May 25, 2019
MAN-MADE DIAMONDS: WHAT IS THE WORTH
Many of your favorite accessories and jewelry are created by indigenous communities from around the world. Fair trade aims to help preserve their traditions and techniques and provide opportunity for sustainability of culture and life. When you purchase fair trade items, you are contributing to the success of these families. Your hand crafted accessories will help our artisans gain self-respect and dignity while making a living wage to afford the essentials such as nutritious food, education, and healthcare.
Engineered diamonds have excellent value. Mined diamonds have a long supply chain. To get a diamond from its raw form to a retail-ready gemstone requires miners, distributors, cutters, polishers, jewelry manufacturers, and retailers. They are more affordable than natural diamonds with the same properties and are of a higher optical value due to the lack of impurities developed in natural diamonds.
When you buy fair trade items, you are not only appreciating the skilled work of indigenous cultures that created your new purchase, but also giving opportunity for the marginalized men and women of these developing communities. Your purchase promotes improved living conditions and helps improve communities of our artisans.
Are lab created diamonds considered “real” diamonds? The only thing that makes a lab-created diamond different from a natural diamond is its origin. Lab-created diamonds are not fakes. They’re not cubic zirconias. They have all the same physical and chemical properties of a mined diamond. Man-made diamonds, also known as cultured, engineered, or lab created are grown in quality-controlled laboratory environments using advanced technologies duplicated the conditions real diamonds are created.
A lab-created diamond begins as a small diamond seed that is placed into carbon. Using one of the manufacturing processes above, the seed is exposed to temperatures of about 1500 degrees Celsius and pressurized to approximately 1.5 million pounds per square inch. The pure carbon melts and starts to form a diamond around the starter seed. It is then carefully cooled to form a pure carbon diamond. It is a process under a carefully controlled environment that the Earth takes over 1 to 3 billion years.
Are lab-created diamonds certified?
Lab-created diamonds are graded and certified using the same process as mined diamonds. These are sent to a gem lab that specializes in grading diamonds. Most of these labs grade using the 4c’s (cut, clarity, color, and carat — more on those later), however, a select few use their own criteria
Lab-created diamonds are graded and certified using the same process as mined diamonds. These are sent to a gem lab that specializes in grading diamonds. Most of these labs grade using the 4c’s (cut, clarity, color, and carat — more on those later), however, a select few use their own criteria
Why are engineered diamonds ethical?
Man-made diamonds are conflict free. Conflict or "blood" diamonds are illegally traded to fund conflict in war-torn areas, particularly in central and western Africa and contributes to political and human strife. The innocent people of these areas are caught up in the conflicts that the trade fuels. Thousands of men, women and children in countries such as Sierra Leone are used as slaves to extract diamonds.
Diamond mining has a significant impact on the environment. Lab-created diamonds are inherently and significantly less detrimental to the environment as it takes considerably less energy to grow a diamond in a lab than it does to dig it out of the ground.
Diamond mining has a significant impact on the environment. Lab-created diamonds are inherently and significantly less detrimental to the environment as it takes considerably less energy to grow a diamond in a lab than it does to dig it out of the ground.
Cultured diamonds have the same beauty and quality of “real” diamonds. These diamonds have the same physical, chemical, and optical properties of the natural mined diamonds.
Engineered diamonds have excellent value. Mined diamonds have a long supply chain. To get a diamond from its raw form to a retail-ready gemstone requires miners, distributors, cutters, polishers, jewelry manufacturers, and retailers. They are more affordable than natural diamonds with the same properties and are of a higher optical value due to the lack of impurities developed in natural diamonds.
