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Synthetic diamond industry booming in NY
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The holiday season is also the season for couples to get engaged and with synthetic diamonds entering the market, cheaper stones are posing a threat to the traditional diamond industry. Dealers and shoppers in New York's diamond district are divided on the merits of the new "perfect" stones.
Although the recent financial crisis has affected global diamond sales, gem-cutters are still spinning their cutting wheels to polish their rough stones up to a perfect, brilliant cut. But the gem this man is polishing does not come from a diamond mine in Botswana, Sierra Leone or South Africa, but from a laboratory in the United States.
Gemesis Corporation in Sarasota, Florida has been growing diamonds since 2002. Largely unknown to the wider public, they specialize in vivid yellow and orange diamonds, that are extremely rare in nature.
Ronnie Vander Linden, president of Pintura Diamonds, said, "A diamond is created, it is carbon. It's created by mother nature, under thousands of pressure under the earth through hundreds of millions of years before it reaches the surface. In a laboratory where they are grown by Gemesis it is grown by a four to five day period."
A finished synthetic stone sells for about a third of the price of mined gems. And according to Vander Linden, laboratory-grown synthetics are identical to stones from the Earth's crust.
But despite the incentive, most retailers in New York's Diamond District still do not sell the man-made product.
But if you put them side by side, natural and synthetic diamonds are virtually identical.
Shoppers on the street have mixed feelings though the cheaper price tag is the most attractive incentive.
The synthetic diamond industry is still in its infancy despite steady growth in the past decade. Its total market share within the 60 billion dollar industry is estimated to be less than one percent.
