Actress Charmaine Sheh examines a 297-carat rough diamond at last month’s The Forever Gifts workshop, hosted by A Diamond Is Forever and Lane Crawford in Hong Kong. Photo: Handout
Led by the De Beers Institute of Diamonds, a recent workshop at Lane Crawford in Hong Kong illuminated the fascinating world of natural diamonds
If you ever get up close and personal with a natural diamond, you might be surprised at just how natural it looks, artist Annette Fernando tells me at a recent event by A Diamond Is Forever, held in partnership with Hong Kong luxury department store Lane Crawford.
Loletta Lai, De Beers’ vice-president of natural diamond marketing for APAC, presenting A Diamond Is Forever’s The Forever Gifts workshop at Lane Crawford in Hong Kong last month. Photo: Handout
The London-based multidisciplinary artist was tapped to take part in A Diamond Is Forever’s latest campaign, The Forever Gifts: A Natural Diamond Series, and found a way to connect with diamonds by drawing them in her preferred creative medium: charcoal. “When you look at charcoal in the light, it does have a sparkly, shimmery quality,” she notes. “The two come from the same element – carbon – but it’s the journey of their creation that made them different.”
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A rough natural diamond from South Africa. Photo: Handout
As I soon learn at a workshop led by the De Beers Institute of Diamonds, that journey is as much a labour of love shaped by humanity as it is a testament to the miraculous whims of the natural world. “You can never grow bored of diamonds,” says director of education and training Jodine Bolden, who teaches global audiences about the significance of natural diamonds. “I’ve met every different personality from every type of culture,” she says. “Everyone has exactly the same reaction. When we give them their tutorial and pass them a diamond, once it suddenly snaps into focus, the reaction is always the same: ‘Wow.’ I find that really inspirational – a common fascination bringing people together.”
Diamond detection instruments can be used to swiftly distinguish natural diamonds from synthetics. Photo: Handout
While many of us are familiar with diamonds in their final, polished form, the master class shed new light on these rare stones through engagement with Fernando’s artworks as well as hands-on experience sorting and separating natural gems from lab-grown synthetics. I was most taken aback by how simultaneously earthy and extraterrestrial each stone appeared to my untrained eye. Under the microscope, a real diamond looked like it had travelled from outer space – a well-worn artefact whose journey through time was chronicled in the inclusions, or diamond “birthmarks”, etched on its translucent surface.
Loletta Lai, vice-president of natural diamond marketing for APAC at De Beers. Photo: Handout
According to Loletta Lai, De Beers’ vice-president of natural diamond marketing for APAC, diamonds serve as the ultimate medium for tracing how our planet has evolved, with a single diamond taking billions of years to form. “De Beers has an iconic 1947 slogan, A Diamond Is Forever, and we feel it’s about time to reanimate this,” Lai says. “We understand that today’s consumers need to experience new stories that resonate with them.”
