Should the world’s diamond and jewellery industry be afraid of synthetic diamonds? The way everyone’s been flapping their hands on the subject, one would think Darth Vader’s empire was about to strike back!
Gemesis pilot plant for synthetic diamond production
The whole issue of synthetics being a threat to the industry is overstated in my opinion. People have been playing fast and loose in the diamond market for as long as one can remember. Never mind the simulants like cubic zirconia, moissanite or even plain old glass that’s been palmed off as diamonds. Has anyone been keeping track of how many treated diamonds, with inclusions laser-drilled out of them, glass-filled to look good and high pressure and high temperature (HPHT) treated to turn them from dirty brown to sparkling white have been surreptitiously slipped into the market?
Treatments have the potential to do terrible damage. The world’s consuming public has been living for years with both synthetic rubies and sapphires (not to mention almost every other gemstone). Yet an almost fatal blow was delivered to the emerald industry, not by dishonest synthetic sales, but by undisclosed treatments to natural stones – which the industry sought to cover up. What happened was that the global coloured gemstone industry only caught on to the fact that some suppliers were using synthetic resins to fill fractures and fissures.
As hundreds of millions of dollars worth of emeralds were already in the Japanese market, that country’s gemstone dealers decided they couldn’t tell anyone that they themselves had been duped. The result was that they twisted a standard declaration that stated emeralds were sometimes dipped in mineral oil to fill fractures (a hotly debated practice that has been prevalent for centuries) to include the phrase or synthetic resins.
With prolonged exposure to ultraviolet light (you get it in sunlight and in small quantities in all artificial light), the synthetic resins began to turn milky and expensive emeralds began developing ugly ‘crazing’ lines. When all the details came out, the resulting scandal all but completely destroyed the emerald market. It only began its recovery some three or four years ago.
Sure fraudulent synthetic sales are a danger – Jayshree Panjikar of the Gemmological Institute of India (GII) told me all the world’s labs would be swamped if unethical manufacturers flooded the market with small, melee-sized synthetics. But that’s where the market system comes in. If you know your supplier, you know your product. That’s why there’s no problem with synthetics in the emerald or ruby markets.
There’s more to it. The diamond miners are making a bundle, while the cutting and polishing industry is tightening its belt and learning to survive on wafer thin margins. De Beers’ Jwaneng mine general manager joked that their profits ‘were like the mafia’. The mine routinely makes a 90% profit on its $2 billion revenue. Diamond manufacturers do well to get to 4%. To add to this, diamonds are getting scarcer. Scarcity has allowed miners to hike rough diamond prices to unbelievable levels while diamond jewellery retailers have strongly resisted any price hikes. The diamond manufacturers have been squeezed in the middle.
Mining giant BHP Billiton states clearly that one of the reasons why it likes being in the diamond mining business is that there won’t be enough rough diamonds to meet global consumer demand in the coming years. There’s got to be some product to fill the gap. Synthetics are it. And BHP is comfortable with it.
And what about when all the mines finally run dry? There’ll only be synthetics. And they’ll do just fine. After all, what’s a diamond but a brilliant illusion? The ‘ultimate symbol of love’ that somehow injects a romantic image of ‘forever’ into the relationship between a man and a woman. Something created by De Beers. The product doesn’t matter so much as the illusion and De Beers knows it. That’s why it has some of the world’s most advanced research on producing gem quality synthetics. Even if all the diamond mines were to go, De Beers will be a big player in the gem diamond business.
For now, with mines literally minting them money, it suits all the mining companies to have the diamond pipeline living in fear of synthetics.
