This is not an advertising ploy - making diamonds out of human hair is a real commercial practice, which is in considerable demand!
The company from Spanish Seville, IrisGem, takes clients’ hair to turn them into diamonds afterwards cut by professionals in Antwerp. This expensive service has already seduced a significant number of customers, according to Courrier International, a French weekly.
To advertise its services this little-known Spanish company uses the name of the Brazilian football player "of all time," Edson Arantes do Nascimento, better known as Pele.
He personally sent a strand of his graying hair to the chemists in Seville and asked to create a diamond for his beloved mother.
IrisGem experts put the hair of their clients into high-temperature furnaces to extract carbon from keratin, which is a 90% component of human hair.
The carbon obtained in this way is then loaded into a special machine for growing diamonds with a chamber where internal temperature reaches 1,500°C and pressure is about 45,000 times greater than the atmospheric pressure.
After several weeks the carbon is crystallized.
Then, synthetic diamonds of amber, yellow, green, blue or white colors are sent to Antwerp, the world’s diamond capital, where they are cut to some shape in accordance with the wishes expressed by the company’s clients. This process takes three to four months.
"To create a rough diamond it is sufficient to have about one gram of hair from which we get about 400 milligrams of carbon", - says Jordi Raventos, CEO of IrisGem. He claims that his company has virtually unlimited creative possibilities, but does not disclose the cost of services to produce a synthetic diamond.
So far IrisGem specialized in the so-called "in-memory-of diamonds" created from the hair of the deceased. This service is popular mainly in Brazil, from where the company sometimes receives quite extravagant requests: for instance, to make diamonds out of the wool of dogs, cats and even monkeys.
IrisGem’s current plans are to expand its business in Europe.
"Some Spanish football teams such as Seville and Real expressed interest in creating diamonds from the hair of their players," says IrisGem, which offers a service giving an opportunity to make family diamonds, for example, from the hair of children and grandchildren.
In 2009, Diamants Augenstern Canada based in Quebec created a yellow diamond 0.45 carats in size and worth $8,600 from the hair of Victoria Lopyreva, the Miss Russia 2005.
But the cost of IrisGem services can be found out only if you address the company personally: there are no prices displayed on its web site.
Alex Shishlo, Editor in Chief of the European Bureau, Rough&Polished
