The Diamond Story

[Music] beautiful timeless and mysterious diamonds are the celebrity of gems from royalty to the red carpet their star power is always on spectacular display a dazzling symbol of wealth power and glamor investment you can actually wait it's just nice trouble girl Whitman the diamond scene on Oscar night are practically priceless this stunning necklace from the famed workshops of Harry Winston would command thousands on the open market others such as this diamond engagement ring are within reach of any aspiring groom willing to part with the traditional two months salary modern technology has transformed these fascinating gems from something only Kings could afford to the prized possession of practically every bride-to-be but availability has done nothing to diminish their ancient allure for centuries mankind has scoured the globe in search of these mysterious stones almost indestructible formed billions of years ago by the crushing pressures found deep in the bowels of the earth they are the most precious of gems join us as we explore the multi-faceted story of diamonds the universal symbol of undying love and devotion that will forever be on every woman's wishlist [Music] [Music] on 47th Street just off fashionable Fifth Avenue in the heart of midtown Manhattan lies New York's famed diamond district among the foremost centers of the world's diamond industry trade on this bustling block averages four hundred million dollars a day most of it in the busy shops of independent dealers like Steve kiln assume I may do a couple deals a day right in the street so if I'm an indication of that oh and there's 25,000 to 35,000 people on the street making good two or three deals you can see that close to a hundred thousand deals are made in the street a day and probably ten times that in the upper floors there are more than 2,500 independent businesses dealing in diamonds and other precious gems crammed into this concrete Canyon most are small mom-and-pop operations many mere booths in one of the area's 25 exchanges in these tiny crowded rooms millions of dollars worth of diamonds aren't just traded each day they're also cut polished and set into jewelry a lot of gemstones get caught here because of the labor cost generally the better stones Oh in terms of gemstones get cut here it's cost effective to cut a three four five carat stone in New York City because of the expense of the diamonds today many stones are cut in India and China where labor is cheaper but New York's diamond cutters or lapidaries have long been recognized as among the world's best many are Hasidic Jews specializing in traditional techniques this is something that's been handed down from father to son for decades the old style of cutting you have to shift the stone to catch a certain facet and polished that and then do the other side of the fast and then the other side back and forth back and forth top and bottom so it's a lot of painstaking work if you think of even small stones that are less than six seven eight points they're so small but they still have a lot of faceting on it that has to each one has to be touched precisely right only the most experienced lapidary will attempt to cut a large high-value diamond and only after hours of careful study in preparation he has to look at all the different dimensions of it all the different where the flaws might be where there might be easy ways to cut it things like that well stow diamonds are naturally quite strong they do have planes of weaknesses you can find little stress fractures but if that fracture is large and breaks the surface on the top and you hit the diamond at that point you may have a vulnerable place one small slip can spoil a stones value or even turn a priceless diamond into a worthless stone if a diamond is struck at the right points of F a plane of weakness it would shatter you cut it Dorne carefully you know the same way you feed Lions a diamonds molecular structure makes it surprisingly brittle and its natural stress fractures and internal flaws make it vulnerable to breaking under certain special circumstances but actually a diamond is the hardest substance found in nature [Music] while most gems are minerals whose crystalline structure combines several different elements diamonds consist almost entirely of a single element diamond is rather pure mineral or sphere minerals have a range of composition diamond is over 99 percent carbon colorless diamonds are essentially pure carbon traces of some other element however can give the diamond a colored tint boron makes them blue nitrogen and small concentrations makes them grain basically it become up the rainbow I can't tell you how many colors are because there's just so many of them I pre can't see em Paige colors and the champagnes and the cognac sort of dark intense colors of Blues it's just a huge gamut one of the most common elements in nature carbon is found in everything from the air we breathe to the graphite in pencils another form of pure carbon graphite is also pure carbon but graphite is really soft the two different planes of the carbon structure are bonded together by a very weak bond they're blended to each other in sheets and these sheets are very weakly held together by what we call Van der Waals forces and so the graphite breaks quite readily between those sheets within a diamond however each individual carbon atom interlocks with the four atoms around it a diamond is still extremely hard because it has all the bonds in all directions the result is what's called a shared electron bond it forms the hardest type of bond the strongest type of bond tightly packed and perfectly aligned a diamonds molecular structure is shaped by the tremendous pressures that occurred miles beneath the earth's surface diamonds formed down deep inside the earth the depth of something over 60 to 70 to 80 miles but takes incredible temperatures generally over a thousand degrees Celsius pressures exceeding 50 kilowatts imeem we wouldn't survive a fraction of a second under those conditions but if diamonds form so deep in the earth just how did men discover them the answer involves very ancient very extinct volcanoes called pipes we don't have this type of volcano today the youngest one we have is 35 million years old but most of these were were source around 90 million years or even greater in age after these ancient volcanoes erupted their lava cooled and hardened into the two types of rocks that diamond miners dig for lamp right and especially kimberlite historic clay the most common rock type that yields divers in the world is Kimberly - Kimberly is the carrier and this is an example of a kimberlite kimberlite basically is a magma which comes from this extreme depth maybe a hundred or 200 miles down and it comes to the surface and it brings along anything that happens to pick up so if it happens to have a rock in it it has diamonds in it it brings it up kimberlite and lamperouge can contain diamonds but they don't form them the ancient magma acted as an elevator carrying even older rocks to the surface the billion year old rocks picked up by the kimberlite may or may not contain diamonds diamond bearing kimberlites are pretty old they're not any kimberlite pipes that contains diamonds that is younger than 70 million years the richest diamond fields occur in areas where the Earth's crust is very old like India southern Africa and Western Australia the way diamond pipes work is they actually intrude older rock so the the rocks that actually host the diamond bearing rock is up to two billion years old so you're looking at material which is about 1/5 the age of the earth kimberlite volcanoes are so old that they're essentially invisible they're craters long eroded away Kimberley is not easy to find you have to find a particular kimberlite that has the divers in fact diamond bearing kimberlites are so hard to find that it wasn't until the 1870s that man discovered that these extinct volcanoes were the secret source of diamonds before then diamonds came from what are called secondary or alluvial deposits those fragments are easily taken by the rivers or by the ocean and transported and places where the water of the river slows down or little cracks or potholes in the riverbed that may have trapped diamonds because diamonds are denser than the rest of the minerals that are transported a sediment and it was nearly 3,000 years ago on a sandy riverbank on the Indian subcontinent that diamonds were first discovered it's believed that diamonds were first discovered in India sometime around the 8th century BC diamonds were treasured just because it's kind of magical quality being something that transparent and it was not like any other stones they are much harder by a much greater degree than any other two stones soon prospectors were scouring India's rivers endlessly panning and sifting in hopes of finding one of the exceedingly rare stones for centuries India was the world's only known source of diamonds but the stones were widely traded and prized across the ancient world India being the only source for diamonds must have made them quite exceptional the Romans believed diamonds were pieces of fallen stars thought to ward off evil and bring their wares good luck ancient Greeks thought the stones were the indestructible tears of the gods the word diamond comes from the Greek word autumn us meaning invincible they know how to cut all the other gemstones they couldn't cut diamond they couldn't alter the shape of diamond and thus they believed that it was unalterable and indestructible diamonds were also exceedingly rare in the 1st century AD Roman historian plenty the Elder described diamonds as known to Kings only and to very few of them the only stones that would would mank it the whole trade route to let's say Rome were very small pieces the best stones were taken and used locally by the great rulers of India and they kept them in their personal collections in the 1500s Europeans finally began trading directly with India and in the 1600s the French merchant and adventurer Jean Baptiste Tavernier became one of history's foremost diamond traders tabernae wrote a book about his experiences and in that book even would sketch out the different gemstones which even today we go back to look at and to document the history of some of the important diamonds the most important diamond tavern he acquired in his travels was the fabled French blue he sold the Magnificent 112 carat rough to Frances King louis xiv lost her in the chaos of the French Revolution the French blue is believed to be the source of a 44.5 carat stone that later turned up in the possession of a London banker named Henry Philip hope the reason why we lose track of important gemstones is that they can be easily recut and they then can't be identified by the shape or the weight anymore but there was no altering the Diamonds deep blue color it's a very unlikely color for a diamond and it is almost a deep steely blue collar that separates it from virtually every other diamond Hope's error sold the stone in 1901 by 1910 it was in the collection of an American named Evelyn Walsh McLean a famous eccentric miss MacLaine wore the diamond everywhere often let friends and guests try it on and once even had it set in a collar for her Great Dane but her greatest contribution to the hope diamonds colorful history had to be the curse miss Evelyn Walsh McLean was quite interesting stories about the diamond magnifier on amusement including that the the diamond is unlucky and people like the idea of an inanimate object of possessing some kind of magic about it but the diamond really is not been unlucky it's we hope not because it was later given to the Smithsonian by Harry Winston and so now it's owned by America the Hope Diamond may be the most famous but it was not the first or largest diamond to capture the entire world's imagination the oldest diamond we can trace the lineage of is the Kohinoor which is now one of the British crown jewels it first belonged to the Rajah of Malwa who acquired it in 1290 for 300 years later he became the property of the Sultan of Delhi when Bob air the first mogul Emperor conquered the city in 1526 over the next three centuries war and conquest carried the stone to Persia Afghanistan and Punjab until in 18-49 the stone passed into British hands by the 19th century India was no longer the world's sole source of diamonds starting in 1730 native miners called God impetus began gathering diamonds from the banks of Brazil's great rivers they were looking for gold in the rivers of Brazil and they discovered diamonds and it created quite a new supply that they didn't have before as the Indian stones had been the had been producing less and less as time went on which is typical of any mine but it came at a good time and they brought back quite a few stones from the rivers of Brazil for a time Brazil's deposits became the world's best source for diamonds but that would all change in 1867 when a 21 carat rough diamond was found along the banks of the Orange River in South Africa two years later a forty seven point seven five carat diamond was found in the same area sparking widespread interest when diamonds were discovered in South Africa there was a mass influx kind of like we have the Gold Rush and people came from all over the world to strike it rich thousands of prospectors descended upon the sandy banks of the Orange River but before long they began finding diamonds far from the water's edge one Hill in particular on the farm of Johannes Nicholas and Dierdre carnal dista beer appeared almost covered in diamonds they discovered that they could go down into the earth and the diamonds were discovered as deep as they could take down the De Beers farm was sitting on top of the first diamond pipe ever found almost overnight the area became a boomtown that miners called Kimberley after the British colonial secretary from there prospectors fanned out across South Africa finding more pipes and more diamonds in 1905 at the premier mine outside Johannesburg miners uncovered the largest diamond ever found 3106 carats that's over 1.3 pounds called the Cullinan diamond after the mines owner the super-sized stone was eventually cut into nine sizable gems and a number of smaller ones the largest the 530 point tube carat great star of Africa is currently mounted on the Royal scepter of the United Kingdom a century later the premier mine is still producing diamonds but South Africa is no longer the world's premier source of these sought-after gemstones currently South Africa ranks fifth in production behind Australia Botswana Russia and Canada geographically the diamonds form in different places over the world but it's usually in a similar type of locality each time they might not seem similar as far as what the weather is today and what the topography is but the fact is they do have similar types of old rocks underneath the surface Western Australia's Argyle mine is currently the world's largest producer of diamonds a massive open pit operation that spreads over 100 acres Argyle churns out about 35 million carats of diamonds annually it's the only economic play viable diamond bearing lamp ride in the world bit of a mouthful but it truly is the only chunk of rock of its kind anywhere on the planet there's no other chunk of rock on the planet which is as well and out in diamonds as Argyle prospectors searching for gold first found alluvial diamonds in Australia in the late 19th century the deposits were small and the diamonds few and far between there was very little large-scale mining until in the early 70s a company called CRA began a systematic search for the ancient volcanic source of Australia's diamonds they hunt for what they call indicator minerals these are minerals that will give some indication that there might be diamonds or kimberlite so they look for a particular type of garnet or a particular type of ilmenite or things like that chrome lights and from that they can then predict sometime in the late 1970s purely by my good luck and good fortune CRA discovered diamonds liberated diamonds in stream sediments on smoke Creek and at that point in time they only knew that the diamonds were actually coming from ups another mining company leased the upstream land but they were looking for copper and zinc not diamonds and CRA sat on the news of its discovery for over a year until the lease from that previous mining company expired it was absolutely top-secret so when the lease expired in late 1970s CRA literally overnight hide every single helicopter they could find in the East Kimberley and they then showed up at the mines department office in kalanoro at 9:00 in the morning and packed the ground and they then actually followed that stream up into what we know as the Argyll pipe today full-scale mining operations began in 1983 starting with the diamond rich topsoil surrounding the main pipe when the miners first discovered the surrounding countryside was covered in alluvial gravel and the gravels that actually surround the main pipe were quite rich in liberated diamonds sir prior to the construction of most of the infrastructure you see around us the alluvial gravels around the main pipes mind digging on the main pipe didn't begin until two years later in 1985 by then the mines owners had the machinery and manpower in place to run a state-of-the-art operation we like to mine with the best equipment using the best knowledge and experience ever it does make our operation a lot more efficient and a lot safer because we're using the latest equipment and the latest techniques Argyll like most modern diamond mines started out as a massive open pit using heavy machinery workers stripped back tons of dirt to expose the diamond bearing Lampre light once the ore bodies then exposed the focuses on moving your to the crusher sounds simple enough but the scale of the operation and the amount of material involved is mined bar we plan to move about 80,000 tons of dirt a shift a 12-hour shift it's about 160 165 thousand a day this year we'll move 53 million tons of dirt in the year and only an infinitesimal amount of that dirt actually contains diamonds it's it's a lot of effort and a lot of drilling and a lot of digging to get the diamonds out of the ground today 170 ton trucks they deliver or at a rate of roughly nineteen hundred tons prayer hour by hour day by day the miners dig deeper and deeper into the pipe so we bought out 15 meters a wedge of 15 meters and then we leave 10 meters to the wall as our bench and our boom is our step down then we step down again like a set of steps and that maintains that structure and that strengthen the wall so they don't collapse in eventually though the open pit mine will play out one reaches a point where it actually costs more to strip waste rock than the profits to be gained from extracting the ore from the open cut so when you get to that point you explore other options of mining and with Argyle the best possible option is to go underground is taken over 20 years but Argyle has almost reached that point we will probably finish the major part of the open pit operation in December 2008 our that stays the underground would have come online opening the underground mine has required Argyle to dig a deep tunnel to access the pipe at a safe distance underneath the surface pit beyond the grand portal will intersect the the old body about - 355 meters below sea level once underground the miners will continue to burrow down as before following the main pipe as long as possible with death Domon deposits do taper to a point where it becomes too expensive to extract the diamonds but before digging can begin underground the mine will have to make a billion dollar investment in infrastructure one of the biggest issues is that establishing the development of the underground or the conveyor systems and having everything on the surface to support that and having that interlocking men into the current surface plant and processing do that we do whether strip mined from the surface or dug from deep below the ore is brought here to the primary crusher the huge machine is the heart of a diamond mines processing plant its job is to break the rock down to roughly fist sized chunks from there conveyors carry the ore to a second high-pressure crusher that liberates the Diamonds from the lamp rewind the difference between other crushes and the high-pressure old crusher is that conventional crime crushers have more of an impact force which tends to shatter the Diamonds you know if you drop a diamond or hit it with a hammer it will shatter whereas if you squeeze the diamond it'll it won't break and that's how the high-pressure rolls crushes work they squeeze the darkness out of the rock reduced to about golf-ball-sized the diamond ore is then sent to a machine called a photomultiplier that separates out the rough diamonds there are x-ray machines which spray from all sides the rocks wood x-rays when a diamond sees the x-ray it forces a bright blue and all of a sudden this thing will just shine like crazy when the photomultiplier tubes say visible light they initiate the air blasts which blast the dark material into a concentrated stream and the gang material responds by gravity into a waste stream the concentrate is collected while the waste goes back into the crusher for another round the process is repeated three or four times as the rock and the Diamonds recovered gradually gets smaller we recover roughly ninety nine point six percent of all diamonds in our company now all so it's very very efficient we recover all diamonds down to one millimeter in size our screen cutoff sizes 1.5 mil but we still do get 1 mil stones in our concentrates from the time a truckload is first tipped the process can take a week then once the last miniscule diamond is recovered the gem quality stones are sent to Perth where they are sorted and graded for the wholesale market but the vast majority of diamonds mined in full-scale diamond operations like argyles aren't high enough quality to become jewelry instead they are destined for industrial use most diamonds will never adorn a ring or necklace instead they're attached to the tips of drill bits or other cutting tools they've got too many inclusions too many flaws too many things that make jewelers unhappy or they may simply be too small because even diamond dust is stronger than any other natural material diamond chips and dust are a common industrial abrasive the most widely used commercial application is cutting and polishing tools will use diamond powder course for polishing diamonds they use diamond power and saw blades of things for cutting purposes and drills tipped with diamonds from Australia's Argyle mine the world's largest producer of industrial diamonds read out everything from crude oil to cavities there's a very strong chance that every person who goes to the dentist in the world has their cavities drilled out by Argyll diamonds widely used for a variety of applications industrial diamonds are a valuable commodity but it's the gem quality diamonds found in jewelry that inspire the imagination and command the highest prices a diamonds market value is based on four criteria commonly called the four C's carat clarity color and cut each of those has impact on the beauty of the stone the desirability of the stone the rarity of the stone and thus the price of the stone the first C carat weight measures the mass of the stone one carat is exactly 200 milligrams about seven hundredths of an ounce diamonds less than one carat are measured in points one point is 1/100 of a carat or two milligrams the larger a gemstone in nature particularly one of fine quality the rarer and the costlier it will be size matters but bigger isn't always more beautiful everyone wants a big stone but only a very tiny percentage or 3 carats and above that are of the gem quality the reason has to do with the second C clarity in the diamond trade clarity is a measure of internal defects called inclusions the clarity grade has to do with what was included in the stone as it formed in nature they can be crystals of the same gem they can be microscopic crystals of some other gem they can be little gas bubbles they can be stress fractures inclusions affect clarity because they interfere with lights penetration since all diamonds have at least some trace impurities agencies such as the Gemological Institute of America have created grading systems to identify a diamonds clarity when they give a clarity grade they're evaluating how many inclusions what color are the inclusions where are they placed in the gemstone do they affect the durability or the visibility in any way so once you've identified all of those things you come to a composite grade grades range on a sliding scale from flawless to and denoted by a series of letters and numbers the coveted high F Follis is only given to diamonds that have no visible inclusions at a magnified power of 10 times normal vision completely flawless diamonds are extremely rare only a few hundred are produced per year worldwide and can cost from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars diamonds rated V V s and V s have very slight flaws each V stands for very so very very small very small diamonds with no inclusions visible to the naked eye are known as I clean and a popular choice for most buyers while diamonds rated s i1 and si to have increasing degrees of slight inclusions below s I come the I rated or included diamonds ranging from i1 to i3 depending on the level of inclusion typically the more inclusions a stone has the lower the price I'm gonna look literally internally within the stone I'm gonna see what characteristics there are right there in the center you've got a fracture and of course seeing those helps determine the exact clarity of this particular stone sometimes an inclusion can actually enhance a stones value inclusions aren't necessarily bad and sometimes they have a lot of personality you can get an imperfect diamond that might have a sapphire embedded in it and it's a beautiful blue stone embedded inside of the diamond which I've seen and it's gorgeous [Music] the third see color is a function of impurities and imperfections within the stone now any diamond that isn't actually white a flawless is purely a function of impurities in the actual diamond crystal itself and inconsistencies within the crystal structure of the diamond itself white diamonds known in the trade as colorless are graded on a color scale from D to Z D is the rarest it is like looking through crystal clear spring water there is no tint of color most engagement diamonds are in the colorless range which is D through F or the near colorless range which is G through J below j2z the tint in the gem gradually increases beyond Z our fancy colored diamonds which occur in a rainbow of colors like this brilliant yellow which is highly valued and extremely rare red is the rarest most valuable of all gems on earth only a handful of known truly red diamonds blue diamonds and green diamonds are extremely rare and extremely costly pink diamonds are extremely rare and extremely costly Australia's Argyle mine produces most of the world's Pink's Argyll is the only diamond deposit in the world that has a reliable source of pink diamonds Pink's are found in other places in the world but the pink color is less intense unlike most colored stones its imperfections in the crystalline structure that produce a pink diamonds distinctive tint are Geils famous Pink's range from a light champagne color to riche rose to rarest of all a deep purplish pink a champagne of around about 30 points would retail for about $600 about the same sized stone in a top intense purplish pink will retail for somewhere around about $60,000 and that's just for the rough the forth see how a diamond is cut can greatly enhance a stones value the cut is the most important criteria especially a diamond so to me as a gemologist the color is important clarity but all of these don't come together if the diamond is not proportionate correctly because if it's not proportional correctly the human eye will not receive the full brilliance and there'll be a dull stone the way a stone is cut is vitally important to its liveliness its personality it's the cutting that's affecting the way light moves through the stone and comes back up to the eye so a badly cut stone can sell for forty to fifty percent less than one that's beautifully cut depending on the shape of the rough some stones are chiseled into what are called fancy cuts there are certain cuts in diamonds that have always been traditional your marquee your oval your radiant cut your emerald cut cuts rise and fall in popularity according to fashion during the 1920s and 30s the most popular fancy cut was the baguette which highlights a diamonds lustre and downplays it's fire currently the princess cut which favours fire at the expense of luster is gaining popularity over the past couple decades the princess cut has been really become popular and you've seen the Marquise cut maybe come down a little bit the pear shape may rise in popularity because of some movie star wearing something like that however since most gem quality diamonds are octahedrons in the rough state the gem cutter typically cuts the rough crystal into two and then shapes each half into a round brilliant the most common diamond cut when we talk about brilliant cuts we're talking about putting these little faces around the stone developed at the start of the 20th century from earlier diamond cuts dating back more than 300 years the 58 facets of a modern brilliant cut diamond are carefully calculated to maximize the stones inner Sparkle and fire it's the proportioning of the top it's the proportioning of the bottom it's the thickness of the girdle it's the size of that big flat facet on top that we call the table in relation to the diameter of the stone all of these things are affecting the way light goes in the angle at which the lights going to come back how much light is coming back at you once cut and polished the stones are ready to be sold most pass through one of the world's leading wholesale centres London Antwerp or Manhattan's diamond district the very finest diamonds however are often sold direct to the consumer every year for instance the Argyle mine sells its 50 best pink stones in a series of exclusive sales whose jet-setting clientele and state-of-the-art security are straight from a James Bond movie they take this 50 or 60 Stein's around the world to Geneva New York London Hong Kong Perth has shine and people are invited to bid on the stones it's a private bidding so it's all very secretive diamonds may no longer be known only to Kings but in today's market the finest stones can still command a king's ransom for the rest of us shopping for a diamond is finding the right balance between desirability and affordability and that's where the four C's come into play buy for a diamond from our wife er a rather nice large diving a couple carats but in fact it wasn't a really great cut and it wasn't really a great clarity and it wasn't really clean but as big as all get-out so it depends upon what you're looking for some people like to flash a big one it's a personality thing there are people who love that brilliance that's what they want first they want the brilliance and then color and then whatever else there are others who are just they want that color and whatever enriches the color to the fullest so it's a personal thing but no matter how big brilliant or clear your diamond is proper care can help it maintain its value in its beauty for generations whether it's an almost priceless pink or simple set of stud earrings dust and debris will dull a diamonds natural fire lotions soaps and even the skin's natural oils will put a film on diamonds and cut down their brilliance to avoid this the stone should be regularly cleaned using mild liquid detergents or soaked in a solution of cold water and household ammonia for stubborn grime consult your jeweler protect your diamonds by storing them in a fabric line jewel case with compartments or dividers diamond pieces jumbled together in a drawer or jewelry box can scratch other jewelry or each other to prevent loss it's wise to have your prongs and settings periodically checked and tightened by a jeweler properly care for diamonds can truly last forever family heirlooms that can be passed down for generations [Music] not all diamonds come from deep inside the earth an increasing number are now coming from labs and factories and some are as beautiful as their natural counterparts though possibly not quite as pricey diamonds were first synthetically produced in 1953 when a team of Swedish scientists developed a process that combines searing heat and intense pressure to produce a few small crystals a synthetic laboratory-grown diamond is physically and chemically identical to the one created by Nature the chemicals used are identical the stone is essentially the same thing most synthetic stones are small crystals created for industrial purposes but they add up to big business more than 3 billion carats for 600 metric tons of synthetic diamonds are produced annually synthetic diamonds are the main source of diamonds that are used in industry a synthetic is a material that has been artificially grown by humans with the same mineral components and the same crystalline structure as the natural gemstone sometimes it is very difficult to distinguish between the natural gemstone and a synthetic while synthetic diamonds are chemically identical to real diamonds there are many other kinds of diamond stimulants which cater to price conscious consumers looking for a jewel that mimics a diamonds appearance a simulant is a material that has a likeness to the actual gem that imitates but it doesn't have the same properties and it's chemically not the same simulants date from the 1700s when Austrian jeweler Joseph Strasser discovered that melting colorless glass with lead oxide produced a hard glass that could be cut and polished to produce a brilliant diamond like Sheen everybody more stressed all the way through the 19th century it was it was not looked down upon as costume jewelry it wasn't fake anything it was pretty jewelry but the simulant that comes closest to the sparkle and shimmer of a true diamond is cubic zirconia cubic zirconia and diamond are of the kind of gemstones where the light when it penetrates it's transmitted equally in every direction so we cannot distinguish them in that way but we can distinguish the fire it will produce more expectorant colors and diamond also the specific gravity of cubic zirconia is higher than the specific gravity of diamond which means that if you have a diamond of one carat with a round brilliant cut and you have a cubic zirconia of one carat with a round brilliant cut the cubic zirconia will be smaller developed in 1976 by scientists in the former Soviet Union today cubic zirconia accounts for roughly 80% of the simulated diamonds on the market since cubic zirconia is denser than diamond it also conducts heat differently a property that's led jewelers to develop a device called a diamond tester it works on the property of diamond to heat up at a different grade than cubic zirconia and the other synthetics do and essentially the jeweler touches the stone that is unknown and if it gets a red light it means it's not a diamond if you get the green light it is a dime like all modern industries even one as ancient as the diamond trade technology is having a big impact on nearly every aspect of the business the biggest changes can be found in cutting and polishing where computer-controlled lasers are supplanting the lapidaries timeless techniques they can cut a diamond more accurately with a laser like years ago if you were given a stake in somebody said I want you to trim off the fat and you had a cleaver you had to chop off various portions of the steak as well as the fat today with a laser or a very thin paring knife you could go around wiggling back and forth and take off nothing but fat so now they have the advantage with lasers of cutting diamonds such that they maximize on the return in carats per diamond diamond cutting isn't the only of the four C's to receive cutting edge treatment modern technology can also change a stones clarity in color color in fancy colored stones can be altered through something called high pressure high temperature and kneeling which can cause a wide range of fancy colors another common technique uses radiation to enhance or even alter a diamonds natural tint irradiation bombarding the gemstone with particles is the main way in which the gemstone is altered and the bombardment may involve either electrons or which are subatomic particles that are negatively charged it might involve neutrons or it might involve gamma radiation the radiation which in no way affects humans does affect the stones color by changing the alignment of the atoms as a result colored diamonds are now available to the consumer at a fraction of the cost of their naturally occurring counterparts it's fine as long as you know what you're paying for and you pay an appropriate price for what you're actually getting in the new millennium modern materials technology has even begun to produce true gem quality synthetic diamonds in the last few years colorless synthetic diamonds have been created by several labs so far synthetic fancy colored stones are much more affordable than natural stones of comparable color but synthetic colorless stones are still very expensive in the future technologies may enable them to be produced at much more affordable prices almost 2000 years after an unnamed prospector pulled the first diamond from an Indian riverbank diamonds remain prized above all other gems no matter where it comes from the timeless beauty and romantic charm of the diamond will be with us forever [Music] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: JTV Live Now

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Keywords: jtv, jewelry television, diamonds, diamond, gemstones

Id: RunHbaISCE0

Length: 49min 36sec (2976 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 10 2020