Lab grown melee

[denverappraiser]

I’m curious.

One of the areas of interest for shoppers of man made diamonds is that they have a known provenance. They buy for environmental or social sorts of reasons. That’s one of the reasons people choose documented Canadian stones as well. These are fine reasons but in the case of the mined stones, pedigree becomes prohibitively expensive when stones are below, say, ¼ carat. This doesn’t seem like it would be the case with synthetics. A 0.01ct synthetic would still be a synthetic and therefore would have a KNOWN history, and this would be valuable to a certain selection of shoppers. Even the well regarded vendors of lab grown stones seem to be using mined melee in the mountings. Why aren’t we seeing these in the marketplace?

 

[EEFranklin]

Our jewelry is made entirely with lab-grown diamonds, with the exception of .01ct and smaller whites, unless we have enough lab-whites of that size in-stock. The issue is cost-effectively growing large amounts of small diamonds (or material that can be cut into many small diamonds).

HPHT diamonds typically grow one crystal per cycle so it makes the most financial sense to grow the largest crystal possible. During cutting, the tops and pieces that are removed can be polished into melee. Most of these pieces finish in the .03-.20ct range, though some can finish down to 1mm. We have a fair amount of inventory in all colors in these sizes, however availability from this method is tied directly to growth of large crystals.

We have been researching growing multiple small stones per cycle for many years. In the last year or so we have refined the process to grow multiple whites per cycle in the .08-.30ct polished range and are now working on smaller sizes.

From my knowledge of CVD, the per-cycle turnover and treatment costs are too high to cost effectively grow small stones.

 

[denverappraiser]

Ah, so there's an issue with synthetics that you can only grow a certain number of stones at once so you might as well grow bigger ones than little ones since they sell for more. Makes sense. Mines, on the other hand, get whatever they get and if that's a handful of sand, so be it...that's what goes to the cutter. Thanks.

 

[EEFranklin]

Right. Most gem quality diamonds are grown one crystal per cycle but some machine designs and configurations can produce multiple smaller crystals in one cycle. The challenge is balancing fixed (per-cycle) and variable (cycle length) costs against the quantity, quality and size of crystals produced. For example, the value of 3x.20ct diamonds is around half of 1x.60ct, so the costs to produce them need to be much lower.