Skip to content

About Our Diamonds

Homer - About Our Diamonds 001

Everything you will ever touch is made of atoms. A knife’s edge, a mirror’s glass, a lover’s shoulder—all atoms. The source of the atoms is not a matter of scientific debate, though it sounds almost too magical to be believed: nearly everything that we are came from stars.

Of course, just because something is true does not mean it is not astonishing, improbable, or even inconceivable. A diamond is made up of just one kind of atom, many times over: carbon. Its complete chemical formula is exquisitely simple: C. Yet, as a matter of chemical fact, the same carbon atoms, differently arranged, yield not a sparkling diamond, but gray pencil lead. The diamond is in the details.

What makes a diamond a diamond: what it is, or how it’s procured?

As a substance, diamond is a marvel of the universe. Light travels through it at less than half the speed at which the same light passes through air. The resulting faceted refraction reveals the diamond’s signature “fire” —brilliant, fleeting colors that flash and wink from different angles. It is such an efficient conductor of heat that a handheld sliver of diamond cuts easily through a block of ice. It cannot be scratched, except by another diamond. Diamonds form when carbon atoms are subjected to tremendous heat and pressure.

The impressive thing is not that they can be made underground. Underground is, after all, the stage for many astonishing phenomena,
like undersea volcanoes that expel glowing magma into the deep ocean, and car-sized milky white selenite crystals that jut out of subterranean caves. The truly remarkable feat is that, after only a few decades of research (a fraction of a blink on the geologic time scale), human beings have discovered how to recreate the natural process that forms diamonds, at will.

Homer - About Our Diamonds 002

Homer’s diamonds are formed under the supervision of a team of materials engineers in the United States.  At our factory, it takes a diamond to make a diamond: each diamond enters existence as a 1/400th carat natural diamond seed. Over the course of four weeks—the same amount of time needed to form a diamond within the earth’s mantle—machinery precision-deposits layers of carbon over the diamond seed, and subjects it to the tremendous pressure and white hot temperatures necessary to form the stones the old fashioned way. The result is the real thing. Not a replica of a diamond, or a close approximation, or a sparkly stone of similar substance. Each diamond is cut, polished, and inspected to meet Homer’s exacting standards before being independently graded by the International Gem Institute.

The final product is pure diamond—down to the atoms.
Homer - About Our Diamonds 003