Episode 92: A Crisis in Green Diamonds

[Music] Welcome to the Rappaport Diamond Podcast, and now you're host Joshua Friedman. Welcome to the Rappaport Diamond Podcast. I'm Joshua Friedman, and I guess for this episode was Dr Thomas Heinschwang, the co-founder of G-G-T-L Laboratories and Geological Laboratory branches across Europe. We touched on some important topics in grading from digital reports to artificial intelligence, of course the issue of synthetic diamonds, and why owners of high-value green diamonds are getting a little nervous at the moment. Enjoy the conversation. Thomas, so thank you for joining us. Just to begin with, there's a few questions about G-G-T-L. What are you, and what makes you different from other G-M labs? Well, G-G-T-L is actually a group of laboratories, so it came to life as a group in 2011. When we joined two labs as a collaboration, that's the laboratory in Geneva from Frank Notary, called Gem Tech Lab originally, and My Lab in Lichtenstein, which was originally called Gem Lab Lichtenstein. So we both founded our labs in 1996, actually, and we're working together in Geneva for GIA, as at the time GIA is Switzerland, from 2004 to 2006. When the whole thing split up again because GIA left Geneva, we went independent again both of us, and in 2011 decided to kind of make a collaboration agreement and work under a group name, G-G-T-L Laboratories. So that's how G-G-T-L Laboratories started. In the meantime, I have opened G-G-T-L Belgium in Antwerp, so we're at three labs now. Two of them are actually My Lab, and one is Frank Notary's Lab. We're all gem testing labs. We're doing pretty much any type of gem testing. I am more specialized in the Lichtenstein and Belgium labs in diamonds, not only and exclusively, but it's like my personal topic because my PhD is on colored diamonds, so it's really my baby's diamonds. So that's why there's kind of a focus on that also in research. And do you get a larger proportion of colored diamonds coming into your lab's relative to other labs because of your specialism? I couldn't say there is a larger portion. I mean, we get to do quite a bit of double certification of large fancy colored diamonds, and then specialized things like green diamonds and blue green diamonds. We get quite a bit. And especially in the melee sizes, we get a lot of material. So melee sizes, fancy colored diamonds, we get a lot. Double certification, meaning that the stone has got overport from another lab, and you're giving an additional one. Exactly. So we're basically giving the green light that everything's okay. There's houses and brands that require that, and so we're basically the lab that says it's fine. The other report's okay. So I'd like to ask about some of the latest developments in grading. We always find whenever we write a story on Rapproport.com about diamond grading, it always performs very well as it's up at the very very very interested in the industry. What is your stance on lab ground diamonds to start with? I know that some of the major labs that provide reports on lab ground diamonds in the same way they do on natural diamonds. What's your stance on that? Well, we do have a couple of clients that do lab ground diamonds. We do certification of them. It's obvious in the report that they're lab ground. But, you know, there is a market like any others. And today's market, they require a report either for quality, but usually the most important part for most of them is that they're actually lab ground diamonds. Because, you know, in this funny market, you get instead of lab ground, people sell HPHG and then they turn out to be CVDs. Or, they sell HPHGs and they turn out to be moistenite. The most funny parts are when they sell HPHGs or CVDs and they turn out to be natural. So, you know, they even require reports for that. There's even cheaper alternatives of synthetic diamonds out there, but they want to be sure that what they're selling is what they're selling. How often does that happen that a stainless submited as lab ground and turns out to be not true? It happens from time to time. It's not very common. It happens relatively commonly in melee sizes. So, in melee sizes, there is such a mix-up everywhere going on. Not huge in natural diamonds. I mean, there is a mix-up, obviously, but in the synthetic market, it's not uncommon that stones being sold as synthetics part of them turn out to be natural. We had cases where we're actually clients of ours who bought equipment from us. We also built some certain equipment. Told us that the equipment didn't work because the stone, you know, they were sold from a synthetic dealer, showed up as okay. And, well, yeah, they sent us the data and I was like, well, sorry, the stone is actually natural. So, it's interesting. It happens. And I imagine that's mostly sort of a mix-up rather than conspiracy. It's not like the other way around where people are frequently trying to pass them off. Absolutely. I mean, the first case I've ever seen was one that I actually had to buy synthetics myself for a friend of mine who couldn't buy them himself for whatever reason. And it got directly from the manufacturer certified by a laboratory. The certificate said Type II A synthetic diamond, no CVD-grown. And it was just for, you know, for data acquisition to have more references. We took the data ourselves. For at the beginning I started to panic because I thought that, well, there was a new way of making diamonds that looked totally natural. Turned out the stone actually was natural. So, I have even a certified stone that is not synthetic. So, when you started creating lab-grown, was there any debate about whether you should do that? I don't know. There's a minority of labs that have just kind of kept away from it. But at the same time clearly there is a market for it. It's not a huge market for us. I mean, for a while we did lab-grown from one of those companies that says that they are using the ashes of deceased people to grow diamonds. And at some point we started to refuse their goods because it was just not our thing. But lab-grown as such, I don't see really a problem to certifying them. It's a service like any other. So, you know, there is nothing inherently wrong with lab-grown diamonds. If somebody asks me to certify a synthetic ruby on a certified synthetic ruby, I don't have a problem with it. It's clearly indicated what it is. So, if somebody needs a report for whatever reason out there, why not? But there's no problem for that. And not for me at least. Sure, understand. The other topic that's been kind of ruffled a lot of feathers in the industry in the last, particularly the last six months, is digital reports. And the GIA famously switched its dossier over to digital only and that didn't work so well. And they've come back to offering paper and digital reports in tandem. What do you do? And do you see reports going digital only at some point in the near future? I mean, for now we're paper only. I'm not sure where the future goes in that. It might be a combination of the two. Only digital, I see it kind of difficult. I mean, we had suppliers, we had clients asking for kind of alternative materials instead of plastic. And I have that much of an issue with the paper itself. But with the plastic envelopes, I would report this in. So, we had suppliers asking specifically for ecological issues to get different substances, but the plastic pouches. But it's actually kind of challenging to find anything that can replace that. So, we'll see, it's not like one of my major concerns at the moment, but we're looking into that for sure. Right. And then something that seems to go together with the digitalisation of grading is also the confirmation of origin. And there's a big spectrum when it comes to talking about confirmation of origin. There's things that are very realistic, such as gathering the rough, taking a record of the rough, and then when you see the polished confirming that one comes from the other. It's pretty doable, it has been done, but there have been some claims in recent months that it might be possible to actually, I'm not sure it's quite as extreme as this, but put a diamond in a machine and an etiology where it came from. What's your view on this? How possible will it be to detect the origin of diamonds? Yeah, that's one of the topics that has been puzzling me quite a bit too. I have a really good friend who actually made a PhD on exactly that topic. Years back, they worked with ICPMS, so very low level chemical analysis, very complex, very complicated, very time consuming, especially for diamond. And her conclusion in the end was it doesn't work, it's impossible. And there is not just one PhD studies that came to the same conclusion. They all came to the same conclusion, it's impossible. And they're working at university level with the best equipment out there, most expensive equipment, it doesn't work. So until somebody convinces me of the contrary, for me it is absolutely impossible to do origin determination based on actual properties of a diamond for all diamonds. There are certain stones, fine, if somebody sends me an argyle violet, I can tell you where the stones from because it's very specific. But if we talk about just colorless cape, series diamonds or whatever type two a diamonds, colorless or brownish or whatever other color, it's impossible. The overlap between the chemical data. First of all, there is very little chemical and purity in those stones. You compare diamond to colored stones. I mean colored stones and origin is already enough of a headache. Third stones, there is labs including us who do origin. There is much more impurities, there is much more chemical elements that can be tested in appreciable quantities. In diamond days, virtually nothing that's present in a part per million concentration, but you're looking down into parts per billion. So you get already into problems of sample preparation. How do you get a rough time clean enough not to have any surface contamination. Then you need to test stones by ICPMS, a very complex testing. This is going into a direction where, first of all, if even feasible, commercially possible. maybe would be for any stone that cuts into maybe a character more because the price of testing the cost and the time for testing would be extensive. So it's impossible. It's just simply and shortly said it's impossible. As I said, somebody proved me otherwise and I'll say okay, I go in my corner, I was wrong. But as it is today, I say it's absolutely impossible. The fundister, this correctly, the information would be in the inclusions essentially. Is that correct? Now, the information would be in the chemical trace elements that you can find in the lattice. Being mainly carbon plus some nitrogen plus which is blue, some boron plus hydrogen. You have other trace elements from the surroundings. So, you know, but since the surroundings in diamond growth are very similar between the different kimberlite or lamp-ride mines, there won't be much of a difference to be found. And that's also what they found that it's just not possible. There's too much of an overlap. The only study that ever came to a conclusion that you might be able to identify origins is when you analyze rough diamonds with a coat on it. So, if you have a coated rough diamond, the coat contains enough fluids and gases that you can start testing the fluids in the gases. But there also you have to go into isotope testing and there they found ways to identify. But since in a cut stone, you don't have a coat. And in many of the rough diamonds, you don't have a coat either. That's just a very limited use. As soon as you talk about gem quality diamonds, it's just not possible. There is no distinguishing criteria. That's why I find it kind of hilarious that there is companies out there who just claim things. I mean, the last claims of basically that some company that nobody has ever heard of before in the diamond market from one day to another claims, hey, we can do it. We're going to test your diamonds before and then we basically put a marker on it. You get your black box, the black box scans the marker and tells you that's the stone that we tested. I seriously, seriously, very, seriously doubt that that's ever going to be possible, anything like that. Do you offer any service of your island that tracks origin in the realistic way so in inspecting the rough and then connecting it to the polishly bit, like the GIA origin certificate? We don't really offer that kind of a service. That service always has a limitation. I guess it's as far as you can go and as far as you can really offer anything that's similar to an origin report. But even there, how do you know about a rough came from? Right, documentation is here. Yeah, sure. You trust the person who supplied the rough to you. I mean, you know, that's like telling anybody with a ruby who comes in today, hey, where's the ruby from? He tells you where it's from and you give him a certificate based on that. So that's just, it's basically, I mean, it has a certain accuracy for sure. If you work with big manufacturers where you can be more or less sure that what they give you is actually from their mind. But how will you ever have proof for that? You don't. So an origin, a bit like in colored stones too, will always remain an opinion. And here it's an opinion based on third party information. It's not actual origin determination. But yeah, I assure you can take a rough and verify that the cut stone came from the same rough. We do offer a similar service. We call it the Collinland report, which is basically we do it more for very large high value stones as insurance in case it's such a stone, they will get stolen. So if you have a very large valuable stone, we can actually make a fingerprint of the stone that ensures that if ever somebody steals the stone, recuts it that we can still identify the stone if it ever shows up again. So that's the thing that we do other than that. We do work in the pinks and violets, our guile in that direction. We do work in areas where you can more reasonably assure origin than in actually all colored diamonds. All right, changing the topic a little. I remember three or four years ago you gave a, for my memory is serving me correct, you gave a presentation at the Hong Kong show about your efforts to gather a collection of specimens of colored diamonds and also carry out various bits of research on this because these stones are so hard to come by. How's that going now? It doubles about green diamonds, right? Correct, yes. Yeah, it was about green diamonds. It's hard to find more like historical samples, but we have like put more of an effort into the study of treatment itself. So that was the past years that was the main effort and it's still ongoing actually. We're sending a batch of stones for treatment out right now. So we've done a very, very extensive treatment study. I think the natural side is extremely hard to find more historical references. There's not so many museums that actually have green and blue green natural stones. So that's a bit of a tough one to find more samples. But we're just building a really, really large database on the properties and the behavior of the effects in irradiated diamonds. So we basically have taken diamonds of all colors, various sizes, various types, various subtypes, and have irradiated them in various methods and then heated them in little steps all the way up to HPHT. So really from just irradiation all the way to 2000 degrees Celsius and more. And at every step, very according absolutely every single piece of data that could you can possibly acquire on the stone, in order to have a complete picture of how the natural goods compare to the treated goods. So that has been our focus in this research project. All right, and imagine if I understood correctly, you're taking real green diamonds which are inherently rare and irradiating them. This is an expensive thing, right? Well, we're not taking greens normally. I mean, I have treated greens too, but usually we're taking other colors. So we're taking anything from colorless through brown, through even pinks with irradiated, violets with irradiated, anything. Any color that you can imagine, any type, any subtype, just to cover the complete range of stones that you could possibly irradiate or manipulate the color by irradiation, that's what we've done. And then heating them to see what happens in the stones, what happens with the color, what happens with the fluorescence, what happens with the defects, just correcturizing them completely. So that's like the big, big, big project that's ongoing since quite a few years now. Okay, I gather that there's been some discussion in the color diamond market about some green diamonds that are being sent to labs and coming back as being possibly treated. Is there something you can expand on? Yeah, the green diamond, I mean, you know, it's from the treatment side, the treatment of green diamonds is the oldest treatment out there, besides coding. You have the coding of pavilions, which is the first one ever learned, so that's not a stable treatment. So irradiation is the actual first stable color treatment ever done to diamonds. And even though it's the first treatment, which means it's known since about 1910, 1915, we're still having huge problems identifying the irradiation because naturally radiated diamonds basically get their color from the same effect as artificially radiated diamonds. So it causes an enormous headache to labs since a long time. And today's status is unfortunately that there is very, very, very, very few labs that even dare to give an origin on such stones. So normally when you submit a green diamond to any lab except few, you will get undetermined. They just don't dare to even, you know, like claim that a stone might be natural or not. The unfortunate situation that the market is in at the moment is that a lot, or let's say quite a bit of stones that have been certified as natural in not too far away past have been re-certified by the same lab in recent years and came back as not natural anymore. You know, they basically changed from a natural origin to undetermined or even treated. Which has created quite a bit of unhappiness. The market, as you may imagine, because some of the stones involved are really high dollar amounts. Right. When you say they were originally graded in the not too recent past how long ago would that be typically? In the 2010, 2014, 2015, 2016, up to 18 even. And stones that have been sent back in the 20s and the 2020s to 2023s came back as they were originally natural color and then came back as undetermined or even treated. And they were routinely sent to a lab for another check. Yeah, to send it back as an upgrade. That's what often is required if you have a stone or a stone for a long time. And people require an upgrade that's difficult. It's like a standard thing, but I mean the unhappy situation that you're going to get a contrary result of what you originally had. You know, and it's not. But it's not that this reality has prompted people to send this to send green dimes back for an update. I do not know. I think today it's probably more of the opposite. The people are afraid to send stones back for an update. Right. Right. And just so I am listening to it understand, what does that mean? Is that what is the extra knowledge of green diamonds that graders now have that they wouldn't have had 10 years ago when it was sent for the first time for the first time? Basically why are these stones coming back with a different report? I'm wondering too. I don't know. I can't tell you. I've worked through a lot of those stones. I don't see any consistent logical reason why. So I can't even tell you. I was trying to figure it out myself. What's the difference? I can't tell you because I have seen stones that are in any property possible identical to other stones. One of them came out as a term and the other one came out as a natural. I have even seen stones. A famous couple that I think I even showed that one in my presentation three years back or so. A green where all, you know, we recorded all properties and figured out there was a couple. There was two stones and that the two stones actually came from the same rough. It was two stones from the same rough. The color was identical. One stone came back as a term and then the other came back as a natural. So I do not know. I actually don't. No, I have no clue where the logic is. That's one thing that I've been trying to figure out, but I can't. What is the premium or I guess the other way around the discount on Ferzia? And determined and then confirmed treated. How much less would a stone sell for? From between natural and undetermined, you mean? Oh, your abstone becomes immediately worthless. You can call it like that. It becomes immediately worthless. If you have a three-carat, if you have a three-carat-reavit green blue that would go for probably nearly three million dollars for a stone and you get treated for that, you can sell it for three thousand bucks, maybe five thousand bucks. Your stone becomes worthless. You scrap 99% of your value from one day to another. So that's what's happening. That's just that's problematic. You're able to say the name of the lab that's been providing these reports? No, that's not coming over my lips. No. Okay, this is all very interesting. Thank you. I also also ask about the impact of lab growing on colour diamonds in general and specifically green diamonds. I know that the most famous entrance into the coloured lab growing diamond world, namely the Bearders lightbox, is selling them for at a fraction of the price of natural for obvious reasons. And also it seems to have kind of reduced its emphasis on the pinks and the blues in the soxing more on the colour of stones. But has there been any impact of lab growing on the coloured diamonds, particularly greens? What kind of impact you talk about? You mean priceways or impact in general? I mean market share. You know, it's a completely different market. It's, I mean, right now everybody seems to be freaking out about synthetic diamond being in competition with natural diamond. Which kind of reminds me even though I mean I was obviously not a lifetime, but you hear all the stories how it was in the 1880s, 1890s when synthetic rubies were grown. People were freaking out that the natural ruby market would be destroyed basically, eliminated because you could grow all those beautiful rubies by this very annoying method and look at the ruby market today. I mean, come on. The noise synthetic ruby is where it belongs to. It's in cheap silver jewelry or in cheap jewelry or being used for fraud while natural rubies is more expensive than ever. So I dare to predict that for synthetic diamonds it's going to be the same. Same as I dared to predict years ago that synthetic diamond is going to go to basically to crap priceways within a few years because I knew exactly that. I mean, the lead scientist that grew the first really big synthetics from NDT, new diamond technology is a good friend of mine. I know him since a very long time. And I knew that they had new technologies and could like grow big diamonds now, but it was obvious that he was just a question of time until India and China would do the same thing. And looking at the way that you know, specifically India and China tend to copy each other and go on with more and more manufacturers without any control of how much material is being thrown in the market. That's where we are right now. So right now basically the market is being flooded by synthetics. They're destroying their own margins. They're destroying their own prices. And currently, regular HPHG manufacturer can't make money anymore on colorless diamond. The market value at the manufacturing level is basically gone. So the manufacturing cost is too high because CVD production is cheaper. So that's where we are right now. So right now we are at production cost and that's about it. So I don't see a particular threat to any market neither to the colorless diamond market nor to the color diamond market. This synthetic diamond market will probably stabilize at some point. The prices will probably pick up a little. I don't think they will go much further down because yeah, we're so low already. I wouldn't know how they could produce any cheaper, but they'll find their little spot like Moisanite did, like CZ did, like all other synthetics did. And that's where they belong to. And they have absolute the right to exist and to have their own market share. But it's just not right to claim that there's a synthetic diamond. There's something better about it, the greener, the less cruel to humanity, et cetera, et cetera. All these nonsense that has been spewed so much from various synthetic diamond manufacturers in the past years. I can't hear them anymore because it's so much nonsense. Now it's not fact-based. It's just like just screaming around that we're better, we're better. That's not the point. The point is create your own market like other synthetics have done too. Don't try to destroy the natural diamond market. It won't work anyways. It has a short time impact, but in a long term, I don't think it has any impact on us. How hard is it to grow colored lab-grown diamonds? I know, Hank Lomblitz seems to be the most main color that we're seeing at lab-grown. Is that right? Well, actually, what we see most is yellows. I mean, we at the lab level, we have either single stones that are being submitted, so they're whatever the client needs, the color that's still going to produce. But like on the melee size level, the vast majority of stones that we see are yellow. Yellow to orange yellow, that's what we see. That's also the impartialist. That's where you have most of the pollution. So that's actually the biggest problem of the entire diamond sector. In synthetic growth is the melee yellows. That's it. There's other colors that are super polluted too. Browns, grays. Those are like the main ones. Brown, gray, yellow, and orange yellow. But from the growth perspective, also the easiest to grow is the yellows. At least in the HPHG process. By CVD, it's more difficult. CVD, we've only seen a couple of bright colored yellow CVDs. It's kind of difficult, and it's not clear how they do it. But in HPHG growth, if you don't put specific nitrogen capturing elements, metals in your growth chamber, your stone will grow yellow. So that's the initial color that is always being grown with yellow, not colorless. With colorless, they had huge problems all the way until 2014, 2015 when NDT started to grow those bigger stones. That was the first time when a company achieved to make colorless synthetic diamonds without inclusions and without yellow tinge. Before that, before 2015, everything that came into the market was always highly included. I followed that quite a bit. What was grown in Ukraine, etc. The materials that came in, they could grow it, but the growth cost was actually higher than natural diamond. And typically you always had the big metallic inclusion in the middle of the stone and the stones were something between KLM color, so they were never colorless. What is your view of the alleged market for as grown lab grown diamonds? Lab grown diamonds are less sold, specifically the color that they were grown with rather than having gone through some sort of post growth treatment. Is there a market for that? Do you think it's a relevant thing for a grading lab to do that? Sure. I think there is a market for that, and currently you know, they're starting to be creative. The friend of mine, he sent me an image the other day of a bi-colored diamond that he grew. Why not? So he actually achieved to grow a diamond that had blue color sectors and yellow color sectors. That's actually an achievement. That's not so easy to grow because the boron usually, nitrogen usually compensates for the boron, so you have either one or the other. So he actually got nitrogen in one color sector and boron in the other color sector and made it bi-colored. I think we covered that on map of what.com. I think they looked at the JCK show. I think so. Yeah. So that's actually a really cool stone, you know, things like that. Sure. And there is, you know, you can either play with color or do other things. I mean, we know how many factors they actually, you know, they actually take materials, let's say grass or clothing or whatever and get it carbonized, make graphite out of it. They're literally complicated process and make some dedics out of that. Sure. Why not? Okay. You had it here first. So you mentioned Thomas, you, you do a melee screening. A melee seems to be the strongest. One of the strongest categories at a moment, we're doing this recording on July the 4th. In fact, that must mean you have a lot of a lot of goods coming in at a moment. We do have, let's say this way, we have like the labs to different levels of melee. The colorless melee is not like my focus for the lighten shine in the antwerp lab. We do colorless melee, but colorless melee, you know, there's so much screening machines out there. Usually what we get here is all the re-fer materials. So whatever the automatic screening machines couldn't do, we get it. So that's what we're usually doing. We're doing relatively little other than that. In the Geneva lab, they do a lot of grading and testing at the same time. So that's a different story. What's our strong point here is the color melee. Color melee, the market is much smaller. Start with. So we don't get such huge quantities as you could get if you do only colorless melee, but it's still quite a significant market. So we do test a lot of yellow, a lot of orange yellow and a lot of browns, and then graze and pinks on top of that. Interestingly even, you know, the salt and pepper diamonds, those included diamonds, even in there you find synthetics, believe it or not. So it's an interesting market and we do test quite a lot of them, yes, we do. And have also the specific machines like really to do color diamonds because there is no automatic screening for color diamonds. There's no way, especially in the yellow, orange, color, it's highly complex to test them. We test them for, first of all, authenticity and also for treatment. So we don't only limit ourselves to authenticity testing, but the stones that get out of here are also tested for treatments at the same time. And Thomas, just a final final question before we finish. What do you see as being the next development, the next step in diamond grading? What should we look out for? Oh, it looks like quite a lot of companies are trying to get into this AI business. That seems to be high interest to many. Me personally, I keep my hands out of it because I don't want to burn my fingers with it because that's probably what's going to happen. You know, there's companies that do that for color stones and there's companies that do it for diamonds as well. Like things like automatic grading has been introduced by some automatic color grading, even automatic clarity grading. Proportion, well, that's a different story. use of a scanner and it does the job for use. That's almost AI, but in the grading sector difficult. Then now we have things like AI introduced for origin determination on colored stones. Well, that's a different story. That's not diamond, but just to say that AI seems to be focused on certain labs, but I'd rather keep it real than artificial. What do you mean by getting your fingers bent? Let's say it creates potential harm to your company. You know, artificial intelligence is only as intelligent as the data that's put into it. So, and if there's something goes wrong and nobody supervises it, then the wrong data will be continued and go out there to public. So I'm not going to go there. If any artificial intelligence, it always needs to be supervised by somebody. So I'm being very cautious about all the attempts to introduce artificial intelligence into diamond grading, diamond testing, etc. Starting to replace gemologists and experts by machines, it's a very dangerous thing, which is also one thing that I always said about automatic screening machines. You know, they're good and right and they're being verified by some to see if they work or don't work. If something goes wrong in such a machine or if a new type of synthetic is introduced in the market or a new kind of material appears, the point until somebody detects it and puts it out there, the machine will always give you a false result in that. So that's the dangerous part about automatic machines. You know, if there is not enough supervision by somebody from the outside, you just don't know, you can't be sure. It's like, you know, you test 100 million stones by automatic machines and only a couple of carrots are being rejected. Well, nobody tests the stones that passed as natural. Everybody tests the stones that have been rejected and it's sure. It's a very good thing to have. It's quite certainly the vast, vast majority of stones will be fine, but I wouldn't put my hands in fire to ensure that every single stone is actually okay or not. I've recently seen it for once. We have tested a parcel that was accepted as okay by a renowned automatic machine. And in there, there were two stones or three stones. At the properties of those three stones, the machine should have rejected them at any cost. That those stones should have been rejected. They were natural, but their properties were totally overlapping with synthetic diamonds. So that's why I'm always a bit cautious about automatic machines in general. I prefer to have actual experts working with machines that, you know, humans make errors too, so we're not perfect either, but at least if somebody who can admit it at the end, you know, if we make an error. Right. So long as they don't replace journalists and podcast producers with machines, I'm happy. Thank you Thomas very much for joining us. I've learned a lot. I have listened, I've learned a lot. It's been a really fascinating conversation and very grateful for your presence in your time. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Rappaport Diamond podcast. For more discussions, news and analysis about the diamond industry, visit us at Rappaport.com. Follow Rappaport Group on Instagram and follow Rappaport on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. And don't forget to subscribe to get future episodes. [Music]