What Are The Benefits Of Lab Created Sapphires

Lab-grown sapphires have a number of benefits.

Sapphires are expensive gemstones. Part of this expense comes from the costs of finding and mining naturally occurring sapphires. By making sapphires in a laboratory, a great deal of this cost can be eliminated. Lab-grown stones offer other benefits beyond cost-saving as well.

Cost

One major benefit of a lab-grown sapphire is the cost. Naturally occurring sapphires are expensive not only because of the stone's quality, but because the stones had to be found and mined out of the earth. Lab-grown sapphires are less expensive because the mining process is replaced by a manufacturing process. It's much cheaper to duplicate the conditions to make a high-quality sapphire than it is to tunnel through the ground looking for one that's already been made. Growing stones in the lab is also a faster process, which means demand can be met more quickly.

Materials

For all intents and purposes, lab-grown sapphires are real sapphires. Blue sapphires (the color that most people think of when they hear the word sapphire) are made of corundum, which is nothing more than aluminum oxide. This is the same chemical composition used by nature to create sapphires, and many lab stones are actually grown using sapphire dust. The only big difference between man-made and nature-made sapphires is that with the former the heat and pressure needed come from machines and with the latter the heat and pressure come from the interior of the earth.

Quality

One way to differentiate a lab-grown sapphire from a natural one is that the lab-grown stone is "too perfect." Because a lab-grown sapphire is monitored by humans and made to a client's specification (rather than formed by chance in nature), it can be created without flaws. For lab-grown rubies this can be especially telling, as flawless natural rubies are extremely rare. It is possible to engineer flaws into lab-grown sapphires for a more natural look, but in general man-made sapphires are flawless.

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