By Virginia Halevi

 

For most people, Sundance is synonymous with a film festival or a chance to spot the town's famous 'kid' (AKA the blonde man himself, Robert Redford) swooshing down the ski slopes. Recently another Sundance kid (this one has yet to celebrate it's first birthday) has been on a mini-promotional tour. Throngs of eager fans-in-the-making in New York, Antwerp and Ramat Gan greeted them on their whistle-stop trip.

 

It's not due to their movie-making skills or skiing capabilities, it's more due to what they can do to a diamond in just 15 minutes.  For just a couple hundred bucks, they can turn a Type IIa brown diamond to a colorless or near-colorless diamond in the time it takes to ski a piste in their hometown. IDEX Online caught up with them on the last leg of their tour, the Israel Diamond Exchange in Ramat Gan.

Sundance Diamonds is a division of U.S. Synthetic (USS), which in 1978 began producing synthetic diamond powder using HPHT equipment. Last June, Sundance announced that it was offering the HPHT process to the diamond industry.

 

“We can permanently change brown and cape diamonds to fancy colors, including yellow, orange and green and Type II diamonds from unmarketable colors to colorless or near-colorless,” boasts Rob Galloway, the affable manager of Sundance Diamonds.

 

How it works is that a dealer (they must be a registered member of a Diamond Exchange) submits a stone. The company then carries out preliminary analysis and color change assessment to determine whether the stone is suitable for HPHT treatment.

 

 As opposed to other companies that undertake HPHT treatment on stones, Sundance will happily explain exactly how the treatment works. "Come visit us," they urge. But, for most, they didn't really want to know how the treatment worked, they just wanted to know if they had stones that could be successfully HPHT'd.

 

Over in their headquarters in Utah, a stone, which has proved suitable for the process, is first blocked or finished to remove feathers that reach the surface or other imperfections. Then, the diamond is placed in a black graphite cube, which is heated up to some 14,000 amps. The cube then enters a press and is positioned on one of six anvils.

 

The anvils close applying an astounding 1,000,000 pounds of pressure per square inch on the cube. By the time it takes to polish the skis outside, the color of diamond has changed.

 

Proving their point a photo appeared on the overhead projector showing a stone of an original 2.90 cts, O, VVSI, that after being Sundanced became a 2.72 cts, F, VVSI. As could be imagined, this excited many in the audience who saw the dollar signs flashing.

 

According to Jim Littman of Sundance Diamonds, all their customers must sign a disclosure agreement, stating that each and every Sundance HPHT diamond will be sold with full disclosure and, as Galloway emphasized, "we try to monitor our customers sales strategy and see that they disclose to their end-consumers that they deal with HPHT treated diamonds”.

 

But, they do not laser-inscribe diamonds that they have HPHT processed as undergoing this treatment. On the other, hand they do refuse to HPHT diamonds if they suspect that the company doesn't really have an 'HPHT strategy'. "If a retailer or dealer wants a single stone treated, or haven't got an HPHT strategy then we will, and have, refuse to take the stone," Galloway continued. "For most people, embarking on the HPHT wagon is too much of a distraction from their core business. There have been cases when we've counseled people against the HPHT route. They first need a good and stable source of suitable diamonds and truly have a sound HPHT strategy”.

 

All this said, at the end of the thirty-minute presentation, dealers scrambled across the presentation room and clamored at Galloway and Littman asking how long the entire process took - from submission of the stone to its return to the office. 'Could you come to my office and see how much of my inventory is suitable for HPHT?' was a question repeated over and over again.

 

Certainly many of these eager would-be HPHT dealers had a very shaky, at best, knowledge or strategy of HPHTing. Over the past twelve months, the company has met and worked with most of the gem labs and industry organizations assisting with detection and research into HPHT.

 

While Sundance most assuredly is committed to full disclosure, without laser-inscription on all the stones they process, they have very little control regarding the guarantee that their clients will sell the stone with full disclosure.