Even-Zohar Speaks on Synthetic Diamonds

The issue has become topical recently following the mixing of undisclosed small diamonds in parcels of melee stones.

The Cullinan restaurant issue in the Israel Diamond Exchange (IDE) was packed out on December 8 as IDE members came to hear a comprehensive presentation by diamond industry journalist and analyst Chaim Even-Zohar on the hot topic of synthetic diamonds.

Entitled Synthetic diamonds: the financial, trade and legal aspects, Even-Zohar’s presentation gave a far-reaching view of the size of the problem of synthetic diamonds in the global diamond trade.

Speaking before Even-Zohar’s presentation, IDE President Shmuel Schnitzer said that the diamond industry was dealing with an issue that had also been on the agenda the last time he was IDE president from 1998 to 2004.

"I hope now, with the whole diamond world looking at the synthetic issue that we will be able to find a solution. There is no need to panic and exaggerate, but we need to defend our natural diamond industry. If there are customers who want synthetic diamond jewelry, then we have no problem with that as long as it is disclosed."

Even-Zohar’s said Israel had the least problems regarding synthetics of all the diamond centers.

He said that the technology for creating lab-grown diamonds was more freely available than ever before, and that the prices for such machines had dropped to around $500,000.

"I estimated in my 2012 Diamond Pipeline document that synthetics accounted for around $500 million of the overall polished trade last year, but that may actually have been on the low side.

The issue should worry all of us."

He said that both the older High Pressure High Temperature (HPHT) method as well as the more recent Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) played important roles, since HPHT could be used to improve the color of CVD-created diamonds.

He explained that 60 stones could be grown on one platter with an average size of 1.3 carats in just 140 hours by Scio Diamond Technology in the United States and an average of 4,900 carats per year per platter.

Even-Zohar also spoke of the danger of lab-grown diamonds to the younger generation, since diamond growers stressed the environmentally clean way in which they are created compared with dirt, destruction of the environment and slave labor which they claimed were prevalent in the mining of diamonds.