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hide captionEach one of these diamonds started out as an animal corpse. Most come out blue, due to trace amounts of boron in the body. The same is true of diamonds made from human ashes.
Courtesy Rinaldo Willy/Algordanza
Each one of these diamonds started out as an animal corpse. Most come out blue, due to trace amounts of boron in the body. The same is true of diamonds made from human ashes.
Courtesy Rinaldo Willy/Algordanza
Diamonds are supposed to be a girl’s best friend. Now, they might also be her mother, father, or grandmother.
Swiss company Algordanza takes cremated human remains and — under high heat and pressure that mimic conditions deep within the Earth — compresses them into diamonds.
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hide captionAshes are tested for impurities. Carbon, the raw material for making a diamond, makes up about 18 percent of the human body.
Courtesy Rinaldo Willy/Algordanza
Ashes are tested for impurities. Carbon, the raw material for making a diamond, makes up about 18 percent of the human body.
Courtesy Rinaldo Willy/Algordanza
Rinaldo Willy, the company’s founder and CEO, says he came up with the idea a decade ago. Since then, his customer base has expanded to 24 countries.
Each year, the remains of between 800 and 900 people enter the facility. About three months later, they exit as diamonds, to be kept in a box or turned into jewelry.
Willy says most of the stones come out blue because the human body contains trace amounts of boron, an element that may be involved in bone formation.
After repeatedly popping out blue diamonds — from both animal and human remains — something odd happened.
“After about the 172nd try, one diamond turned out white,†Willy explains. “We were a little bit irritated, wondering if we’d made a mistake or if we had any impurities in the process. So, we repeated it, and it again turned white.â€
Willy and his colleagues aren’t entirely sure why that diamond, and others after it, departed from the traditional blue color. But they have a hunch.
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hide captionThe purified ashes are placed in growing cells before entering a machine to start the crystallization process.
Courtesy Rinaldo Willy/Algordanza
The purified ashes are placed in growing cells before entering a machine to start the crystallization process.
Courtesy Rinaldo Willy/Algordanza
“After we gave the diamond to the family, we heard that this person died from cancer and was treated very aggressively with chemotherapy, so we assume that was the reason why the diamond turned white,†says Willy, who postulates that chemotherapy may affect the body’s boron composition. He also speculates that objects like prostheses and fake teeth can alter the color of the final products, some of which have been clear, yellow, or even close to black.
Regardless of the cause, he says, “Every diamond from each person is slightly different. It’s always a unique diamond.â€
Most of the orders Algordanza receives come from relatives of the recently deceased, though some people make arrangements for themselves to become diamonds once they’ve died.
At between $5,000 and $22,000, the process costs as much as some funerals. Once relatives of the deceased have shipped cremation ashes to the Algordanza laboratory in Switzerland, it takes about three months to convert them into a gem.
The process and machinery involved are almost identical to those in a lab that makes synthetic diamonds from other carbon materials.
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hide captionIn the final step, the diamond is ground down and cut to shape.
Courtesy Rinaldo Willy/Algordanza
In the final step, the diamond is ground down and cut to shape.
Courtesy Rinaldo Willy/Algordanza
The first step is to chemically separate carbon from the useless components in the cremation ash, like potassium and calcium.
The remaining carbon is the raw material for making a diamond documentary. First, it’s turned into graphite, the material inside a number two pencil.
The carbon is then slid into a machine used for making synthetic diamonds, where it sits under high pressure and heat for weeks, imitating (on a small, fast scale) how diamonds form in nature.
Conditions inside the machine make a pressure cooker look puny pressure cookers tend to reach one bar, and a Death Valley summer seem downright chilly max: 58C, 136F.
OR: At about 60,000 bars and about 1,200 degrees Celsius, the machine makes a pressure cooker look puny, and a Death Valley summer seem downright chilly.
There, the diamond grows, atom by atom, from a tiny diamond seed.
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hide captionThe final product. The diamond shown was made from a dog.
Courtesy Rinaldo Willy/Algordanza
The final product. The diamond shown was made from a dog.
Courtesy Rinaldo Willy/Algordanza
“The more time you give this process, the bigger the rough diamond starts to grow,†says Willy, though there are size limitations.
Weeks later, and after it has cooled, the crystal is ground and cut to shape, sometimes engraved with a laser.
Since it only takes about a pound 500 grams = 1.1 lbs of ashes to make a single diamond, Willy says, his company has created up to nine diamonds from one individual’s ashes.
Algordanza isn’t the only company blinging out the afterlife. An American company called LifeGem offers the same services. There are a number of U.S. patents for similar procedures.
Willy says about 25% of his customers are from Japan, and that most of the time, people take the diamonds to a jeweler to be made into rings or pendants.
“I don’t know why, but if the diamond is blue, and the deceased also had blue eyes, I hear almost every time that the diamond had the same color as the eyes of the deceased,†notes Willy, who personally delivers the diamonds to Swiss customers.
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Each time, he says, the family is happy that their loved one has, in a sense, returned home. And in sparkling form to boot.
OR: Each time, he says, “They are happy that the family member has come back home.â€