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[saratee]

I saw advertisments of Stauer in a very popular science magazine and it stirred up my curiosity. In my high school chemistry i studied the process of creating diamonds in labs using graphite, catalysts, high temperature and pressure. From the advertisement i got the impression that the same procedure was carried out by Stauer. Excited, I went ahead and ordered a ring for my sister.
It arrived in a nice packing and aside from some scratches it looked brilliant. My sister got super excited and took it to her jeweller who said it was..... FAKE!!!! a cubic zarconia. Undeterred(and after i called her jeweller an idiot ) she then went ahead and gave it to some testing lab who also said it was CZ.
I am pissed and annoyed and aggghhh. anyhoos can someone tell me who creates REAL diamonds. By real i mean diamonds that are man made and have a chemical composition of C!!!!! it can't be that difficult.I know that GE(General Electric) created the first lab diamond using graphite a few decades back so i am sure the process is easily replicable at this point.

[denverappraiser]

Here's a few:

http://www.gemesis.com
http://www.apollodiamond.com
http://www.lifegems.com
http://www.chatham.com

Apparently it's pretty difficult to produce stones that are both transparent and big enough to be interesting for jewelry purposes. The industrial market for things like sandpaper and drill bits has been dominated by synthetics for quite some time but I assume this isn't what you're looking for. Difficulty and expense of manufacture is why you're having such trouble finding producers of a product you like at a price you like and why there are so many posers out there who will promise the moon if you just hand over your credit card number. The people who are actually doing it have remarkably low production numbers and higher than expected prices. They aren't much cheaper than natural mined stones. They usually make them in colors that can be both striking and lovely but they don't look a bit like what people expect when they think of 'diamonds'.

Neil