As technology has advanced throughout the decades, it has created endless opportunities for companies to reach their target audience, thus laying the foundation for their platforms to influence the lives of as many people as possible.
Shopping as a consumer has never been easier with the digital market allowing any product they could possibly desire to be just a few clicks away. Technology has positively impacted almost every market in multiple ways, with the diamond market being no exception.
It is common knowledge that diamonds grown from the Earth were formed from being under intense heat and pressure for billions of years.
This intricate process is what allows diamond suppliers to charge such grossly inflated prices for these gems.
Thanks to the advancement of technology, this has allowed experts within the field to investigate ways to eliminate the irreversible damage done to the Earth and its eco-systems by extracting these gems, while still being able to create beautiful diamonds. This is where growing diamonds within the lab was born.
Method 1: High Pressure High Temperature (HPHT)
This process involves recreating the identical environment that earth-grown diamonds experience in order to grow carbon crystals into fully formed diamonds.
The “diamond seeds” (carbon atoms) are exposed to extreme pressure and temperatures of 4,700 degrees (F). The average time period for a diamond to form from the Earth is 1 to 3.3 billon years, but using this method a lab-grown diamond can reach optimum results and be ready for purchase within 10 weeks.
Method 2: Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD)
The CVD technique involves placing a diamond seed in a vacuum chamber, with low pressure being applied to hydrocarbon gas.
These gases are heated to extremely high temperatures, resulting in the decomposition of the hydrogen to form pure carbon atoms (diamonds).
The release of these carbon atoms causes them to drop and attach themselves to the original diamond seed, gradually building into a new gem layer by layer.
Lab-grown diamonds, despite of claims otherwise, are REAL diamonds in every sense. They have the identical chemical composition as a mined diamond, and the two are identical in appearance.
Telling the difference between them is impossible to the naked eye, with professional jewelers and gemologists requiring special machines to differentiate lab-grown vs. mined.
Their identical features, in addition to their much-reduced price-tag and high ethical standards has attracted the millennial generation, so much so that analysts expect diamond prices to decline by the year 2020 as lab-growns continue to grow in popularity.