Most people know that a diamond started life as a piece of carbon, subjected to intense heat and pressure under the earth transforming it into the hardest (and most desirable) material known to man.

As you'd expect, there's been a lot of interest in creating artificial diamonds in a laboratory - a form of modern-day alchemy.

Industrial-quality diamonds have been available for decades and are used in grinding wheels, drill bits, etc. Industrial diamonds are small, and appearance is unimportant.

However, after the break-up of the Soviet Union, numerous crystal-growing labs sprang up in Russia and are now producing lab created diamonds in good qualities and increasing sizes.

Most created diamonds are less than one carat in the rough. Since 30% to 70% of the rough material is removed during cutting, the majority of created diamonds end up as fractional carat faceted stones.

However, the growers have recently started producing rough stones in 3-carat sizes, and we therefore expect to see full-carat (and larger) cut diamonds on the market soon.

Nearly all created diamonds are an intense yellow-orange "fancy" color, due to nitrogen introduced during processing. They're very pretty, but the market for near colorless diamonds is much larger than for the fancies.

The crystal growers are working on this problem, and we can expect to see "I" color grades and better (all the way to "D" and "E") in the near future.

Clarity can be very good in synthetics, as high as GIA VS1.