Gemstone Coating:

From fine-cutting and polishing in Austria, the gems go to our coating facility in Austin, Texas. The DNL coating is much different from anything else available in the market today, and has been a multi-year development process.

The DNL coating material is conundrum and other proprietary materials which is substantial, visible under microscopy, and has important measurable physical characteristics. The coating seals the stones surface, greatly lowers porosity and makes the stone impervious to outside contaminants. It also increases hardness and scratch resistance. The coating is not fully transparent, and the slight opaque and blue phase shift imparted brings the reflective and refractive index (called "brilliance and dispersion") of the stone almost exactly in line with a natural diamond. The coating also gives the slightest hint of fluorescence that the most highly prized blue-white diamonds exhibit. Your Diamond Nexus stone will not look blue in color; the blue phase shift adds depth and richness to the look of the stone, but does not color it. The effect is out of the range of visible light. (DNL does, however, also offer a true blue colored lab-created diamond simulant, our Glacial Ice Diamond Nexus).

The coating process is time consuming and costly. Each stone is taken through a four step process to completely sterilize the surface, as any contaminant will ruin the coating. The gemstones are hand placed in a special tool that holds each stone separately and at the proper angle for coating. The stones are placed on a rotating table in a vacuum chamber. All air is evacuated from the chamber and a micro atmosphere of nitrogen and other proprietary gases is introduced. Corundum and our other proprietary materials (the species) are placed within the chamber. An electron beam, which is capable of producing temperatures as hot as the surface of the sun, is focused on the species and it is evaporated into a plasma state. ("Plasma" is the fourth state of matter, the others being solid, liquid and gas. Plasma is a high energy electrically charged mixture of ions and electrons. It is the stuff of stars: all stars that shine are pure plasma. Plasma appears naturally on earth only in places like lightning bolts, flames, and auroras).

An ion assist beam is then focused on the gemstones, causing a reverse in polarity and the molecules in the plasma species are attracted to the molecules in the substrate. The two materials fuse together and the coating is deposited and interlocked to the surface.