Interview: Ashes into Diamonds

Some people are buried, some people are cremated, and some get cremated and have their ashes turned into precious stones. Would you want to turned into a diamond? Admittedly, it'd be easier lugging around grandma on a ring than in a jar.

At a glance it seems like a gaudy idea, well... that's because it is, but nonetheless, VICE did an interview with the man behind the venture and I thought it'd be interesting to share.

So, can you tell us how you got the idea of making diamonds from corpses?

The idea first struck me ten years ago, when I was a student of economics. One of my teachers gave me an article by a Russian scientist to read; it was about the production of synthetic diamonds to be used in the semiconductor industry. The article explained how such diamonds could be made from ashes, and I misinterpreted it, thinking it was referring to human ashes–while in fact it was talking about vegetable ashes. So he (teacher) got in touch with the author of the article, who just happened to have some diamond-making machines here in Switzerland. Together, we started to set up what would become Algordanza.

What was so compelling about turning human ashes into diamonds?

Diamonds are precious, pure, clean. They couldn’t be more different from today’s cemeteries, which are places crammed with too many graves, very often neglected, and where you can’t have a real relationship with the dead. I loved the idea of dead people becoming something you can touch and enjoy the sight of. I also like the fact that a diamond remains, can be kept and passed down from generation to generation.

How big are the diamonds that you can create in your laboratory?

Usually they are four carats when they are rough and 1 carat after they’ve been cut. There have been diamonds as big as 1.6 or 1.8 carats, but they were exceptional cases.

What’s the difference between one of your diamonds and a real diamond?

Our diamonds are real diamonds. They have all the physical and chemical properties of diamonds. Obviously, synthetic diamonds are less valuable than natural ones, since they’re man-made. But you can’t tell our diamonds from natural ones with the naked eye. Not even a jeweler could. The only one way to distinguish between them is a chemical screening – a gemologist may help you with that –which will find out that the stone was made artificially.

In general, why do people resorting to your services decide to be transformed into diamonds?

In many cases they don’t decide, since it’s their relatives—usually their mothers or wives—who come to us. The reason given by the relatives is typically that they want to keep the deceased always with them. But there are also people who choose to become diamonds while they are still alive. Often they are people who are aware that they’ll die soon, like for example someone with a terminal illness.

One of the reasons they give us is economic—they want to avoid the costs of burial in a cemetery. In other cases, they’re people living alone and very far from the place where they were born, who are afraid that nobody would properly care for their grave if they were buried.