CaratGübelin sprays synthetic DNA onto melee, and rough still defeats it
Provenance Proof, Gübelin's subsidiary, is marking polished melee from KGK Suisse with synthetic-DNA nanoparticles carrying mine, period and country. Rough defeats it: deep boiling strips the coating.
§1A tracer on the smallest stones.
Provenance Proof, the independent subsidiary of the Gübelin Gem Lab, has begun marking polished melee diamonds with synthetic-DNA nanoparticles, using goods supplied by KGK Suisse, the Swiss sales and service arm of the KGK Group. Daniel Nyfeler, Gübelin's managing director, presented the work at the 41st World Diamond Congress in Singapore in July, the same congress at which the Qatar Diamond Exchange signed the three Asian bourse agreements this paper reported yesterday. IDEX carried the account on 20 August. Each particle carries a unique synthetic DNA sequence encoding the mine of origin, the mining period and the country of manufacture, and the tracer is invisible to the eye and to an optical microscope, readable only on laboratory equipment.
The choice of melee is the whole engineering argument, and it is an admission as much as a design. Rough resists the technique for two specific reasons the company states: rough is cleaned in hydrofluoric acid or deep-boiled before cutting, which damages the protective material around the DNA, and cutting and polishing removes particles applied too early. So the current model applies the marker after the stone is finished, to goods that are sorted and processed in large parcels. That is precisely the category where per-stone certification has never been economic, which is why melee has been the industry's provenance blind spot for as long as it has had one.
§2Not the first outing.
It is not a first outing for the chemistry. The same technology is already in commercial use on selected gemstones from Gemfields, and here the two accounts this desk has diverge and are not reconciled: IDEX reports it as running on Gemfields emeralds, while Diamond City's Gujarati report of 24 August describes it as sapphires. Gemfields mines emeralds in Zambia and rubies in Mozambique and does not mine sapphire, which points to emeralds, but this desk cannot settle it from the sources it holds and prints the divergence rather than choosing. What both agree on is that the diamond application is the extension and the coloured stone is the proving ground.
A tracer only one laboratory can read moves the trust problem.
§3The figures nobody publishes.
The measure this needs, and does not yet have, is a cost per carat and a detection rate. Nothing published states what marking a parcel adds to its price, what proportion of marked stones still read after a full cutting and setting cycle, how the tracer survives a retail repolish, or who pays for the reading equipment at the far end of the chain. A physical tracer that only a Gübelin laboratory can read moves the trust problem rather than solving it: the buyer stops trusting the seller's paperwork and starts trusting one laboratory's instrument. That is an improvement, and it is not the same thing as an open standard.
Melee is where diamond provenance goes to die, and this is the first serious attempt to mark the stones that were always too small and too many to certify individually. But
the industry does not need another proprietary claim, it needs a checkable one, and until Provenance Proof publishes a survival rate, a cost per carat, and a route for a laboratory that is not Gübelin to read the marker, a jeweller cannot price the assurance and therefore cannot sell it. The right question to put to KGK Suisse is not whether the DNA is on the parcel. It is what the parcel now costs, and who can read it besides the company that sprayed it.
The trade, filed to your inbox before the New York open.
Prices, tenders and the one story that moved the industry overnight — read in ninety seconds.
Subscribe free →1,004.21 in Shanghai, and five bank counters spread 16.60 yuan apart
Shanghai back above 1,000 yuan, and five bank counters 16.60 apart.