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DIAMONDS ON DEMAND; Lab Makes 'Virtual' Gems

Posted on: Wednesday, 14 February 2007, 21:00 CST

By DONNA GOODISON

Bryant Linares sees the potential for a big diamond mine in Massachusetts, but don't expect any digging to start soon.

"It's a virtual diamond mine," said Linares, president and CEO of Apollo Diamond Inc.

Apollo Diamond makes what it calls "cultured" diamonds in a laboratory outside Boston.

Its diamonds are structurally identical to and virtually indistinguishable from diamonds mined from the earth, according to Linares, but customers don't have to worry about environmental sustainability issues or their origin.

"We can grow them very perfect and with high purity, which is difficult to get out of the ground," Linares said.

Apollo's production process was developed by Linares' father, company chairman Robert Linares. It starts with a sliver of a natural diamond.

"We take carbon in its gas form, and we rain those carbon atoms down on the sliver, and we build up the diamond crystal, atom by atom," Linares said.

The company grows colorless and pink diamonds. It takes four to six weeks to create a diamond that can be cut into a quarter carat for jewelry or to create a wafer for semiconductor material.

"They have produced some very high-quality diamond crystals," said James Shigley, director of research at the Gemological Institute of America, an independent, nonprofit research and educational group in California that created the standard for grading diamonds.

But there's ongoing controversy about what lab-produced diamonds are called and proper disclosures about their origin when sold, said Shigley, whose group started grading what it labels as "synthetic" diamonds Jan. 1.

"It's a man-made product that can be produced in the laboratory, and natural high-quality gems are quite rare in nature," Shigley said.

Apollo started selling its diamonds late last year through Bostonian Jewelers, which has fashioned them into finished pieces of jewelry. It also fields inquiries through its own Web site and will launch an online store this year.

Apollo sells its cultured diamonds for about 15 percent less than a comparable mined diamond. While diamond gemstones represent a very large opportunity for the company, Linares also sees big business in high-tech applications.

"We see diamonds 15 years from now in most of the commercial and consumer applications out there - lighting, power switching, high- speed communications," Linares said. "It's a building block."

Source: Boston Herald

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