An ex-Army officer in Florida is using secret Soviet
technology to create fake diamonds that are indistinguishable
from "real" ones. Soon we'll all be able to afford to wear
masses of them?but when it's no longer a status symbol, will
we still want to?
Joshua Davis writes in Wired Magazine about Carter Clarke,
who runs Gemesis in Sarasota, Florida, where he grows
diamonds in a warehouse using Russian-designed machines.
Diamond dealer Aron Weingarten of Antwerp, Belgium
says, "Unless they can be detected, these stones will
bankrupt the industry."
In reaction, De Beers has set up what it calls the Gem
Defensive Program to warn jewelers that the fakes are on the
market. The problem is, there's no way to tell the "fakes"
from "real" diamonds. Clarke says, "Right now, we only
threaten the way De Beers wants the consumer to think of a
diamond. But imagine what happens when we fill this
warehouse and then the one next door. Then I'll have myself
a proper diamond mine."
Clarke discovered diamond-making technology during a 1995
trip to Moscow, when he met Yuriy Semenov, who was in
charge of selling Soviet-era military research to Western
investors. He asked Clarke, "How would you like to grow
diamonds?"
He showed Clarke an 8,000-pound machine that used
hydraulics and electricity to produce enough pressure and
heat to recreate conditions 100 miles below Earth's surface,
where diamonds form naturally. If you put a diamond sliver in
the machine and inject carbon (the raw material of
diamonds), a larger diamond will grow around the sliver.
General Electric built a diamond-making machine in 1954, but
it took so much electrical energy that the resulting diamonds
were more expensive than mined stones.
Clarke brought a machine back to Florida with him, but no one
in the U.S. knew how to run it, so he imported a crew of
Russians as well. When it comes to Florida, Nickolay Patrin,
says, "I felt myself all the time in a sauna." But the machine
still wasn't working right, so Clarke hired Iranian crystal
expert Reza Abbaschian, who installed a computer control
system.
When Clarke took some of his manufactured diamonds to a
gem show in London, De Beers was tipped off and one of their
executives, James Evans Lombe, met him there.
"When I told him that we planned to set up a factory to mass-
produce these, he turned white," Clarke says. "They knew
about the technology, but they thought it would stay in
Russia and that nobody would get it working right. By the end
of the conversation, his hands were shaking."
Since there's no way to tell the difference, De Beers
pressured the Federal Trade Commission to force Gemesis to
label its stones synthetic. Clarke decided to call
them "cultured," as in cultured pearls. He's started out making
yellow diamonds, which are extremely rare and expensive,
and charges 10 to 50% less for them.
Gemesis has a marketing campaign that says their synthetics
are superior to natural diamonds. "If you give a woman a
choice between a 2-carat stone and a 1-carat stone and
everything else is the same, including the price, what's she
gonna choose?" Clarke says. "Does she care if it's synthetic
or not? Is anybody at a party going to walk up to her and
ask, 'Is that synthetic?' There's no way in hell. So I'll bite
your ass if she chooses the smaller one."
A diamond has always symbolized love, but is it possible to
love someone who is worshipped by the public? And what's he
REALLY like? Learn about Amy Wallace's
secret affair with Carlos Castaneda on this week's
Dreamland.
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