Want to make a diamond in 10 weeks? Use a microwave

BENGALURU: The 2.62-carat diamond Calvin Mills bought his fiancé in November is a stunner. Pearshaped and canary-yellow, the gem cost $22,000. A bargain. Mills, the CEO of CMC Technology Consulting in Baton Rouge, says he could have spent tens of thousands more on a comparably sized diamond mined out of the earth, but his came from a lab.

“I got more diamond for less money ,“ says the former Southern University football player.

While man-made gems make up just a fraction of the $80 billion-global diamond market, demand is increasing as buyers look for stones that are cheaper.

Unlike imitation diamonds such as cubic zirconia, stones that are “grown“ (the nascent industry's preferred term) in labs have the same physical characteristics and chemical makeup as the real thing.They're made from a carbon seed placed in a microwave chamber with methane or another carbon-containing gas and superheated into a glowing plasma ball. That creates particles that crystallize into diamonds, a process that can take 10 weeks.

The technology has progressed to the point that experts need a machine to tell synthesized gems apart from those extracted from mines.

Retailers including Wal-Mart Stores and Warren Buffett's Helzberg Diamonds are begin ning to stock the artificial gems. “To a modern young consumer, if they get a diamond from above the ground or in the ground, do they really care?“ asks Chaim Even-Zohar, a principal at Tacy, an industry consulting firm in Israel.

In a survey by Gemdax, only 45% of North American consumers from 18 to 35 said they prefer natural diamonds.“Some substitution for natural diamonds is inevitable,“ says Anish Aggarwal, a partner at the firm, which wouldn't disclose who paid for the study .Gemdax says more research is needed to better gauge consumer attitudes. The companies that dominate the market for natural gems, including Russia's Alrosa and DeBeers don't see the upstarts as much of a threat, because “it's such a small fraction“ of the market, says Neil Koppel, the CEO of Renaissance Diamonds.

His lab, in Boca Raton, Fla, is supplying Helzberg stores in 10 US cities. Last year, only about 3,60,000 carats of man-made diamonds were produced, compared with 146 million carats of natural gems mined in 2013, estimates researcher Frost & Sullivan.

The supply of lab-grown stones will probably jump to 2 million carats in 2018 and 20 million by 2026. DeBeers says its research shows consumers don't equate synthetic gems with ones from a mine, adding that the artificial stones are more likely to compete with costume jewellery .