The History of Lab-Grown Diamonds

Lab-grown diamonds have experienced a boom in recent years, but their origins date back much further. Let's retrace their history to discover how and why they occupy such a strategic position in the jewelry world today.

Man has been trying to imitate nature by creating synthetic diamonds for centuries. It all began in 1772, when Antoine Lavoisier discovered that diamond is a crystalline form of carbon. This paved the way for numerous attempts to convert carbon into diamond.

Here are some key steps to reconstruct the history of lab-created diamonds:

• The first lab-grown diamonds were produced in 1952 by Union Carbide using the CVD (Chemical Vapor Deposition) process. Initially, these diamonds were used for industrial purposes, such as telecommunications and laser optics.
• In 1954, scientists at the American multinational General Electric succeeded in identifying the correct combination of heat, pressure and temperature to reliably grow diamonds in the laboratory using the HTHP (High Temperature High Pressure) method.
• In 1971, the GIA (Gemological Institute of America) published the first scientific study on lab-created diamonds. Although millions of carats of industrially created synthetic diamonds were produced each year, none were large enough or of high enough quality for the gem industry.

Everything changed that same year, when General Electric announced it had created several gem-quality synthetic diamonds and sent them to the GIA for analysis. It was then that GIA scientists published the first scientific study on lab-created diamonds, attracting the attention of the jewelry world.

At first, these diamonds were not economically feasible for use in jewelry, due to the high production costs. T However, research conducted in Asia, Russia, America, and Japan quickly led to the development of more advanced and efficient techniques that allowed laboratory-created gems to begin to be used in the jewelry sector as well.

In the 2000s, new chemical deposition methods for diamond creation were discovered, and since 2010, lab-created diamonds have also become available in commercial quantities on the jewelry market. In recent years, thanks to scientific and technological advances, it has been possible to create gems and diamonds of a size and quality suitable for jewelry, with qualitative characteristics that have surpassed those of mined diamonds.

Today, there are three methods to obtain diamonds :

1. Mining
2. The HTHP (High Pressure High Temperature) method
3. The CVD (Chemical Vapor Deposition) method

To find out in detail how a lab-grown diamond is created, you can read our article here