Turns out there is literally no difference between lab-grown diamonds and natural diamonds, well, apart from the price.



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Ever wondered what the difference between lab-produced
diamonds and natural diamonds was? Well, nothing. They are exactly the same. 



As with most things of value, a great deal of information
has been produced over the years about the price of diamonds. In short, many
believe the real price of diamonds is far lower than what ‘big business’ would
have us believe and that it is driven up by our insatiable hunger and the
social importance we place on the stones. 



In line with this, there is a widely-held belief that they
are not rare and the market is being deliberately controlled to create the
façade that they are difficult to produce. Therefore, their price is dictated
by the fact that they symbolize the most enduring of all human emotions – love.



&nbsp;With that out of the
way, in recent times, society has developed a pragmatic relationship with
diamonds, rather than a romantic one that has long sustained the industry. 



It might be that we live in the era of instant gratification
or that we have stopped romanticising the idea of waiting millions of years for
the precious stone, but more people have embraced the idea of purchasing
lab-grown diamonds.



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Unlike an imitation gem like cubic zirconia, it has the same physical characteristics and chemical components as a natural diamond but production time is much shorter, enabling producers to create it in a matter of weeks. 



Lab-grown diamonds producer Ross Reid offers FORBES AFRICA a very sobering perspective with the following analogy to describe man-made diamonds. 



“If a couple can’t fall pregnant using conventional methods,
they do IVF where the baby’s origin of life is manmade. Is that not a real baby
when it’s born?”



The room falls silent as all contemplate this question.



“So by that logic, it is a real diamond,” Reid states
emphatically.



Reid is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of Inception
Diamonds, One of South Africa’s first Diamond companies to offer lab-grown
diamonds and fine jewelry.



The world’s leading diamond producer, De Beers, however, has
a different perspective.



“We view natural diamonds and lab-grown diamonds as very
different products as they have completely different production processes.
Natural diamonds are created in the earth, under intense heat and pressure over
billions of years. Each diamond is rare, finite and unique,” says Bianca
Ruakere, a De Beers Group spokesperson.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="585" height="611" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Diamond2.png" alt="" class="wp-image-40193" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Diamond2.png 585w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Diamond2-300x313.png 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Diamond2-287x300.png 287w" sizes="(max-width: 585px) 100vw, 585px" /><figcaption> De Beers Lightbox range. Picture: De Beers</figcaption></figure>



Reid says he recognizes the market potential for global
growth in being able to offer conflict-free, environmentally-friendly lab-grown
diamonds, especially to the millennial market.



“With the creation of laboratory-grown diamonds, it allows
you to offer the consumer the same thing optically, physically, and chemically
at a big discount. So you can have the same beauty, the same hardness, the same
look and the same feel for less money,” Reid says.



Large diamond producers have also recognized the same
potential.



De Beers Group has been producing synthetic diamonds for
industrial purposes for more than 50 years. “Last year, we launched Lightbox in
the United States to market a range of fun, fashion jewelry using lab-grown
diamonds. They are accessibly priced, and a distinct product offering compared
with natural diamonds,” Ruakere says.



&nbsp;Price is not the only
reason that encourages the market to opt for lab-grown diamonds. They are also
other ethical factors such as having a guarantee that the rock on your finger
is conflict-free.



&nbsp;Shogan Naidoo, who
proposed to his fiancé, Preba Iyavoo, on Valentine’s Day at the popular
independent cinema house, The Bioscope, did so with a healthy bank balance and
clean conscience. 



They were traditionally engaged in July last year, so by the time the ring engagement happened, Iyavoo was caught completely off-guard and was pleasantly surprised. 



“Shogan is the most endearing person, but he’s not romantic
in the slightest,” says a giddy Iyavoo, who recalls the proposal that happened
in a filled theater, with a movie Naidoo had created just for her. 



The couple are besotted with their lab-grown diamond. Naidoo
says after doing exhaustive research to find the perfect ring to propose with,
all conventional options had failed him.



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&nbsp;He says his final
ring choice far exceeded his expectations in price and design. Naidoo explains
that Iyavoo has a very specific preference and that he was not willing to
compromise in getting her the perfect ring but the one he initially wanted was
in the range of R80,000 ($5,500).



&nbsp; “We were planning a
wedding and we’d just bought a house,” he says. The exorbitant cost of retail
rings led him to search out of the box, and eventually the box returned with
the perfect gem.



&nbsp;The couple who lead a
very environmentally-conscious lifestyle, say they are especially proud to be
the custodians of this ring because they are guaranteed it’s conflict-free and
no miners were exploited.



&nbsp;Reid says he has to
grapple with a great deal of scepticism because many are not ready to fully
embrace the idea of lab-grown diamonds despite their advantages. 



“The Federal Trade Commission has changed the definition of
a diamond. It does not need to come from the ground.



“We have opened up the market for people to be able to
afford beautiful pieces without compromising on quality,” Reid says.



Change is inevitable and with that, there will always be
those resistant to it. But one thing is for sure, society’s relationship with
diamonds are changing.

diamond

Lab-grown Diamonds: Never Mined, It’s Man-Made

Angola is planning to hold its first diamond auction this week, inviting around 35 companies to bid for seven stones as the world’s fifth largest producer moves to make the sector more lucrative for producers and the state.



The stones, selected for their rare quality and size, were produced by the Lulo project operated by Australia-listed Lucapa in the northeastern province of Lunda Norte.



“It’s our conviction that the final result of this auction will show to our society and the wider world our total commitment to transparency and innovation in the commercialization of diamonds in Angola,” Minister of Mineral Resources Diamantino Azevedo said on Monday.



The auction on Thursday will use a sealed system by which interested parties submit their offers electronically without knowing what others have bid. This model is proven to garner the highest price, Azevedo said.



The new system, part of wider reforms in the commercialization of diamonds in Angola, has been welcomed by producers who long complained they were not getting fair value for their stones.



Producers were previously obliged to sell through an opaque government marketing system to buyers selected by the Angolan state, a process they said resulted in prices well below international levels.



Angola has vowed to increase diamond production and per carat value, aiming to become a top 3 producer by 2021, as part of an attempt to diversify its economy away from a dependence on oil. -Reuters



-Stephen Eisenhammer

gettyimages-612570588-594×594

Angola to Hold First Diamond Auction

It does not matter how amazing your business is, as long as customers don’t know about it, it is as good as a diamond buried deep under the earth.
Technology has led to radical changes in the market; traditional advertising is dying out, and the media companies’ revenue from this is declining. Yet, despite not investing much in advertising, the exposure of companies is at an all-time high.
Are we caught in a middle of a market evolution? Everyone is trying to predict what is going to happen. Reports by the likes of the World Economic Forum, McKinsey &amp; Company and PricewaterhouseCoopers are springing up everywhere. Some are correct, others are dismally wrong.
If you are an entrepreneur in Africa with a fervent drive to conquer a particular industry, whether or not you have a budget for advertising, you need to explore the most effective strategies to market yourself in a world where you can end up drowning amid the plethora of ads and messages in the media. It’s a mad show out there, all you have to do is take a walk along the street or browse the internet to realize this.
Let’s look at some of the effective ways to convert prospective customers to actual clients.
There is a model that many entrepreneurs don’t know about – the freemium model – which is one step below the paid for premium model. Freemium is where you offer your products and services for free and then make money on the other end. Facebook’s monetization strategy is selling advertising to other companies, on the back of the popularity of their service. Bear in mind that the high usage of their service is down to it being free.
Chinese ecommerce company, Alibaba, did the same thing to kill eBay when the American company tried to enter the Asian market half a decade ago. They invited eBay to follow their free model, knowing that the listed company’s shareholders would persecute its senior executives if it did so. Alibaba is now the king of the Asian ecommerce market, while eBay fizzled out.
You need to be creative to stretch a dollar in today’s economy, whether your company is big or small.
Referral is one of the most effective marketing tools for your business. It’s a form of trust transferred by another source you know and respect. Uber has used this method well. The taxi company offers free rides to their existing customers when they refer Uber. In this case, an incentive rewards existing customers for finding new customers.
There are products that go viral without monetary incentive. WhatsApp is the best example in this case. Existing customers were pushing the product themselves because they wanted to use WhatsApp to message everyone else in their phonebook. It helps that WhatsApp is cost effective as well.
Offering your product for potential customers to use over a trial period has been popular in recent years. Most anti-virus and software companies use this as a marketing strategy. It is not a new concept though. William, a young salesman in the 1930s, worked for a company that sold home appliances. He walked from door to door, allowing people to use particular products until he returned to collect them a week or so later. More often than not, when he returned, the majority of those people discovered that the items were useful and refused to give it back. They chose to pay him for the item instead. It led to him becoming the number one salesman in his company.
Some say print media advertising revenues are going down because many marketing campaigns are online. That cannot be the entire reason, only 9.8% of Africans are internet users.
Then internet is not the only answer to marketing these days. Many companies collaborate to leverage each other’s client base. Insurance, retail and healthcare based companies are good at this. Partner with a company that opens your business to hundreds, thousands, and even millions of clients; it could save you piles of money that would usually be spent on ineffective campaigns.

The Art Of The  War

The diamond, beautiful and rare, must first endure searing temperatures, immense pressure and the cut before it is polished to shine. For Jenna Clifford this sounds like her life.
&nbsp;
<h4>The Diamond Is Pressurized</h4>
Clifford was born in a time when patriarchy was first and women second. She was an only child who endured great pressure from her father, who often told her that if she wasn’t number one she was a failure.
“My father was really the guy that might have broken me as a child but it stood me in very good stead for the pain that business can bring.”
Her father was inspired by South African golfing champion Gary Player who borrowed the saying: “The harder I work, the luckier I get,” from American producer Samuel Goldwyn.
Her father pushed her into the deep end and hoped it would teach her discipline.
“For anyone, getting to the top of any field or any faculty, sport [allows one] to get their head and physicality into dedication, drive and sticking at it even when you cry… Business is the sport of the mind. Sport is the business of the body.”
&nbsp;
<h4>The Diamond Is Chiseled</h4>
Despite this, at 19, a naive Clifford fell prey to the so called ‘Cinderella Complex’—all she wanted was to find a prince charming, who would love and look after her. After two failed marriages, she found that a fairy tale can often be grim.
“In my lifetime, I’ve had three unions. The first one I was just under 20 and then again I got married in 1987, then again in 1993, which has been about a 23-year relationship.”
Clifford’s struggles with men were not limited to her personal life.
“When you rise as a female, you will be challenged by your male counterparts. They can’t challenge your acumen and your efficiency in what you do, but they can challenge your being, as a woman, and hit your emotional bodies to get control or compliance, which is a very subtle way of getting compliance. Other women get violent compliance… it doesn’t just happen to women who are necessarily rural and un-educated, it happens in the highest order of society.”
Along the way, Clifford has learnt from the enemy.
“I just find that I fit in better with the male counterpart from a head space point of view. I love the way men focus. They don’t pick 16 things to do, they pick one and the number two will normally be their lifestyle sport or car racing or rugby…”
Another major problem is that women tend to find it harder to support each other.
“When you keep women weak, meaning break them one by one, they can’t stand as a collective. It’s as simple as that. Women are scared to stand as a collective… and it usually takes someone like me, that’s had men shape their life destructively and possibly turned it into a positive thing.”
One of Clifford’s inspirations is Nelson Mandela, who left a lasting impression on her.
“The humility, the kindness… Color is nothing that he sees, he sees the individual… He stuck to a dream irrespective to the punishment. It’s the same principal of greatness; he just had to go through 29 years of hell to get there.”
&nbsp;
<h4>The Diamond Is Polished</h4>
Clifford has made peace with her past, and acknowledges its role in shaping her life. With a successful jewelry company that has international clients—including Celine Dion and Debra Messing—three loving daughters and a husband, life could not be better. As for getting on with her father’s generation?
“With strong patriarchs, my age group to my father’s age group, I get along with them exceptionally well now, because they don’t treat me like a woman. They think of me as a different being. So, I’m now okay for them because, in their minds, I’ve achieved success.”
Dedicated to the empowerment of women, Clifford will be collaborating with Doctor Dorianne Cara Weil, Professor Shirley Zinn, Dion Chang and Doctor Marko Saravanja, in a new venture called Inner Genius. The project will allow women to interact with these mentors, who will advise them on how to succeed in their personal and professional lives.
Surely, it is worth listening to Clifford, a cut in polished
diamond.

A Glint Of Feminist Fire

The story goes that in 1867 a 15-year-old Afrikaans boy picked up a ‘mooi klippie’ (nice stone) on the banks of the Orange River in the Hopetown district. Sir Roderick Murchison, Keeper of the Royal Museum of Geology in London, said the diamond had been planted. It was impossible, he said, for diamonds to be found where it was, but soon massive diamond deposits were discovered in Kimberley and the Hopetown district and the diamond rush began.
Syndicates and partnerships were set up, the De Beers Group being the largest. They were in favor of the Diamond Trade Act of 1882, which made it a punishable offence for anyone, but a licensed buyer, to possess rough diamonds. A diamond cutting industry, they believed, would pave the way for stolen diamonds to be processed.
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However, in 1919, the then-prime minister Louis Botha, put forward a plan to start a diamond polishing industry. A Cutting Act was passed, but it was another five years before an industry was established in Kimberley. Dutch experts were imported to train local workers and diamond polishing began in earnest.
But the trade went through a series of recessions and did not prosper. Eventually most of the industry moved to Johannesburg. In 1930, a Diamond Workers’ Union had been set up, but the trade suffered in the Great Depression and really only recovered during the Second World War.
The master cutters formed a Diamond Dealers Club, which remained stable and productive contributing to the fiscus and being respected around the world. In 1947, they were admitted to the World Federation of Diamond Bourses in Antwerp, Belgium, but the changing political situation in South Africa had its effect on the trade.
In 1976, the master cutters wanted to introduce a chain system—a way of polishing the rough stones in a production line—a faster method of producing a finished diamond. But the polishers objected to this because it lowered their skill. They went on strike. After six weeks, the chain system was brought in anyway.
Ernest Blom, then 25, was the youngest vice-president of the Diamond Workers’ Union. Initially, the fewer than 1,000 diamond polishers were exclusively white. After the strike, women and previously disadvantaged individuals were admitted as polishers and the tradition of a five-year apprenticeship was abandoned.
The Harry Oppenheimer Diamond Training School opened with Blom as its first chairman. The idea was to train unemployed youths. The South African Diamond Bourse sponsored the school, but the new diamond cutters were no longer artisans in the accepted sense of the word. By 1990, the trade reached a peak with 3,500 workers and 18 sightholders—those factories entitled to buy rough diamonds directly from De Beers.
By July, the number of sight holders had fallen to 10—none of them South African. The number of diamond polishers had dwindled to less than 600.
Blom says the European banking crisis and recession have affected the trade. The local industry has suffered with the declining labor force, the competitiveness of Indian and Chinese buyers and too much red tape.
“Our production costs are too high, much higher than Indian or Chinese costs. The open system of buying rough directly from the diggers has gone, having been replaced by the tender system which most people accept,” says Blom.
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A Johannesburg factory owner said: “De Beers did not look after the local industry, nor does the government. Many workers are being brought in from India. They work seven days a week, virtually 24/7, non-stop, are housed in crowded conditions and bussed to the factories. Furthermore, they are paid in India, so they pay no tax here”.
“Uncut diamonds, which now have to be bought through the State Trader, are too expensive because our labor costs are too high. It’s more profitable to send rough diamonds overseas for processing, despite the taxes and interminable red tape.”
Another factory owner said the government wanted diamond polishers trained locally.
“We are just not able to buy polishable goods at workable prices [to train them on],” he said. “What’s more, there are qualified workers who are unemployed, walking the streets, trying to get jobs, so how can we take on learners?
“In any case, the industry is moving to Botswana and Zimbabwe. At this rate, there is no future in this country for a polishing industry. There isn’t one wholly South African-owned sightholder. There is a 500-bench factory in Polokwane and they cannot get a sight.
“The only hope is to give rough to South African-based manufacturers at a favorable price. South Africa was once regarded internationally as being at the forefront of diamond polishing—now it’s a joke.”
Blom was sanguine, however.
“The government is due to hold a summit later in the year. Hopefully, they will upskill labor and cut out the unnecessary red tape. If they get that right, we still have a bright future.”
A Diamond In The Rough
Kgele Ellen Mahuma finds herself in the heart of the African diamond industry and still can’t believe how she got there. It’s been a long way since her childhood years, when she first recalls watching a dishwashing liquid commercial on television: the dishes sparkled like diamonds. Mahuma also remembers the advertisements for diamonds and how she longed to touch them. Her childhood dream became a reality in 1984, now she has her own diamond cutting, polishing and trading company.
Mahuma is multi-talented: a true diamond in the rough. She established K. E. Mahuma Diamonds—with its modest office in the South African Diamond center, in central Johannesburg—in 2008. In the next two years, she hopes to have an employee or two.
“I don’t want to rush things, it must grow first. The money I could pay that person, could have bought a stone. I can do everything on my own,” she says.
This diamond entrepreneur has repaid the loan used to establish her company. She visits her clients from China to India and from Dubai to Belgium.
It’s a lucrative industry.
“If I have a polished stone, there are always buyers,” she says.
It can be a risky one too.
“It’s a dangerous industry. My neighbors don’t even know what I do. They try to investigate. They ask my children, ‘Why is your mom going to China? ’I tell them, ‘I work for a white man and I am happy with my job.’”
There is a lot of worry around the buying of stones. She bets against around 100 other people; the person who offers the highest price, ‘wins’ the parcel.
“Whenever I ‘win’ a parcel, I worry that I may have overpaid and miscalculated because I have to consider the color and clarity of the stone or stones; as well as my labor; the payment for the certificate from the lab and then, of course, the profit I will make,” she says.
She started working for Reichman Diamond Cutters in 1984, at the age of 23. It took a year of training to learn the basics of the trade and another five for her to feel competent.
Her mother—who used to work at the bioscope (cinema) in Carlton Center—was scared when Mahuma first started working there.
“She used to say, ‘don’t lose any of the diamonds. Don’t tell anyone that you work there. Don’t let anyone convince you to steal one’,” she recalls.
It wasn’t easy for a Zulu-speaking woman. The male to female ratio was two to one. She was the only black woman at Reichman Diamonds; there was one other black man working alongside her. Her mentors were Afrikaans-speaking, colored males.
“They couldn’t speak my language. I was forced to learn and speak Afrikaans. I used my dictionary at home and if I couldn’t understand something at work, I had to ask someone to explain it. Now I’m competent in both,” she says.
She has trained seven other black diamond cutters on a part-time basis; two men and five women, three of them are foreigners: one from Côte d’Ivoire and two Ghanaians. While she doesn’t charge them the going rate of R30,000 ($3,550) for a six month training course, her trainees can recognize a sure-sell stone and sell the diamonds bought in their home countries to her.
In a month, she polishes around six stones amounting to around 14 to 16 carats.
While she believes the South African diamond industry is growing, times can be as rough as the diamonds.
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Tag: Diamond

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

Lab-grown Diamonds: Never Mined, It’s Man-Made

Angola to Hold First Diamond Auction

The Art Of The War

A Glint Of Feminist Fire

More carat, Less Stick