Editor’s Note
Botswana’s Karowe mine has yielded a 1,174-carat rough diamond, now ranked as the third-largest ever found. While its precise value remains unassessed, a comparable stone discovered previously in the country was valued at $53 million.
Botswana has just made an exceptional new discovery. Following a 1098-carat diamond, a new stone weighing 1174 carats has been found at the Karowe mine. This is the third largest rough diamond in the world. The stone was discovered by the Canadian company Lucara Diamond. The precious stone has not yet been valued. However, the world’s second largest diamond, also discovered in Botswana, weighed almost the same. It was then valued at $53 million.
With the Covid crisis, the natural diamond market has suffered enormously, not to mention the dynamics of the synthetic diamond market.
For ecological and ethical reasons, the Danish company Pandora has decided to stop selling jewelry made with natural diamonds. The world’s leading fashion jewelry specialist wants to turn to synthetic stones. Of course, out of 85 million pieces of jewelry manufactured, Pandora produced only about 50,000 pieces using diamonds extracted from mines. But its decision is part of a larger movement of a new strategy aimed at guaranteeing carbon neutrality for its activities within four years and conquering new consumers: millennials that all brands are trying to attract.
The first laboratory diamonds date back to 1954, thanks to the American chemist and physicist Tracy Hall. This General Electric employee invented a machine that artificially reproduces the conditions under which diamonds are born. A bit of graphite, some heat, enormous pressure, and the stones are there: not quite pieces of jewelry, but small synthetic crystals suitable for industrial applications such as cutting tools, drill bits, missile nose cones, or scalpels.
This technology is perfectly suited for small carats. But for others, the CVD (Chemical Vapor Deposition) method has since proven itself. The latter involves growing the diamond by depositing successive layers from a plasma. It allows the manufacture of diamonds indistinguishable to the naked eye from natural diamonds.
It was in the 1990s that synthetic diamonds, in gem-quality and therefore usable in jewelry, truly developed. And it was only at the end of the 2010s that these synthetic stones became a real issue in the diamond market.
According to the consultant Bain & Company, 6 to 7 million carats of synthetic diamonds were produced in 2020. They come mainly from China and India. But not enough to alarm the natural diamond market, estimated at 111 million carats in 2020. These are extracted each year from mines in Russia, South Africa, Canada, or Australia.
In terms of quality, synthetic diamonds have the same chemical, physical, and optical properties as their mythical ancestors. It takes only three weeks to two months to manufacture them in series, depending on the desired size and quality.
Nowadays, the quality of both natural diamonds and artificial stones is evaluated according to the 4Cs: Color, Clarity, Cut, and Carat.
A sign of purity and rarity, the more colorless a diamond is, the better its quality. The international color scale for white diamonds includes 23 shades graded from D to Z. A diamond with a perfectly colorless hue is classified in category D. On the other hand, a diamond with a high shade of gray, brown, or yellow will be part of class Z. However, only gemologists and experts from diamond certification laboratories are able to appreciate the subtle hue differences that exist from one letter to another.
A diamond is qualified as “pure” when it is free of imperfections, whether inside or outside the precious stone. Only a professional can detect whether a diamond is pure or not using a sufficiently magnifying loupe or with the help of a binocular, which is a special microscope used by gemologists to analyze gems. With this equipment, it is possible to know the exact location of any inclusion and thus analyze its shape, color, and size. The diamond has several grades according to its purity. FL (Flawless) or Perfectly Pure, and IF (Internally Flawless) or perfect internal purity are the highest grades, awarded to diamonds of the highest quality.
It is the quality of the diamond’s cut (whatever its shape) that will maximize its brilliance. It is the only one of the 4 diamond evaluation criteria that depends on human work. Indeed, a poor cut can either generate too much loss of rough diamond or not exploit its brilliance to the best. The diagram below summarizes what a well-cut round diamond is and the importance of these proportions for its maximum brilliance; the path of light depends directly on the quality of its cut.
