Aron Weingarten brings the yellow diamond as much as the stainless steel jeweler’s loupe he holds in opposition to his eye. We’re in Antwerp, Belgium, in Weingarten’s marbled and gilded residing room on the sting of town’s gem district, the middle of the diamond universe.

Almost eighty proportion of the sector’s robust and polished diamonds circulate by way of the fingers of Belgian gem buyers like Weingarten, a provider who wears the thick beard and black match of the Hasidim.

“This can be very unusual stone,” he says, nearly to himself, in thickly accented English. “Yellow diamonds of this color are very onerous to search out. It’s most likely properly price 10, perhaps 15 thousand bucks.”

“I’ve additional exactly like it in my pocket,” I inform him.

He places the diamond down and appears at me severely for the first time. I neighborhood the opposite two stones on the desk. They’re all the identical shade and size. To find 3 practically similar yellow diamonds is like flipping a coin 10,000 situations and on no account seeing tails.
“These are cubic zirconium?” Weingarten says with out tons want.

“No, they’re actual,” I inform him. “However they had been made via a system in Florida for lower than 100 bucks.”

Weingarten shifts uncomfortably in his chair and stares on the glittering gems on his eating room desk. “Until they might be detected,” he says, “these stones will bankrupt the enterprise.”

Put pure carbon below enough warmness and pressure – say, 2,200 ranges Fahrenheit and 50,000 atmospheres – and it’s going to crystallize into the toughest cloth acknowledged. These had been the situations that first forged diamonds deep in Earth’s mantle 3.3 billion years previously.

Replicating that surroundings in a lab isn’t straightforward, nonetheless that hasn’t saved dreamers from attempting. Because the mid-Nineteenth century, dozens of these present alchemists had been injured in accidents and explosions whereas attempting to fabricate diamonds.

Latest many years have seen a number of modest successes. Beginning contained in the Fifties, engineers managed to provide tiny crystals for industrial features – to coat saws, drill bits, and grinding wheels.

However this summer season, the first wave of gem-nice manufactured diamonds began to hit the market. They’re grown in a warehouse in Florida via a roomful of Russian-designed machines spitting out 3-carat roughs 24 hours a day, seven days each week.