Look at the Stones on You!
Examining the appeal of moissanite as an alternative to diamonds
Photo of synthetic moissanite gemstone, a silicon carbide mineral. Image credit: James St. John (jsjgeology) via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
by Clare Lochary
December 13, 2024
The Brilliant Earth showroom is discreetly tucked away in Baltimore’s tony Harbor East neighborhood, so discreetly that it takes me five tries to find it. After I ride an elevator to the second floor of a chic, renovated factory and am buzzed through security doors, my consultant, Virgil — sporting a goatee, a fashionable royal blue suit, and no jewelry at all, not even his wedding ring — whisks me into a private viewing salon. We sit down at a round table.
Treasures of the Heart advertisement c. 1947. An example of De Beers "A diamond is forever" ad campaign illustrated with artist Pierre Ino's painting "Love Scene." Image credit: NW Ayer & Sons, incorporated Advertising Agency Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, ID: AC0059-0000238
Between us, there is a white plastic tray with small, grooved channels. Five gemstones sit in the grooves. Three are diamonds; two are moissanites. At first glance, to my untrained eye, they are all shiny, clear stones, the kind you expect to see in a solitaire engagement ring. But chemically and symbolically, diamonds and moissanites are different.
Diamonds are solid carbon, formed billions of years ago by the heat and pressure of the Earth’s crust. Mined and treasured by cultures across the world for millennia, they are an enduring symbol of wealth and purity and, more recently, of romantic love. (The legendary deBeers “A Diamond is Forever” advertising campaign launched in 1947, which successfully convinced prosperous post-WWII couples that diamond engagement rings were an affordable and almost mandatory luxury.)
Conversely, moissanites are relative newcomers to the fine jewelry scene. While they look remarkably like diamonds, moissanite is composed of silicon carbide, a mineral first observed in nature by French chemist Henri Moissan. Moissan initially rose to (scientific) fame in 1886 for isolating fluorine. That discovery alone would have made him one of the most prominent scientists of his generation, but his career had an unlikely second chapter.
During an 1893 field expedition to Arizona, Moissan noticed tiny, sparkling minerals embedded in the stone near Canyon Diablo. He thought they might be diamonds, but they turned out to be deposits of silicon carbide, a compound imported to Earth 50,000 years prior by a meteorite that smashed into the desert and created the now aptly named Meteor Crater.
A photo of Meteor Crater, Arizona. The crater was created by the Canyon Diablo meteorite approximately 50,000 years ago. Image credit: Photo by Emma Buchman via Pexels
The discovery and geological investigation of the Canyon Diablo meteorite materials made Moissan curious about the possibility of synthesizing diamonds. He dedicated the rest of his career to the endeavor.
The endeavor was technically a flop; Moissan never conclusively DIY’ed diamonds. (He and some lab assistants claimed they did, but no one could replicate their experiments. It wasn’t until 1954 that the General Electric Company produced the first synthetic diamonds in a laboratory setting. Today, lab diamonds make up about 20% of the global market.) But in one of science’s happy accidents, Moissan’s attempts to make diamonds led to a more important scientific discovery: the electric arc furnace.
To generate the heat and pressure needed to transform carbon into diamonds, Moissan built a device that connected two blocks of hollowed-out limestone with an electrical current. Powered by steam, the furnace first glowed purple and then green, and spit out smoke and fire. But it could reach 3000 degrees Celsius, an astonishing level of heat at that point in history. This innovation created an entirely new field of high-temperature chemistry and made the eventual manufacture of super-hard substances like tungsten possible.
For the invention of the electric arc furnace and the isolation of fluorine, Moissan won the 1906 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Two months later, he died of appendicitis at 54. His professional exposure to volatile chemicals likely weakened his immune system, making him more susceptible to infection.
Nearly 90 years after Moissan’s death, researchers in the Research Triangle of North Carolina perfected (and patented) a process for manufacturing large amounts of silicon carbide, which until then had only been found in tiny quantities in nature, like the sparkling traces Moissan saw in Arizona. Besides being useful for a variety of industrial purposes (like diamonds, silicon carbide is incredibly hard and durable), the product was beautiful. The researchers named it moissanite in honor of the late French chemist. Moissanite is now found in body armor, sandpaper, LED bulbs, spacecraft, and, of course, jewelry.
Thus, in a white plastic tray with small, grooved channels, two moissanites lay before me, glittering as much as any diamond and daring me to notice the difference.
It takes a while, but eventually, I do.
I see that the diamonds are slightly darker than the moissanites. All three diamonds are high quality; one is even, to use gemology lingo, internally flawless. The stones are not cloudy or chipped. But they possess a grayness that the moissanites lack.
Virgil explains that even the clearest diamonds, including lab-made ones, have microscopic inclusions. While invisible to the naked eye, inclusions still cast shadows that interact with any light that passes through the stone. Those shadows are the greyness that I see. They add a warm note of contrast to the icy gem, one that highlights how perfect everything else is.
In comparison, moissanite never has inclusions. Light glides through it untouched by shadows, creating a sparkling brilliance that many liken to fireworks or confetti. This extreme shimmer is a lure for some buyers, and off-putting to others. There can be an uncanny valley quality to moissanites, a sense that they are too perfect to be real, like AI-generated art or the teeth of a movie star.
Perhaps most devastatingly, the glitter of moissanites too closely resembles that of cubic zirconia (CZ). CZ is a diamond simulant found in nature, but it has been mass-produced since 1972. While newly-made CZs resemble diamonds quite closely, they are much softer and less dense; any jewelry professional and even most amateurs would notice the relative lightness of a CZ. Additionally, while CZs are much cheaper than diamonds, they will inevitably tarnish and become cloudy. Their sparkle has a shelf life. Diamonds and moissanites never lose their luster.
As with most things aesthetic, it simply comes down to personal taste. If moissanites are fireworks, diamonds are candlelight. If moissanites are glossy silk, diamonds are soft velvet. If moissanites are lemon, diamonds are butter. At least that’s what I think after 20 minutes of staring at these five stones in a room built and lit for this exact purpose with the assistance of an expert.
Virgil, a wonderfully diplomatic salesman, can see the appeal of both stones. The product of a union household, he has a strong sense of social justice and an interest in working conditions. Within this framework, moissanite is unquestionably better, if better means more environmentally sustainable and safer for the laborers involved. It’s also more affordable, particularly for the young, engaged couples that make up 90% of Virgil’s business. (Of the five stones I saw, two were quite close in size and clarity. The moissanite cost $990. The diamond cost $2,170.)
Still, he understands the allure of diamonds, an affinity that’s tied to his sense of wonder about the natural world.
“I’ve been an activist since I was 13. But on the other hand, I had a fossil collection,” Virgil says. “I understand the appeal of something one billion years old.”
If you’re looking for it, you can find appropriate symbolism in either gemstone.
Diamonds are as ancient as the Earth. The natural ones have been painstakingly extracted from deep underground, then cut and polished into something exquisite. They are both durable and beautiful, just as familial and romantic love should be. Lab-grown diamonds neatly combine tradition and innovation, a time-honored aesthetic born of modern manufacturing methods.
Moissanite fell out of the sky. The celestial origin story has a certain futuristic appeal for some buyers, even though every single moissanite on the market is man-made. If diamonds are inextricably linked to humankind’s messy, bloody, colonial past, moissanites symbolize its shining, equitable, utopian future. Who needs inclusions — who needs any kind of darkness, physical or ethical — when you have peace of mind and the largest, sparkliest rock that your money can buy?
Diamond adherents posit that moissanites are mere imitators, pretenders to the throne. Moissanite partisans claim that their gem has surpassed the original.
If I saw any one of Virgil’s five stones set in a ring on the hand of a newly affianced person, I’d simply say, “Congratulations! I’m so happy for you.”
Clare Lochary
Clare Lochary is a writer and editor, who lives in Baltimore, Maryland. She has a bachelor’s degree in English from Georgetown University and is currently a student in the Johns Hopkins University M.A. in Science Writing program.
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