The video explores the evolving world of fine jewelry, highlighting how designers like Annabella Chan are pioneering the use of laboratory-grown gemstones as a sustainable and ethical alternative to traditional mining practices. The discussion revolves around how lab-grown diamonds and gemstones help eliminate environmental damage and unethical labor practices associated with traditional mining. These creations utilize renewable resources, leading to innovative designs and concepts in the jewelry industry.

The narrative emphasizes the importance of creativity in design, where the designer's vision is as crucial as the materials used. Annabella Chan's work is showcased, illustrating her journey from traditional gemstone training to exploring lab-grown alternatives. Her designs have been worn by celebrities, proving the acceptance and appeal of sustainably sourced jewelry in high fashion.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. endearingly [ɪnˈdɪrɪŋli] - (adverb) - In an adorable or charming manner. - Synonyms: (charmingly, appealingly, lovingly)

And I find that endearingly romantic.

2. disruption [dɪsˈrʌpʃən] - (noun) - A disturbance or problems which interrupt an event, activity, or process. - Synonyms: (disturbance, interruption, disorder)

A lot of jewelry embodies a lot of human suffering, whether that is the suffering of minors, whether it's the environmental disruption.

3. trajectory [trəˈdʒɛktəri] - (noun) - The path followed by a projectile flying or an object moving under the action of given forces. - Synonyms: (course, path, route)

And I think what really sort of changed my trajectory was when I went on my honeymoon to Sri Lanka.

4. ingenuity [ˌɪndʒəˈnjuːəti] - (noun) - The quality of being clever, original, and inventive. - Synonyms: (creativity, inventiveness, resourcefulness)

You can use more sort of ingenuity.

5. captivate [ˈkæptɪˌveɪt] - (verb) - To attract and hold the interest and attention of; charm. - Synonyms: (enchant, fascinate, enthrall)

And a lot of the times when I design, I'm merely trying to capture that moment of magic I see in nature, transforming that into something that can be worn.

6. skeptics [ˈskɛptɪks] - (noun) - People inclined to question or doubt accepted opinions. - Synonyms: (doubters, cynics, unbelievers)

To doubters, I would say, come back in 20 years.

7. sustainable [səˈsteɪnəbl] - (adjective) - Able to be maintained at a certain rate or level; conserving an ecological balance by avoiding depletion of natural resources. - Synonyms: (environmentally friendly, green, renewable)

I think the future of fine jewelry really is about sustainable and ethical and mindful operations in every sense.

8. ethical [ˈɛθɪkəl] - (adjective) - Relating to moral principles or the branch of knowledge dealing with these. - Synonyms: (moral, principled, righteous)

And if that includes being concerned about the materials, that things are made, not just that they be expensive or rare, but that they be ethically sourced, you're going to have to take that into consideration

9. prestige [prɛˈstiːʒ] - (noun) - Widespread respect and admiration felt for someone or something on the basis of a perception of their achievements or quality. - Synonyms: (status, honor, esteem)

The fine jewelry industry has always been about prestige.

10. revolutionize [ˌrɛvəˈluːʃənaɪz] - (verb) - To change something radically or fundamentally. - Synonyms: (transform, overhaul, alter)

It became affordable because of this technological breakthrough.

Why Lab-Grown Gems Are Becoming The Real Thing

I think jewelry is the most magical thing you can wear for something so small that can fit in the palm of your hand. It can hold a world of memories and emotions. It has the ability to reach into the past as well as reach into the future. And I find that endearingly romantic. A lot of jewelry embodies a lot of human suffering, whether that is the suffering of minors, whether it's the environmental disruption. They produce something very beautiful, but it often comes at a kind of nasty cost. The more people get concerned about that, the more they are open to alternatives.

In this place, we mine the sky to get the gases we need to make diamonds. Our entire ingredient list is the wind, the sun, the rain, and atmospheric carbon. That's it. No more. Still so much to explore in the world of science and also material innovation and how to turn something negative and wasteful into the things that we want. Annabella Chan is telling a new 21st century romantic story about jewelry, which is that the designer's eye is just as important as the materials they're made from. I've made pieces from everyone from Beyonce to Rihanna to Taylor Swift, Julia Roberts, Lupita Nyong'o, from the Oscars to the Grammys.

When I told people I wanted to create fine and high jewelry using laboratory grown gemstones, people thought I was crazy. There are several pieces from my old collection that I treasure. One of them is this ring from the late Andrew Grimmer. This was one of his sort of architectural inspired rings that he designed in the seventies. He is known as the father of contemporary jewelry design. He famously said that a 50 carat topaz can become a work of art that can be worn and enjoyed. Yet a 60 karat diamond needs to be locked up in a vault. Traditionally, high fine jewelry is notoriously exclusive. I wanted it to be more accessible because it is the ultimate craftsmanship. It's the ultimate sort of handcrafted treasure that shouldn't just be accessible by so few people in the world.

The most beautiful colors and geometries and textures come from nature. And a lot of the times when I design, I'm merely trying to capture that moment of magic I see in nature, transforming that into something that can be worn. I would always start by having a sketchbook and my drawing easel and going to draw subjects that interest me, just seeing something ordinary as something extraordinary. The two pieces we are making are a pair of brooches inspired by a blade of grass with morning dew drops sort of running through the veins. I will then start to sketch on each piece of jewelry in pencil. And then from those initial sketches, there could be hundreds of them. I will then take sort of my favourite ones and then transition them into paints, which is known as jewelry, jewelry renderings that will essentially be like a map for the craftsmen to work with.

I was trained very traditionally at art college as a fine jewelry designer, working with sort of mind gemstones. And I think what really sort of changed my trajectory was when I went on my honeymoon to Sri Lanka. I knew that Sri Lanka was famous for its color stones, and so I made few visits to latisional mines in the area. These are some of the most precious commodities in the world, and yet the people who mined these stones live some of the harshest conditions in the world. It just didn't make any sense. And that's when I began my research into laboratory grown gemstones, gemstones cultivated in a science lab rather than mine from the ground.

So I'm sat here in the Cotswolds in our lab, the place where we created the process to make these diamonds from the sky. The most permanent form of carbon that we know of is a diamond. We set out to do this in order to lock carbon up into a permanent form. It's like a carbon capture and store storage project. What we learned very quickly was that there's not a lot of carbon in a diamond, actually maybe 4 grams in a one carat stone. But when we looked at the diamond mining industry, we found that to make that same one carat stone requires the digging of 1100 tonnes of rock and the exposure of 30 tonnes of toxic metal to the environment, the consumption of 5000 litres of water and the production of half a ton of greenhouse gas.

So de beers have made famous this slogan, diamonds are forever. What they don't tell you is that the impacts of diamond mining are forever. So the holes in the big diamond mines in Russia, for example, are so big, you can see them from orbit. And so the avoided carbon that we are achieving through making diamonds from the sky is way bigger than the carbon that we're actually pulling from the sky and locking up. And what we make are diamonds. They're chemically, molecularly identical to diamonds that are dug out of the earth. Lab grown diamonds as a thing, have been around for decades, but they were small and they were used for industrial diamonds. Gem type diamonds have begun to be a major industry, more or less the last ten years.

The knowledge that they exist is becoming greater. But people still have confusion, because there have been, for a long, long time, imitation diamonds of cubic zirconia, things that look like diamonds but are not diamonds a lab grown diamond, it's not an imitation. It's not like vegan meat or something. It is the same thing made in a different way. So the magic starts where we first pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere with a machine from Switzerland. We then split rainwater into hydrogen and oxygen. And we feed a combination of hydrogen and carbon dioxide to our bugs. These are ancient bacteria that take these two ingredients and stitch them together into methane. And then we feed the methane, along with some other gases, into our diamond ovens.

So in our diamond oven, we might lay out 16 diamond seeds in a square pattern. And they live in this ball of plasma, where we feed it with gas. It runs at about 1000 degrees centigrade, so it's very hot. But within this plasma ball, we can turn our gases into a crystalline structure that is a diamond. And at the end of two weeks, we pull out a square like this. It's like a window with a black edge. And we chop this block up into 16 individual stones with our laser. And then we trim each one of those to remove the black growth from around the edges. And then we have what we call ruffs, little squares or cubes of material that looks a little translucent.

And we send it away, and it gets cut and polished into the shape that we all traditionally associate with a diamond. And is this the biggest one that you. Any given batch will come out with a different color or clarity, but we are achieving quality in the top 1% of all diamonds. We know this. We send them away for assessment in the same way that diamonds ripped out of the earth are sent for assessment. And we get back the same basic metrics. Although many laboratories do work with renewable energy, the source of the original elements often have to be taken from existing minerals.

And I think the excitement with what sky diamond is doing is that it actually takes something that we don't want, something that is a waste, and turn that into something that is treasured at retail mined diamonds, traditional diamonds cost two or three times more than lab grown diamonds. And I think it's kind of an old fashioned idea that luxury requires the most expensive materials. You can also use more unique designs. You can use more sort of ingenuity. Many potential sources of value can make something luxurious. I think for a younger generation, the idea that you can have this scientific breakthrough to create this special stone has a kind of romance to it, just as the old diamond is forever slogan had a different kind of romance.

When working with recycled gold, you can purchase some palettes of gold that actually come from different sources. Whether it's from tech industries, extracted from discarded electronics like computer chips and mobile phones, and also from repurposing antique jewelry. So all of this metal is then remelted together and refined into the palettes that we are using today. The process of creating this piece involves, first, a wax model of the blade of grass. So, like carving of a miniature sculpture from the wax model, it is then lost wax casted into gold.

One of the oldest technique within fine jewelry. So how it works is by setting that wax piece inside a plaster cast and then melting gold pellets and pouring the metal into the plaster cast. It will then fill the void where the wax was. And so you lose the piece of wax. Hence the term lost wax casting. And once the metal is cooled down, when you open up your cast, you will get the piece that resembles exactly your original wax, but in solid gold. And from that, you will then start working on finishing the piece of by filing and assembling. And within the gold piece, we will then work on the setting of each gemstone.

A piece of jewelry finally come to life in those final stages of polishing it, because that's when you see the transformation of a piece that is maybe quite dirty and quite gritty, and that final polish gives it that shine. The fine jewelry industry has always been about prestige. Whether it's showing off your wealth or showing off your power. What conveys prestige changes over time. And if that includes being concerned about the materials, that things are made, not just that they be expensive or rare, but that they be ethically sourced, you're going to have to take that into consideration. And that opens the way for lab grown gems, among other things. To doubters, I would say, come back in 20 years. Come back in 20 years and see where we are. I suspect that we will no longer even be talking about this distinction. There will just be diamonds.

Lady Gaga wore a pair of alfeather earrings with laboratory grown tourmalines, and that was, for me, the first time, sort of seeing it out on the red carpet. It always blows my mind when a celebrity wears one of our pieces. I think in the beginning, people choose it predominantly for the design and for its aesthetics. But when they find out more about the sustainability and the ethical sort of ethos behind what we do and the reasoning and why we use certain materials, they become much more supportive.

The other pair of the brooch features tahitian pearls with anodized aluminium. So pearls used to be the most precious gems, the gems that represented wealth, that represented power. You see a lot of them in renaissance art showing how rich the person wearing them is. And the reason the pearls were so valuable is that they are extremely in nature. But in the late 19th century, someone figured out that you could culture pearls so that you could have a reliable supply of pearls.

It became affordable because of this technological breakthrough. But if you owned an old string of pearls that was worth the price of a building in Manhattan, which is a real example, suddenly that string of pearls was worth a lot less. And that is the kind of dynamic that lab grown diamonds could present for the diamond industry. For this particular piece, I've chosen to use pearls from Kimoka pearls. I'm always fascinated by the incredible colors they are able to achieve. Where you get these pistachio hues to golden, to silvery gray, to midnight, so blue. I came across Kimoka pearls around two, three years ago.

What really drew me to them was the way they farmed their pearls is a perfect example of how people can work with nature in harmony to actually improve the environment around them. So, traditionally, when it comes to pearl farming, water jets are used to clean the oysters. And by using water jets, it changes the current surrounding the oysters. It can damage the coral reefs and change the ph level of the water and actually disrupts the whole ecosystems. Kamoka pearls utilizes exotic fishes to clean their oysters. Not only have they been able to regenerate the reef surrounding their island, they've also been able to we generate some endangered species in the ecosystems, which is phenomenal.

Making jewelry is a messy process, and I always say it is like beauty emerges from organized chaos. The process to make this piece piece involves hand shaping aluminium metal, piercing it out of the sheets using a piercing saw. And it's very much guided by subtle changes of directions to pierce the piece out into the form and then moulding it into a blade of grass. Chasing is setting a piece of so sheet metal that is essentially flat into a platform where you shape the metal by knocking and tapping on the hammer. So every vein and every grain has been worked on individually and organically. Aluminium is so much lighter than gold or platinum or silver, so I'm able to work with much bolder geometry.

And at the same time, it is about creating a new color palette that mimics nature. Because aluminium can be colored in a myriad of different ways compared to traditional precious metals. You run an electric current into a bath, where the metal is then submerged into different tanks and beakers that allows the color to be imbued into the aluminium. I've chosen a specific type of pearl that reflects the colors in the leaves and to set the pearl into aluminium. We then create a cup with a pin in the center, which is known as the setting. The pearl is then drilled, and then to secure it in place, we used a resin.

I see this pair of brooches being equally shared between sort of partners and family members, equally worn by men and women at the same time. They are inspired by the same elements, presented in a different language, yet they complement each other in the same way. I think the future of fine jewelry really is about sustainable and ethical and mindful operations in every sense. And it's being able to learn from the past, to offer a different perspective in the present, always in mind for a better future. I suppose this is one of my favorite quotes by Maya Angelou. Do the best you can until you know better. And when you know better, do better.

Innovation, Sustainable Luxury, Lab-Grown Gems, Science, Technology, Entrepreneurship, Bloomberg Originals