How much does it really cost to mass-produce gems? 2003 article below
"This is very rare stone," he says, almost to himself, in thickly accented English. "Yellow diamonds of this color are very hard to find. It is probably worth 10, maybe 15 thousand dollars."
"I have two more exactly like it in my pocket," I tell him.
He puts the diamond down and looks at me seriously for the first time. I place the other two stones on the table. They are all the same color and size. To find three nearly identical yellow diamonds is like flipping a coin 10,000 times and never seeing tails.
"These are cubic zirconium?" Weingarten says without much hope.
"No, they're real," I tell him. "But they were made by a machine in Florida for less than a hundred dollars."
https://www.wired.com/2003/09/diamond/
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Gemesis Inc., now known as Pure Grown Diamonds,[1] is a privately held company located in New York City. The corporation growssynthetic diamonds using proprietary technology.
Gemesis has the world's largest facilities for both the high-pressure high-temperature (HPHT) and chemical vapor deposition (CVD) diamond production methods. Using these methods, Gemesis has produced high-quality colorless and fancy color diamonds that have been offered for sale at 20–30% lower prices than mined natural diamonds of similar quality (and, from some suppliers, lower prices than that).[6] Gemesis is the principal producer of gem-quality lab-created diamonds and jewelry. The company was renamed as Pure Grown Diamonds in June 2014.[7][1]
Gemesis started marketing its diamonds by cutting and polishing them and then selling them to jewelry retailers on the wholesale market. In 2012, the company began also selling polished diamonds and diamond jewelry directly to consumers through its website.
Available in the purest Type IIa colorless and rare fancy yellow colors, the company's diamonds have the same cut, color and clarity, as well as identical chemical, optical and physical characteristics as the highest-quality mined diamonds.
2012 controversy[edit]
In May 2012, the news emerged that a parcel of 600 unmarked synthetic diamonds had been submitted by a buyer to the International Gemological Institute diamond certifying agency for evaluation without any accompanying disclosure that they were synthetic.[9][10] The DTC Diamond Research Center issued an alert and said the undisclosed synthetics were "strikingly similar" in their characteristics to Gemesis diamonds, and a trade journal said the synthetics and Gemesis diamonds had "identical characteristics" and "had the specific Gemesis fingerprint".[10] The diamonds had been grown by CVD and then treated by HPHT, and thus their production required both technologies. It was noted that all of the stones in the parcel were synthetics – there was no mixing to hide synthetic stones among natural ones. The buyer of the parcel said the 600 diamonds were only a sampling from a collection that was four or five times larger.[10]
The invoices for the diamonds were traced to a company called Su-Raj Diamonds and Jewelry USA in New York that was co-owned by Jatin Mehta, the majority owner of Gemesis, along with a junior partner named Ashok Bhansali.[10] The same company was reported to house the central inventory of diamonds for Gemesis itself.[10] Stephen Lux responded to the reports by saying "Gemesis can assure the industry with 100 percent certainty that it has not been involved in selling its diamonds as mined, and the undisclosed diamonds referenced in the DTC and IGI alerts are not Gemesis diamonds."[10] Jatin Mehta then reportedly suggested it was possible that Bhansali "had misappropriated stocks held previously by the partnership" or that "some people who had left Gemesis … might have stolen our technology and are thus producing our typical Gemesis characteristic goods", and showed that that Su-Raj parent company (a large publicly listed company based in India) had taken some steps to sever its ties with its New York subsidiary (although the degree to which the separation had taken effect was unclear).[10]
In December 2012, Stephen Lux resigned from his position as the company's CEO. Lux said that internal issues at the company and "distractions" (speculated to include the reports of undisclosed synthetic diamonds) had recently made it difficult for him to focus on his goals for building the business.[11]
https://www.puregrowndiamonds.com