Another lab grown diamond, this one designed by famed Apple designer Jony Ives and renowned industrial designer Marc Newson and created by Diamond Foundry. This required a new way of actually “building” a diamond. In their blog, Diamond Foundry outlines the process: ”

The team at Diamond Foundry was faced with a new challenge: to create a block of diamond with the dimensions necessary and to be polished into a ring of this size. No base plate of the required dimensions existed, and no existing earth extracted diamond would be sufficiently pure enough to allow growing a rough diamond of this size.  

To create this, it required coaxing the first ten atoms of a layer into believing that a certain rare metal is a diamond, these atoms would assemble into real diamond and allow the creation of diamond blocks of previously unprecedented size. This process was not previously considered possible. Through this process and Diamond Foundry’s plasma reactor technology, managed to create the first diamond blocks of the required size for this design project.”

I encourage you to read the rest of the article here; it’s fascinating. The piece was sold to benefit AIDS research, and with a matching donation from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, the final hammer price realized was USD$461,250.