I grow diamonds. I make custom jewelry with these lab created diamonds. I hate diamond mining but love discussing functional uses of man-made diamonds. AMA!

What effect would the man-made diamond industry have on the price of diamonds as a whole?

Would it make them more cost effective for the consumer or will it remain similar?

Thanks for the AmA!

This is a really important question - please upvote!

IMHO, the price of mined diamonds is about to fall precipitously. Why? It's not because of synthetic diamonds, but instead because a diamond is forever, but Baby Boomers are not.

Think back to WWII and the decades that followed. The massive improvement of machinery during WWII resulted in a massive increase in diamond mining production. Then you had the 'diamond is forever' campaign result in a massive increase of purchases of diamonds by Baby Boomers.

Almost every car, fridge, and radio from the 1950s has long been destroyed, but virtually every diamond bought in the 1950s has the exact same utility today. Those diamonds are about to flood the market, in significantly more quantities than lab diamonds ever will.

There is a joke in the diamond industry that the biggest diamond mine in the world is in Florida and Arizona, but the mine is the pawn shops, not the Earth.

So Econ 101 - demand for diamonds is relatively stable, but supply is about to shoot up. Thus I believe we're going to see a sharp fall of diamond pricing.

The mined diamond lobby wants to blame millenials, lab diamonds, rent prices in NYC and SF, or anyone else, but the real answer is that the problem is that a diamond is forever, but humans are not.

Wow, that sure gave me something to think about. I guess I just assumed all these diamonds would be passed down as heirlooms or something, but that's true for only a portion of them and the other half would get sold!

Even if it did get passed down in the family, it would still affect the industry. Every time a guy proposes with a ring that used to belong to his grandmother, that's a newly mined diamond that isn't being bought.

*bingo*

Thoughts on moissanite? My wife has a moissanite ring because she is heavily against DeBeers, the artificial scarcity of diamonds, blood diamonds, and so-on.

Is what you're doing similar? How are ADA Diamonds different?

I admit my biases, but I am not a big fan of moissanite. I guess it's because it makes my head hurt the same way a chess grandmaster gets completely discombobulated if you show them a board that is not physically possible.

We do not sell moissanite or CZ, we only sell diamond.

Lastly, I genuinely believe in the positive externalities of lab diamond gemstones, hence my enthusiasm for them.

How large can the diamonds get? How did technology improve in order to create diamonds larger than 0.40 carat?

Are you able to recycle the diamonds?

Can/will you make colored diamonds, aka those with impurities?

The record for a diamond gemstone is 15 carats. The record for a diamond plate is 92 carats IIRC.

The driving goal of the industry is *not* a 100 carat gemstone, but instead 4" wafers of diamond to replace silicon as a semiconductor substrate... blue diamonds are the best semiconductor know to man!

Not sure I understand recycling a diamond, what do you mean?

We do offer fancy-colored lab diamonds, and they are significantly less expensive than fancy colored natural diamonds. While a natural blue or pink diamonds can sell for millions of dollars per carat at auction, lab grown yellow, blue, pink, red, green, and black diamonds are only a small premium over the price of colorless lab diamonds.

Hey thanks for answering! That's interesting about boron, and makes me curious if you could create never-before-seen diamond colors to increase possible conductivity or even for other uses. Seems like quite the expensive alternative to silicon. I'd take a purple, though!

By recycling diamonds, I guess I meant if there was a quantity of discarded gems or a mass of industrial stones no longer used, could you "melt" them and regrow it back into something gemmy and more valuable? Like aluminum recycling or something.

You are correct, there is one color of lab diamonds that is not possible in mined diamonds: gray diamonds.

Why is this possible in a lab but not nature? These diamonds are grown via CVD in a vacuum, and the resulting crystal of carbon can intentionally be grown with voids in the crystal, almost like freshly fallen snow has air between the H20.

You can then heat the diamond, and the carbon atoms around the voids revert to graphite, leaving billions of nano-graphite particles in the crystal.

The optical effect is a smoky, sexy diamond with all the fire and brilliance of a white diamond.

Here's two pieces we've done with gray diamonds:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf3P7cADWSQ
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxplwi4bnGA

We also did an awesome two stone ring with purple diamonds.

_____________________

No need to 'recycle' diamonds to grow diamonds - it's much more efficient to use readily available graphite or natural gas as a carbon source.

Sweet.

So, here is a memento of my late grandfather that I have on my desk at work. I think it's from the 1970s, possibly the 1980s. "Shock synthesized polycrystalline diamond" embedded in some basically indestructible plastic from the same company, DuPont. What I've been told is that the silvery lumps in the copper section are diamonds, but I have no way of verifying that.

What can you tell us about that process? Is that what you use? If not, how is yours different?

Thanks!

Basically an explosion creates very high temperature and very high pressure for a very brief moment. If done correctly, diamond can grow in these conditions, but their size remains quite small, due to the short time. The HPHT (high pressure high temperature) process creates similar temperatures and pressures to your grandfather's shock process, but sustains those conditions for days or weeks at a time, allowing the diamonds to grow into gemstone sizes.

Fun fact - there is an entire city in Europe filled with diamonds in the streets, steps, etc. because of an asteroid impact shockwaved the forest into diamonds.

Nördlingen, if anyone wants to visit.

Roughly in the Middle of the triangle formed by Nuremberg, Stuttgart and Munich, ~150km or 2h by train from Munich.

Go to the Porsche museum while you're there!

Hi! Is this cost-effective? Like, I imagine it must be way cheaper than mining diamonds.

Also, would it be possible to make rubis or emerald or other precious stones in a lab as well? And could we extend this to other natural stones such as lapis lazuli, jade or tiger’s eye?

It's not way cheaper, and it will never be cheaper IMHO. Source: De Beers mines diamonds at $107 per carat IIRC.

Diamonds are not like iPhones. There will not be a Moore's law for diamonds where it gets exponentially cheaper to grow diamonds. Why? There is a *speed limit* to how fast you can grow a diamond crystal. Grow it any faster and the crystal will get inclusions/microfractures in the diamond.

Yes, rubies, sapphires, emeralds and other stones can be grown in a lab as well, but not all types of gemstones can be grown. AFAIK you cannot grow lapis lazuli, jade, or tiger's eye.

I mean, there must still be economies of scale though.

How long do the diamond making machines tend to last? If they've got high turnover, maybe not. But if they last a long time you'd expect diamonds to get cheaper and cheaper as older models continue churning.

Yes, there are some economies of scale coming, but we're talking marginal, not exponential.

Why? This *is* a mature technology. GE grew the first diamond in the early 1950s. De Beers has been commercially selling diamonds since 1960.

De Beers is investing $94m to grow 200,000 carats of gemstones (by 2020). If they invested $1Bn instead, they would not get 100x the production, they *might* be able to get 12-15x. (just a WAG, no data to back that up)

Why is there a speed limit? This would seem like a limit of current technology not a fundamental physical limitation. There is a lot we don't know about crystal growth.

I have a PhD in materials science and am genuinely curious.

I'll admit I'm out of my element to definitively answer your question, as I'm just a computer scientist, but I'll try my best.

If you grow CVD too fast you get voids in the crystal structure, not really a big deal for most functional applications, but it give an undesirable brownish/grayish/yellowish tinge to the crystal the way that light interacts with the voids.

For HPHT, the crystal is grown at ~7GPa and 1500C, which is right on the verge of the melting point of carbon at that pressure. You're convecting liquid carbon by the seed and adhering the carbon atom by atom, and my understanding is if you try to grow the crystal too fast, you'll get stress cracks in the crystal.

Again, sorry I'm a bit over my skis on a definitive answer here.

PS - I do know that if you grow nitrogen containing diamonds, you can grow the crystal faster :)

The "speed limit" you mention is kind of similar to proof of work in blockchain technology. Would it be possible to grow a diamond slowly while encoding information in it to serve as an indisputable ledger?

Turns out that pink lab diamonds are the best 'hard drive' known to mankind.

First you put the lab diamond in complete darkness, then you can use a laser to put a photon in the nitrogen-vacancy defects in the diamond.

That 0 or 1 will last for eternity, and is potentially the future of long term data storage that is currently decaying on HDDs, SSDs, DVDs, etc.

Source:

https://phys.org/news/2016-10-defects-diamond-unique-platform-optical.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/27/science/diamonds-data-storage.html

What timespan to you foresee before diamond mining is for the most part phased out? What sort of pushback do you expect from the mining industry and how do you plan to combat it?

Somewhere between 20-50 years from now. I've pulled all the public filings from all the major diamond miners and there are about 1.6Bn carats of diamonds in known reserves, while ~6Bn carats have been dug out of the Earth in the last 150 years. So we are well past 'peak diamond' at this point.

If there were a carbon tax levied on mining, the cessation of diamond mining would happen a lot sooner than otherwise.

De Beers and the other diamond miners have invested $133m in PR and lobbying to fight lab diamonds, largely unsuccessfully. I don't know what's next for them, given that De Beers announced last week that they will start to sell lab diamond jewelry.

How do I combat it? I don't need to. My clients are too smart to buy the 'fake news' that a lab diamond is 'fake.' They view grown diamonds as a paragon of human achievement and proudly tell all their friends about the origin of their diamonds as a feature, not a bug.

I'm far more supply constrained than demand constrained at this point.

De Beers will sell lab-grown gems at a huge discount in an attempt to destroy the market for lab grown diamond jewelry.

That is the general consensus in the industry.

That being said, I fully support De Beers entre into the market (www.lightboxjewelry.com) and encourage everyone to consider purchasing a lab diamond from any of the purveyors, including De Beers.

Why? Every lab diamond gemstone purchased directly funds the medical, industrial, scientific, and computational applications of diamonds.

I bought a lab grown diamond 4 years ago for an engagement right and the company no longer exists. I’ve tried searching for a similar company that lets you buy loose stones and did not come up with much. Is the lab grown industry floundering?

I was hoping lab grown would be an affordable way to get a set of large brilliant yellow diamond earrings.

The lab diamond industry is not floundering, in fact every major producer of lab diamonds is currently doubling or tripling their production.

We are often supply constrained, not demand constrained. I don't want to get commercial here, but we will happily sell you loose yellow diamonds, or a custom pair of earrings - our website is in the initial post.

Is it possible to make a diamond fleshlight?

We are in the business of saying yes to our clients. While we have yet to make a diamond sex toy, we gladly would. I personally think a diamond cock ring would really jazz up any marriage.

Do you only make jewelry? Are there any medical applications for your diamonds? (I am a doctor)

Here's a few medical applications I'm tracking:

• diamond scalpels for surgeons: in addition to being extremely sharp, have the benefit of being optically transparent and you can actually shine a laser through the tip of the blade for ultra-precise medical procedures.
• diamond vertebrae and hip replacements: https://ryortho.com/breaking/first-triadyme-cervical-disc-implanted/
• Drug Delivery via nanodiamonds: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/5346_2017_11
• Diamond optics for more precise lasers (surgery, etc.).
• Histology - studying biological samples and tissues, use diamond blades for ultra-thin slicing during sample prep and can cut samples as thin as 100 nanometers

And my personal favorite:

• Early detection of Alzheimer's, ALS, cancerous tumors, etc. via very precise magnetic field detection.

Also, it is much more efficient than the status quo to generate ozone with boron doped diamonds, making sanitation and water purification much better. De Beers is a big player in this space:

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/element-six-launches-its-diamox-technology-for-the-electrochemical-treatment-of-highly-contaminated-wastewater-300252477.html

My understanding is that diamonds are just the result of pressure, heat and time. How long does it take to create a diamond? Is there a size limit to what you can create?

Size limit: maintaining the correct pressure and heat is one of the most precise and difficult processes that humanity has ever harnessed. It took 60+ years to get to the point that we could grow 1 carat diamonds. The biggest growth cell today is about the size of an egg. I don't see that going to a baseball or volleyball anytime soon.

The goal that is driving the entire industry is 4" wafers of diamonds, as diamond is the ultimate semiconductor and the future of computing. I do see that happening in my lifetime (I'm in my 30s).

It takes 7-10 days to grow a 1 carat lab diamond, and about a month to grow a 3 carat diamond. If you try to grow a diamond any faster, the diamond crystal will fracture. Thus, there is a physical speed limit to how fast you can grow diamonds.

Business idea: "Donate" blood over the course of several months/years. Harvest the carbon from the blood, and turn it into your own diamond for an engagement ring. Romantic or creepy? You decide.

We have a patent pending to grow diamonds from your breath, as you exhale 4-5% CO2 with every exhalation.

Same net result of your spirit encapsulated in a diamond, but a lot less creepy IMHO.

What are the costs of the materials involved in the process and the machines used? Do you think it will eventually see home versions like 3D Printers, Crisper, etc?

Also, is it only more costly because the slave wages are so inexpensive in other countries?

For gemstone quality diamonds, you are talking about *massive* machines. Our largest diamonds are made in machines that weight ~70 tonnes. Thus the concrete slab required to hold the machine is 1+ meter thick.

In addition, the 'recipies' to grow the diamonds are actually more important than the 'ovens' if that makes sense. Those recipies take decades to perfect and are as closely guarded at the KFC and Coca-Cola recipies.

Now there are esoteric ways to make small diamonds with explosives that you can do at home. IIRC Mythbusters did this a few years ago.

Can you make a diamond out of a human’s cremated remains?

How big would it be?

Also, can you add to it later?

Yes, you can make diamonds of of cremated remains. That being said, we have made a business decision to not make these diamonds. We instead focus on diamonds grown from life's greatest memories, not life itself.

Is there any ethical diamond mining, in your opinion?

It's a tough question, especially given the wealth of the people mining diamonds artisanally in Africa. So you stop that and you unethically hurt a lot of vulnerable people, but you keep it going and you damage a lot of riversheds, pollute a lot of water, and hurt a lot of animals.

Now I strongly believe that there has been and continues to be a lot of unethical behavior by large diamond mining corporations, well documented by the UN, the US State Department, BBC, Human Rights Watch, etc.

Let me ask your opinion - say we applied a proper carbon tax to the large diamond mining corporations, and industrial mining were to phase out over the next 20 years - would that not be a good thing for the price of diamonds and the livelihoods of artisanal miners?

To be clear, most mining is necessary: the human race needs lithium for our batteries, iron ore for our buildings, oil for our transportation, metal for our power lines, and rare-earth elements for the device on which you are reading this article. Diamond mining, by contrast, has now been made unnecessary and obsolete by modern technology. Humanity can culture diamonds in laboratories that are objectively superior to the diamonds cultured in the chaos beneath the Earth’s surface, neatly avoiding potential corruption, conflict, and ecological damage at the same time.

Unfortunately, the unsustainability of diamond mining is accelerating; each marginal carat mined is more difficult to extract and more energy intensive than the last. Despite the best efforts of the mining industry to expand diamond mining operations around the world, humanity has already passed ‘peak diamond,’ extracting 25% fewer carats in 2016 than we extracted a decade ago. Quite simply, all the easy to get diamonds have already been extracted.

Here's a great read by a former BBC reporter about the industry: Glitter & Greed (Amazon)

What is the most interesting thing you have turned into a diamond?

My favorite that I have made to date: We made an engagement ring for a client that met his now fiancee skydiving. He gave us *grass* from the drop zone where they met for the first time, pictures of the couple, her favorite flower, and their favorite beer.

We graphetize the material, like a wine reduction sauce, and then pressure cook it into a priceless diamond.

Here's the donor material: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxafm1On-UEPTXNTV1ctMnNuMFU/view

Here's the finished ring: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-RVXamfXqndw3GQNsM7c82HeP6t5WvOj/view

The thing I am most looking forward to making? A diamond for myself from the S-1 filing when we IPO or the contract when a luxury conglomerate acquires us :)

Omg that's my ring!! I love it. The story behind it makes it so special. And it's SO SPARKLY.

Here it is shining in the SF sun: http://imgur.com/gallery/1FkdVQ0

Hooray!!! Really glad to hear you love it :)

Your fiance is awesome. It was such a pleasure to work with him.

How much is that proof worth?

We put it together quickly without weighing all the diamonds, but I would guess it's about 3 carats total, so set in platinum we'd probably sell it for $4-6k.

That being said, we can make it as big as you want and price would go up from there. You want a diamond Snoo the size of a Flava Flav Clock, we can make you that for ~$100k.

Hey everyone, hear that?

Get over to our Patreon, we can get the $100k one if you all donate!

/u/spez, /u/kn0thing. Get one for the office maybe?

I'm taking the Diamond Snoo to the Reddit office next week for lunch. Get the funds together and I'll make a giant Snoo, at cost, and hang it on the Reddit wall!

A lot of watches and even now some phones are using sapphire crystal in order to protect their faces/displays because of how durable it is. Is there anything preventing diamonds from being grown and used in a similar way beyond cost-effectiveness?

I can answer this. In applications for protection and what not, sapphire is much cheaper than diamonds, something which even lab manufactured diamonds will not be able to touch. Diamonds and sapphires have quite a lot in common too, with sapphires being just slightly less hard. The main prohibitive thing is the cost. It takes a lot more for labs to make the diamond compared to the sapphire and the gain in durability/scratch resistance is minimal.

Even in our lab, diamond isn't really that great and we prefer sapphire for nearly all applications besides cutting. Sapphires also have a cleaner optical window than diamonds.

^ I'm with this guy.

You'll see diamond heat spreaders in your phone first, and the diamond semiconductors. Probably not going to see diamond crystals for a few decades if ever.

In your opinion, are memorial diamonds going to get more popular as lab created diamonds become more popular?

Yes.

How much for the diamond snoo?

$4250 in platinum :)

So if you sell a man made diamond for lets say $1000, how much of that $1000 did you spend on energy costs while producing that diamond?

Good question. The most efficient growers are around 250 KwH per carat and the least is around 750 KwH per carat. So a decent amount, but not a dominant amount of the cost.

The fixed costs and the price of PhDs in physics, material science, etc. to run the equipment are the two largest costs.

If I wanted to get into diamond making what would I need to learn and how much would it cost? Asking for a friend, obviously.

A *lot* of materials science. There are academic institutions around the world growing diamonds that would gladly work with you :)

Michigan State is doing some amazing work with diamonds!

https://www.egr.msu.edu/fraunhofer-ccd/projects

What is your favorite cut and weight for diamonds?

What other gems would you be interested in making (that either you arent now, or only in smaller amount)?

I love a well cut oval in the 2-3 carat range.

https://www.adadiamonds.com/blog/our-favorite-lab-grown-oval-diamond-engagement-rings

From what I understand, the reasons diamonds are expensive is because they are rare, and the more of the 4 C's they have, the rarer they are, hence the higher cost. If lab diamonds flood the market, and companies can manufacture them, wouldn't the price of diamonds tank?

Combining data from the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) and the Kimberley Process, approximately 6 billion carats of diamonds have been mined out of the Earth since antiquity. According to GIA, “The total global production from antiquity to 2005 is estimated to be 4.5 billion carats valued at US$300 billion, with an average value per carat of $67.” From that 6 billion carats of mined rough diamonds, there are approximately one billion carats of diamond gemstones that were cut and polished and are now owned by individuals all over the world.

In 2017, approximately 142 million carats of diamonds will be mined out of the Earth and approximately 2.3 to 4.2 million carats will be grown (according to a recent global survey). Thus, lab diamonds only make up 1.6 to 2.9% of annual global diamond production today. Morgan Stanley predicts that portion of lab diamond sales will rise to 7.5 to 15% by 2020.

Ada believes the much larger threat to the value of mined diamonds is the recycling and resale of previously mined diamonds, a space that De Beers recently entered. Experts estimate that the Baby Boomer Generation in the United States owns over 500 million carats of diamond gemstones which will be inherited or resold in the next few decades. These diamonds will be gifted or sold. These ‘used’ diamonds are often recut and reset, then sold as ‘new’ mined diamonds.

What do you think about making LEDs with diamonds? If you try it and it sells well don’t forget about me.

Simpsons did it!

Stanford SLAC uses diamond fresnel lenses to amplify x-rays to 1Bn times brighter than any natural light source

https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2011-09-22-tools-of-the-trade-diamonds-are-forever-for-focusing.aspx

why is it so hard to find diamonds in minecraft? shoudnt they give you the ability to create your own like you do?

Can you find graphite in Minecraft?

I have lived on a diamond mine in Namibia for the past 45 years. The mine is a DeBeers mine and has been operational since 1936. In that time, the mine has provided employment, education and contributed massively to the fragile economy of countries like Namibia and Botswana. These are not blood diamonds and the revenues generated have benefited many. Do you consider it a positive thing to see these two countries in particular lose their primary revenue stream once the age of diamond mining ceases due to artificial stones?

No, I don't think that there are blood diamonds in Namibia (other than the seal hunt on the Namibian beaches, but that's something of a tangent).

However, let's talk jobs and Namibian diamonds. My understanding is that the on-shore mining in Namibia is winding down because all the diamonds have been extracted, no? IE Namdeb is shutting down and Debmarine is growing, correct?

De Beers is spending $600m+ right now to build another deep-sea mining vessel. It will only employ 140 people when operational IIRC. It's being built in Norway, so most of the construction jobs are *not* going to Namibians.

Say De Beers instead spent ~$100m on a solar plant and ~$500m on a diamond 'gigafactory' in Namibia:

1. The facility would employ more people than the vessel
2. The construction would put far more dollars directly into the Namibian economy
3. The spare electricity could be donated or sold at a low cost to the local communities
4. The gigafactory could be built where the land has already been disturbed by the mining process, minimizing the environmental impact

The way I see it, this course of action would be far more beneficial to the people of Namibia than the current trajectory of Namdeb and Debmarine.

But I'm obviously not plugged into the true happenings of the Namibian economy.

Can you please give your honest thoughts on my proposal? I'd genuinely appreciate it!

what's more costlier - lab grown or mined?

It's counterintuitive, but it is far more expensive to *grow* a diamond than it is to dig one out of the Earth.

That being said, we have a very efficient supply chain so we are able to sell lab grown diamonds for around 30% less than comparable quality mined diamonds.

This amazes me. I never knew it was a thing. But on a serious note, how much is that diamond Snoo going for?

We'll do one in Platinum for $4250.

Hi I am a glass artist. we commonly use Gilson created opal that can withstand the intense heat and being encased in borosilicate glass. Do you make opals like this? Is it possible or how hard is it to do at home? Thanks

We only work with diamonds, sorry!

How are you going to combat the huge stockpiles of diamond keeping the markets artificially high? They will be released at some point, maybe expressly to destroy business like yours and it would be wise to have a game plan.

AFAIK, there *was* a big stockpile, but that was released to the market when the Russians broke the De Beers monopoly in the 1990s.

They can try to destroy our business, but I believe that today's consumer is too smart to fall for the fear, uncertainty, and doubt spread by the Diamond Industrial Complex (DIC)

Source: http://www.paulzimnisky.com/chart-of-de-beers-diamond-market-share-monopoly

Is it possible to do something like order a variety of lab-grown diamonds a la carte through Amazon (or an online equivalent)? Or will it be soon?

We'll gladly sell you loose diamonds :)

why do you choose to be so useless to society? why do you choose to dedicate your time on earth on something that is taking away resources from more important things. is it pure vanity? are there things you wouldnt do for money?

I'll bite and defend myself.

I've spent years working in philanthropy. I've put my own life in danger to help others less fortunate than me.

President Clinton loves my work, and Stanford teaches a case study about my Philanthropy Engineering efforts.

Lab diamond gemstones are *not* useless. They, in fact, fund the future of technology:

https://www.adadiamonds.com/synthetic-diamond-facts-and-misconceptions/is-buying-a-lab-diamond-an-investment