Print

Mail

wiki links

The jewel from outer space

By Catherine Shu
STAFF REPORTER
Wednesday, Sep 17, 2008, Page 13

VIEW THIS PAGE

Moissanite crashed into earth on a meteorite 50,000 years ago, is grown in a laboratory using state-of-the-art methods and has a name that sounds like something out of Star Trek.

Crystal-clear, durable and very, very sparkly, the synthetic version of moissanite, which occurs very rarely in nature, has been generating buzz as a high-tech, affordable diamond alternative. Wedding Web site TheKnot.com praises the jewel as an eco-friendly substitute for mined gemstones in engagement rings, while forward-thinking couples on forums like Indiebride.com and Offbeatbride.com who are wary of conflict diamonds or just want something a little less traditional are also turning to the laboratory-grown gem.

And over the past four years, Taiwanese consumers in particular have begun developing a taste for the jewel, thanks to the marketing efforts of Joalan Designs (喬愛倫珠寶), one of the first companies to sell moissanite jewelry and the exclusive distributor of the gem in this country.

Based in the US, Joalan was founded in 1994 by Taiwanese-American entrepreneur and jewelry designer Josephine Lee (李以莊). Joalan expanded to Taiwan in 2004; since then, the company has opened stores in Taipei and Kaohsiung and made its jewelry available at retailers throughout the island. Joalan is also sold in Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore, but Taiwan remains the company’s top Asian market.

“In Taiwan, consumers are more open-minded,” says Lee, “They like new ideas and moissanite’s backstory appeals to them.”

Moissanite’s history, which Joalan pitches as “a classic tale of beauty and brains,” started in 1893 when Henri Moissan, a French chemist and Nobel Prize winner, stumbled upon the mineral while examining samples from Meteor Crater near Arizona’s Canyon Diablo. Known scientifically as silicon carbide, the rarity of the mineral in nature meant that moissanite jewelry did not become more than just a glimmer of an idea until a way to grow large silicon carbide crystals was first discovered in the 1980s by Cree, Inc, a US semiconductor manufacturer.

Lee, in turn, first discovered the stone when a close friend of hers, a diamond dealer, pitched moissanite as a business idea.

“He said that it was his gut feeling that this jewel was going to be the ‘jewel of tomorrow,’” says Lee, who at the time was running the computer hardware business she had founded in the early 1980s after immigrating to southern California. Lee’s entrepreneurial instincts sensed a new market niche, and she launched Joalan to design and sell jewelry featuring moissanite and other lab-grown gems.

Synthetic moissanite was initially manufactured primarily for industrial and scientific use, where the mineral’s hardness makes it a cost-effective replacement for diamonds. Not knowing how consumers would respond to moissanite as a jewel, Lee started with small trunk shows, presenting just 12 to 15 jewelry pieces at a time. Buoyed by positive responses, Lee began to focus on expanding her fledging company through the US and overseas to Europe, Asia and Australia.

Since the beginning, Joalan has worked closely with Charles & Colvard, the sole source of lab-created moissanite. The company credits her with helping to increase consumer awareness of the new jewel in the US, where Lee makes regular appearances on the Home Shopping Network, and abroad.

“Josephine Lee is a moissanite celebrity in her own right. She continues to help moissanite’s awareness grow by gracing the airwaves of American TV shopping channels, just as she does abroad,” said Dennis Reed, president and chief marketing officer of Charles & Colvard, in an e-mail.

In the beginning, Lee turned away from creating simple solitaires and other designs traditionally associated with diamond jewelry and focused instead on more elaborate, dramatic styles with larger stones.

“Because of the pricing and beauty of moissanite, I had no limits,” says Lee, adding, “I don’t think it is that people don’t like big. I think it is that they can’t afford big.”

Eventually, Lee added classic solitaire rings and necklaces to the collection, to appease Asian tastes for simpler jewelry and because many customers said they were choosing moissanite for their engagement and wedding rings.

“We never promoted moissanite as bridal jewelry, because we felt that was a diamond market, and we wanted to differentiate ourselves,” says Lee. She found out, however, that some couples see moissanite as a way to save money without sacrificing on bling or quality. While synthetic moissanite may not have the prestige or financial heft of a diamond, it is not exactly costume jewelry either. At about NT$38,000 for a white-gold Joalan solitaire ring with a moissanite stone equivalent in size to a one-carat diamond, it is less pricey compared to many gems, but customers will hardly be running into the jewel at a night market stall any time soon.

Both Joalan and Charles & Colvard’s marketing strategies highlight moissanite’s unique properties instead of promoting it as a diamond substitute, but comparisons are inevitable because the two jewels resemble one another on first glance.

When moissanite first appeared on the market, many gem dealers were concerned that unscrupulous sellers might try to pass off the new jewel as a diamond to unsuspecting customers, says Jim Shigley, a Gemological Institute of America (GIA) Distinguished Research Fellow.

Part of the concern stemmed from the fact that moissanite and diamonds test the same when using a thermal conductivity tester. “When it is tested in this way, moissanite’s heat conduction is much like a diamond and unfortunately there were a couple instances of moissanite being incorrectly sold as a diamond,” says Shigley. Newer testers that measure electrical conductivity instead can distinguish between the two stones.

Shigley, however, says that the difference between moissanite and diamonds can be spotted with the naked eye. Unlike a diamond, which is composed of all carbon atoms, moissanite is silicon carbide, or silicon and carbon atoms bonded together. Because its crystal structure is different, light passes through moissanite in a different way than through a diamond, creating a distinctive visual effect called “double-refraction” in which the back facets of moissanite appear to be doubled when viewed from top down. The glittering bouquet of colors that results separates moissanite from diamonds and diamond substitutes like cubic zirconia, and is one of the stone’s main selling points.

Lee says that one of the reasons she expanded to Taiwan was because Charles & Colvard suggested Joalan’s presence might ward off scammers. “We wanted to clean up the market and really educate people about what moissanite is,” she says.

Some consumers, especially connoisseurs of natural gemstones, may continue to be wary of laboratory-grown jewels, but moissanite’s high-tech backstory and extra-terrestrial origin is exactly what draws many people to it, says Lee. Pictures of the meteor crater in Arizona where Moissan first discovered the mineral are displayed prominently in Joalan’s flagship store near Zhongxiao East Road and are used as part of the sales staff’s pitch to new customers.

“What I like to say about moissanite is that it has a meteorite’s DNA,” says Lee.

VIEW THIS PAGE

This story has been viewed 1432 times.