Diamonds are a girl's best friend

Andy Warhol- Marilyn

Essay


Diamonds are a girl’s best friend


A kiss on the hand may be quite continental
But diamonds are a girl’s best friend
A kiss may be grand but won’t pay the rental…

From the song: Diamonds are a girl’s best friend: Lyrics by Leo Robin, Music by Jule Styne
Sung by Marilyn Monroe in the movie version of: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes


“If you go into a florist and buy a beautiful orchid, it’s not grown in some steamy hot jungle in Central America. It’s grown in a hothouse somewhere in California. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a beautiful orchid.”

Kevin Castro, jeweller, Cedar City, Utah



Anybody queuing up for the Koh-i-noor by any other process? Any gentleman candidate kleptomaniac who wishes to lightly abstract a synthetic Hope? Not yet perhaps, but in the era of cloning, genetic manipulation and computer graphics, the three C’s – that’s cut, clarity, colour and carat-weight, for those who like to insist on a fourth leg to a troika - it won’t be long now. The potential has turned into quite a blur of kinetic, and all the beard flowing over black-coated Hassidic Jewry in Antwerp, Belgium, (which trades 80 percent of the world’s rough and polished diamonds), can’t push the genie back in the bottle.

It is a Humpty-Dumpty, broken-egg, virginity-taken-done-deal sort of transformational scenario that’s been in the making since the fifties. But the world’s greatest London based diamond production and marketing company De Beers, boss of the diamond business for 117 years, (forcing its rivals out by ruthlessly controlling supply), has decided to secret the evidence in the deep forests. Following textbook procedure, De Beers duly shot the chap who emerged on the highway with his spade, having done as instructed. Being good enforcers, De Beers also placed a fat Boer shushing finger on their thin moneymaking lips and applied the Code Muerta to the distribution chain as well. Suppression of evidence is a great delay tactic of course - ask the engineer of the pyramids at Giza. There he is, clear as daylight to your infra-red night-sight, nicely propping up the key-stone at Cheops and keeping his mouth shut at the same time. Perfect. But, even De Beers and the Forevers (of Diamonds are Forever fame) are having trouble with a new melody line for this development despite a $200 million p.a. budget for advertising in 34 countries and 21 languages.

De Beers is baffled with the mechanics of containing an open secret of such technological promise. They are falling back on wholesale breast-beating emotion to protect the bottom line. But, it’s a rear guard action at best. This time, the policy is to damn the new technology with faint praise and keep the bilge pumps working non-stop. So far, the PR is holding up well enough and that’s not bad for these uncertain times. De Beers has, after all, met so many challenges with admirable containment in the past. Think of all that initial spilling of black blood in Africa, then the upstart ice from Russia, the Canadian Yukon, then again from down under and where else have you. Mountains of product and not so much as a dent in the global scarcity stakes- that’s called sure professional work! But this time, the conundrum resembles a hospital gown, nice and modest in front but disconcertingly slit open all the way up the back. Its good that the synthetic genies can only make them up to about 3.5 carats so far, but what happens when they can swap rocks with Elizabeth Taylor’s heirs?

De Beers, Alrosa, Israel’s Lev Leviev, BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto - who together account for 90% of the diamond business (De Beers holds down 55% on its own), are banking on the natural diamond’s mystique for the moment. They’re keeping their cool, the cartels, well and chillingly aware that the bulk of the trade, in boutique and mall, is in the small and chip. Indians control most of the trade in the under fifth of a carat chips, both at Antwerp and Surat, and these tiny diamonds are used to create those sparkling fields of diamonds on watches, earrings, rings and pendants. In this segment, synthetic or natural is uneconomical to determine, that it isn’t cubic zirconium is itself a matter to be taken on trust!

For the larger gemstones, De Beers is handing out ever more sensitive authentication machines free-of-charge at first rattle, and now, second wind obtained, selling them as of April 2004. These can ferret out the synthetic from the natural and are branded DiamondSure and DiamondView as part of their Gem Defensive Programme. These machines can detect the synthetic diamond, but the premise is a smidgen lame, because the synthetic is outed on the basis that it is totally flawless and nature just doesn’t make them that way. Its slippery ground, but the cartels and the jewellers plough on undaunted, joining in a battle of attrition, strongly criticising Newsweek International’s February 17th, 2005 cover story entitled “Romancing the Stone” which they said was wild and sensational overstatement in favour of mere synthetics with none of the soul of natural diamonds.

But over all, De Beers and the rest of the diamond cartels are uncertain, and just in case all this fails to convince eventually, are working furiously on synthetic diamond programmes of their own. The cartels are not the only ones worried. The legions of ice owning glitterati around the globe are equally concerned. What will happen to the value of their hoardings of inherited or expensively acquired sparklers? Will technology turn them into just so much twinkling junk jewellery with all the tawdry brilliance of fallen stars? Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket/Save it for a rainy day…

While all this is going on, so is the infiltration, the inclusion, the passing off - that is part of every honest jeweller’s stock-in-trade. So, a lot of the synthetic induction at present is surreptitious, masquerading as natural, protected by the complicity of the producer, distributor and retail jeweller alike. The jewellery business, left to itself, has always co-opted threats like this - think of cultured pearls, heat treated emeralds and sapphires- all absorbed into one big happy family and little or no impact on prices.

By implication, this is all good incestuous precedent for the synthetic brigade. Instead of selling at a third or a quarter of prevailing prices and getting into a market share war with the big boys, they can allow themselves to be seduced, like the Leonids and C.Dundees before them, and coolly climb onto the high-priced distribution bandwagon and reach for the champagne and Cohibas instead. Why, oh after all why, spoil a perfectly good party?

The hassle is that you can make diamonds in a do-it-yourself kit now by a process called Chemical Vapour Deposition (CVD), that can fit on a desk-top, or another, originally Russian high-pressure-high-temperature job the size of a washing machine. There are two prominent companies in the biz at present, Apollo Diamonds of Boston, Massachusetts, which uses the CVD process to turn out perfect 1 carat diamonds (expecting to do 2 carats in 2006), and Gemesis of Sarasota, Florida, which uses high pressures and temperatures to mimic the natural diamond formation process to turn out very good quality diamonds including yellows and blues up to 3.5 carat size. De Beers scoffs at coloured diamonds and states that they account for 0.1 percent of the market but find it painful when Gemesis sells theirs for $4,800 a carat compared to De Beers’ $18,000.

But quite apart from this slugfest, how long will it be before ubiquitous and manifold small-scale industrial parks or gem and jewellery enclaves from Burkina Faso to Bora Bora decide to participate, if they take to the notion? It’s no longer like persuading Boris with the nice diamond mine over a quart or two of chilled Stolichnaya. Now you could, and probably will, run into a few Madrassa bred and laden types or a troop of transcendental yogis or those Green-Peace people aboard a ship making kick-ass artificial diamonds in a portable unit in order to put an end to open-strip mining.

You also need to reckon with the pamphlet brigade that avers that cartels and “blood” diamonds can be eliminated by the patronage of nice lab grown ones. Pamphleteers all grow up eventually, of course, but sometimes they put a practice out of business - think mink furs, alligator shoes, fox stoles, overt racism, smoking in public spaces. Also, the fact remains commercial nightmares in 2005 all seem to have technological parents. And technology, coming in a pure stream straight from the muses, seems to care nothing for commerce.

In this season of cats among the pigeons, mind-sets may need to change. Innocence may have to sprout in place of avarice. A thing of beauty may, in reality, have to become its own reward. Think of when conquistadors managed to trade continents for beads and carry away all that shiny yellow stuff that the Aztecs were using for doorjambs and back-scratchers. It was a tale of relative values wasn’t it? If the Aztecs were daft they weren’t unappreciative of the real uses of horses, brought over by the self-same conquistadors, or chocolate, an innocent item they had plenty of from all the coca at hand, as it were. And with regard to gold, look at all the upheaval these things cause when they are scarce across the water…

But acceptance is, and always will be, a bit of a wild horse. First there’s the customary shock and awe, then the scorn and ridicule and then a shoulder shrugging acquiescence tantamount to one part surrender and one part acknowledgement. Human beings are cussed and ornery. This process dance makes us feel alive.

The notion of synthetic diamonds aka as “cultured” - I first came across in a short story where the protagonist makes a diamond more or less in his fireplace underlining the point that coal is the same chemical composition as a diamond except that the molecules are wound tighter and closer together on account of the many atmospheres of pressure applied. My next encounter was a mite bizarre because it was a serious suggestion from the somewhat humourless Japanese, (they do laugh, but it takes a skinful of booze and blood-sport slap-stick replete with beheadings), to turn a loved one’s ashes into a diamond. Only a very small and humbling one is possible, from all those kilos of ancestor, as it turns out, because, once again, the carbon in the ashes and the diamond are, like Kipling’s “Colonel’s Lady and Julie O’Grady” very much “sisters under the skin.”

But flowing on from the realms of science fiction and ghoulish taste, we’ve got a flash flood on our hands now and how long before we have to announce that the dam just broke? It is a serious and challenging industrial strength reality with organisations like General Electric spearheading the action from those many years ago -1954, when a Tracy Hall in GE at Schenectady, New York, developed a two storey-high 400 ton press to persuade carbon overlaid with pulsating abundances of electrical power towards begetting tons of industrial grade diamonds. That Tracy Hall monolith did produce gem quality diamonds, up to 2 carats in size, but, like extreme constipation, took upwards of a week and used so much electricity to produce it that the diamonds cost more than the real thing. De Beers got to smirking their Boer smirks at GE’s folly right through the 1960s but started a remarkably similar (some said acquired through industrial espionage), programme of their own as insurance. They paid GE $25 million for patent infringement but developed a third share in the $1 billion p.a. trade in industrial diamonds out of this escapade. It’s understandable in a bare knuckles kind of way. As of now, the cartels do have a $60 billion p.a. bauble business to protect.

But lately, the new charge, mostly 21st century, post new millennium led, is from the geek in search of the super semiconductor. “Today’s speedy microprocessors run hot-at upwards of 200 degrees Fahrenheit….Diamond microchips, on the other hand, could handle much higher temperatures, allowing them to run at speeds that would liquefy ordinary silicon…” says an article called The New Diamond Age by Joshua Davis, Wired Magazine, Issue 11.09, September 2003).

It is this quest for the synthetic diamond semiconductor, complete with Boron injection to make it not only withstand heat but conduct as well, that will inflict the incidental Tsunami strength body-blow to all the posing and posturing of the diamond jewellery trade. Some side-effect that. Think Intel diamond chip inside even though Intel, probably has so much invested in silicon presently that it doesn’t welcome the thought. That’s progress for you, a resented, cold turkey of an ugly duckling. But before the pending transformation into swan, CNN reports that the doctor is out, the phones are down, there’s a dark and stormy night extant and Bulwer-Lytton is the midwife. But still, there you have it, a perfect diamond. If it were a baby you’d say it was good in every finger and toe and lusty with all life.

(2,224 words)

By Ghatotkach
Title: Diamonds are a girl’s best friend
Tuesday, July 26th, 2005

This and all original essays on GHATOTKACHSERIES are copyright 2005 by Gautam Mukherjee. All Rights Reserved.