12 24 2021

How To Make A Diamond

Ingredients: Carbon
Temperature: Above 1000°C
Location: Approximately 120 kilometers below the earth’s surface
Time: Billions of years

Although a pencil worth pennies and a diamond worth a fortune are technically composed of the same atoms, it’s the crystal structures that sets their value apart completely.

Diamonds are created when carbon atoms are bonded together deep beneath the earth’s surface at a depth of 120 km or more, in a region called the mantle. In the mantle, carbon atoms are bonded together by the strong force of pressure of about 50 tons per square meter at a stable high temperature of nearly 1,000 degrees Celsius. The cooling process, which takes billions of years, gradually grows the diamond.

It is a miracle that diamonds are not only born under such extremely limited conditions but that they were even discovered by humans. Humans are only able to dig as deep as 12 km, however, in order to find diamonds, we would need to dig as deep as 120 km. For us to find diamonds, we need the help of volcanic eruptions that can push the diamonds up from deep underground.

The rough diamonds produced from the strata do not shine on their own but have a high refractive index. If you shine a light perpendicularly to the surface of glass, 4% of the light will be reflected, whereas a diamond will reflect 17%. We use round brilliance cuts, princess cuts, and at times, use un-cut diamonds for our jewelry to accentuate the colorless, transparent beauty of a natural diamond.

The earth has been producing diamonds through this process since long before humans existed, which explains our forever fascination with their gleam and glisten.