Pastor-Genève Diamonds Investment Advice

Author: Dror Klar

When most people think of diamonds, it usually brings to mind a clear white colored stone of indescribable beauty. They have the indescribable part right. However the color may not necessarily be so. Many of the world’s most intriguing diamonds are vibrant in their color. The shades are of a wide range.

The world’s most famous diamond, The Hope Diamond, is a blue color. Although this diamond is extremely beautiful, it has long had the reputation of bringing bad luck to those who owned it.

It was stolen from King Louis XIV during the French Revolution. When it resurfaced in 1830, it was purchased by a gentleman named Henry Philip Hope, who it is still named after. After he acquired it, his entire family died in poverty. Another owner, Edward McLean, suffered a similar fate. This famous diamond now resides in the Smithsonian Institute.

The most well known yellow diamond is The Tiffany. It was discovered in a DeBeers owned mine in 1878. Charles Lewis Tiffany bought it the next year. After the stone was cut, it weighed over 128 carets.

The most unusual famous diamond is The Grand Conde. It is pear shaped and light pink in color. It is said that Louis XIII purchased the diamond and later gave it to the Prince of Conde, Louis De Bourbon. He was a French Army Commander in The thirty Years War.
The Grand Conde Diamond weighs approximately 9 carets.

The Great Chrysanthemum Diamond is an orange- brown color and weighs approximately 104 carets. It has a pear shaped modified brilliant cut. It was found in South Africa and then sold to a jeweler named Julius Cohen. The stone was later purchased by Garrards of London about 2003.

Red, purple, green, and blue are the rarest diamonds. Yellow and brown tinted diamonds are the most common found. The clear colorless, white diamonds are the most sought after for making jewelry. It is found in jewelry stores everywhere.

Colored stones are gaining in popularity due to a wider availability. A process called irradiation can enhance the color of light tinted stones, such as blue and pink. The outer part of a cut and polished stone are beamed with radiation all the way around giving it a darkening of its natural color.

The diamond industry has made this an acceptable process. A diamond that has more intensive colors in their natural state will cost much more than stones that have been irradiated.

Author: David Cowley

Henri Moissan (1852-1907) received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1906. In 1892 theorized that by crystallizing carbon with pressure and heat from molten iron he could make diamonds. The then set out to prove his theory by designing and building an electric-arc furnace. He subsequently was able to product several tiny stones that had the same properties as mined diamonds. Thus the start of the man made diamond race was born.

The experiment was successfully repeated by Ruffin in 1917 and again by Dr Willard Hershey in 1926. The diamond that was created by Dr Willard Hershey is on display in Kansas at the McPherson Museum. Despite the earlier success, the following experimenters had great difficulty in reproducing the required temperatures and pressures needed by the process and some of the experimenters even lost their lives to explosions.

In 1941 General Electric was able to produce a one carat diamond but of very poor quality. It was not until 1954 that General Electric was able to produce commercially synthesis diamonds of a size and quality to be used in the industrial abrasives market. Today over 600 metric tons of commercially produced diamonds are produced for the industrial abrasives market and about 26 metric tons of mined diamonds are produced for gemstone market yearly.

Today there are two methods used to produce gem quality diamonds. The first is the High Pressure High Temperature (HPHT). If pure carbon in put under pressures of 50,000 atmospheres and temperatures between 1100, and 1400 degrees Celsius will reproduce the environment that creates diamonds inside the Earths core.

Companies like Gemesis, New Age Diamonds, Adia Diamonds and Tairus all utilize the HPHT method of producing gem quality man made diamonds. Clear or White diamonds must be produced in an environment that is free of impurities like nitrogen and boron which makes them very difficult and costly to produce. Most diamonds created by the HPHT method will contain some color. Yellow or orange tint occurs when nitrogen atoms replace 5 or more carbon atoms out of each 10,000 atoms. At a level of one or a few boron atoms for every million-carbon atom is replaced, an attractive blue color results.

The second method used to produce gem quality diamonds is called Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD). When pure carbon and hydrogen is heated to about 1,8000 degrees Fahrenheit a plasma cloud is formed. As the plasma cools carbon will rain out of the mixture and carbon atoms will be deposited on wafer seeds. The wafers will grow at about 1/2 a millimeter a day. The ability to control the injection of impurties allows a greater measure of control in the final diamond composition than the HTHP method. Apollo Diamond uses the CVD method of producing the larger and more expensive man made diamonds.

Man-made diamonds are very difficult to distinguish from natural ones. A trained jeweler could tell the difference if he could detect the different growth patterns and the lack of inclusions. Inclusions are the tiny bits of material that are usually imbedded in a natural diamond and are considered a flaw. The ability to be able to control the amount and type of inclusion is vital to the ability of the man made diamond to be used in semiconductor applications which in turn will lead to the next generation of computer chips