By diamond testers I mean the ones from videos online that lights up all the way if a diamond is real. How do lab grown not also set those off?
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Lab grown diamonds are shown to be real when tested. The testers cannot tell the difference between a natural and lab grown diamond. The tester can detect fake diamonds, like those made of glass etc.
Lab-grown diamonds won’t show as fake in those detectors – but lab-grown diamonds aren’t how most people “fake” a diamond, as those are still pretty expensive to make (need to apply a lot of pressure and meet other conditions which costs money for equipment to the point that if you’re doing it just to have some jewelry it’s less hassle and money to just get the jewelry at marked-up prices), but other rocks like cubic zirconia and substances like glass are polished and made to look like diamonds by various means (adding reflective materials to the bottom and other little tricks to fool the naked eye) and put into jewelry in the place of real diamonds either by people making jewelry on the cheap or people trying to rip off uninformed buyers of expensive jewelry.
The issue with lab made diamonds is they are too perfect. The whole idea DaBeer spent their money on was telling you that a diamond with no impurities or flaws was worth a fortune. Now, lab made diamonds are worth a fortune and they’re mad that it hurts their market.
A diamond tester is testing whether carbon in the diamond form is there. There are a few ways this can be done. Testing the hardness, testing the refractive index by measuring how much light internally reflects etc.
Diamond testers can’t tell natural from synthetic, and they don’t try. Lab diamonds are not “fake”. What the diamond testers do is tell diamonds apart from things that are not diamonds, like cubic zirconia. Telling a lab diamond apart from a natural one requires a much more sophisticated approach than the testers can typically perform with current technology.
My memory is a bit out of date on this subject, but here goes…
One method of detecting lab diamonds is due to atomic inclusions (~~nitrogen~~, I think – don’t know what the element is). Both lab and natural diamonds have these. When the diamond is formed, it sometimes gets a ~~nitrogen~~ atom in one of the places a carbon atom is supposed to be. These inclusions can “hop around” in the crystal – meaning that they occasionally swap places with an adjacent carbon.
If the diamond is kept in a very hot environment for a very very long time (centuries or millenia, maybe) the inclusions have plenty of opportunity to hop all over. There’s a slight energy advantage to them clustering near each other, so in a natural diamond, you would find inclusions that are groups of ~~nitrogens~~. Potentially too small to see though, even with a microscope. But in a lab grown diamond, they’re mostly dispersed as single nitrogen atoms
These single-atom defects are called “color centers” because they do weird things with light. Like, when exposed to UV light, the color centers convert the invisible UV light to visible blue light. This doesn’t happen when there’s a cluster of odd atoms grouped together.
Color centers are also responsible for colored diamonds, I think. Like yellow diamonds probably have a bunch of color centers of some specific element.
So shine a UV light on the diamond. If it lights up bright blue, it’s lab grown. If not, natural.
Caveat: This info is years old, and it’s possible they’ve since come up with ways to decrease the color center formation in lab conditions. Also I don’t remember which element causes the UV-blue fluorescence.
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