How Diamonds Are Grown

Despite the fact that the bulk of industrially synthesized diamonds are used for industrial purposes, such as the manufacture of electronics, a fairly large share of grown stones also enters the jewelry market. Until recently, diamond mining companies such as De Beers built their advertising campaign on the exclusivity of natural stones, but now many large companies (both mining and cutting) have departments responsible for the synthesis and processing of synthetic stones.
The first synthetic diamonds of jewelry quality were grown in the early 1970s, but industrial commercial production was still many years away. A few cuts of synthetic diamonds began to enter the jewelry market in the late 1980s. And less than a decade later, these stones became a real scourge for both natural stone producers and gemologists. Currently, a significant portion of synthetic gem-quality diamonds are grown in a metal flux environment at high pressures and high temperatures, with the weight of the grown crystals exceeding 10 carats back in 2015, and now individual stones can reach several tens of carats. Growing of raw material crystals from graphite (another polymorphic modification of carbon can also be used) occurs in stages from small crystals to large ones. For this, special reaction tanks (the so-called "bombs") are used, in which the pressure and temperatures necessary for diamond crystallization are created.
Recently, the technology of producing polycrystalline diamond has been developing, in which the final product is a polycrystalline aggregate of nanosized diamond crystals, outwardly looking like a transparent single crystal. Since the late 2000s, chemical vapor deposition (CVD) technology has been widely developed. It involves depositing a thin film of diamond on a seed plate under the influence of an electric discharge. Such stones were distinguished by a polycrystalline structure. However, later manufacturers managed to achieve the growth of single crystals, although the process of their growth is much longer and more labor-intensive. With the development of synthetic diamond production, they are becoming a very real budget replacement for natural stones, especially since advertising campaigns for the sale of products made from such stones emphasize their higher "environmental friendliness". The latter can of course be disputed in view of the high energy costs of industrial synthesis, but advertising showing operating unreclaimed mines and keeping silent about the environmental impact of industrial energy production works almost without fail. Another advertising "hobbyhorse", presenting synthetic diamonds as grown in a laboratory ("lab grown"), is far from being so clearly consistent with reality, since the technological process of synthesis is only being developed in the laboratory, while mass production is carried out in industrial workshops. The production process in such factories can be compared to a farm, where each installation is like a chicken laying eggs, or a cow giving milk, although at a much slower pace.