Sparklers from the lab

Now you can have your diamonds and wear them too. A local company, Zolastar, is revolutionizing the gemstone market with a superior diamond carbon-bonding process. The process, combined with Zolastar’s quality control, creates lab-grown stones that are nearly indistinguishable from natural stones to the naked eye. Best of all, they’re far more affordable than natural gemstones and every bit as beautiful.

This is great news in a market that is seeing prices for gold and gems continually on the rise. The current state of things means that many people have had to settle for an inferior-cut natural product rather than enjoy the size and quality of a gem that they dreamed of getting or giving.

John Kersch, president of Zolastar, explained: “For gemstones, there’s more competition for them and there are fewer of them in the world. The major factions that hold onto gemstones do a very good job of pipelining them, much in the way of the oil cartels. As a result you have this fairly high market value to get a good quality product.”

This high cost of natural gems means that the industry norm is now to cut for yield rather than quality. Gem cutters look at a raw stone to see how they can get the most finished stones out of it with the least amount of waste, rather than to cut it for quality.

“I liken it to making biscuits,” Kersch said. “It’s never quite perfect when you roll out your dough and you have to cheat a bit on the ends. It’s not that they’re deliberately trying to give people less. It’s just that they’re trying to maximize it. They’ve had to pay an awful lot for that raw product.”

With lab-grown gems, waste isn’t an issue. But what had previously held back man-made gem technology was the need to find a process that would mimic the atomic structure of a natural diamond, allowing light to oscillate inside the stone itself.

To solve this, Zolastar came up with the carbon-bonding process. A custom built machine works at the sub-atomic level to build a lattice of carbon-based molecules within the gem, similar to what you would see in a natural diamond. The molecules are actually embedded into the substrate creating scintillation, brilliance and durability similar to natural diamonds.

Better still, this process can be applied to colored gems, creating diamond-like scintillation in stones such as rubies and emeralds that would not naturally have such brilliance. It adds additional toughness to the stones, making them more wearer-friendly. They also come with a limited lifetime guarantee. That’s something you usually don’t get with jewelry.

Of course, the main reason people enjoy Zolastar’s product is that it is affordable as well as beautiful. Only a professional can tell the difference between these specially processed lab-grown stones and natural ones. It means that consumers can opt for bigger and more beautiful stones, spend less money and still lose none of the “wow” factor.

For about $100, you can get either a third of a carat pendant or a third of a carat total weight pair of earrings from Zolastar, and no one’s going to know the difference between them and natural stones. Or guys can push out the boat and get a whole carat stud for about $250.

Zolastar even has a simulated Padparadscha sapphire. They’re very rare and very expensive. You could easily spend $5,000 to $6,000 for a natural one. Zolastar’s version costs less than $600 and is every bit as dazzling.

“Right now we really want to let people know that there is a quality product out there that’s not expensive,” Kersch said. “We have a saying: Your heart races when you wear it, not when you buy it.”