Apple’s Jony Ive Crafts Lab-Grown Diamond Ring Worth up to $250,000 USD for Charity

Apple design chief Jony Ive along with fellow designer Marc Newson have created a diamond ring for their (RED) auction, to raise money to fight AIDS.

According to Sotheby’s : Sir Jony Ive, Apple’s Chief Design Officer, and renowned industrial designer Marc Newson – having curated the (RED) auction five years ago – have, this year, designed a unique ring, made exclusively for (RED) by Diamond Foundry. Consistent with their mutual obsession with transforming raw material into objects of value, Ive & Newson’s design is singular, clear and un-compromised by the traditional metal settings and bands that have previously been required to create ‘diamond rings’. Theirs will be created by removing material rather than adding – an ambition made possible by the extraordinary scale of the stone which will enable the ring to be completely made of this material.

Ye-Hui Goldenson, spokesperson for Diamond Foundry mentioned that the ring will be custom made to fit the size of the winner’s finger.

This ring will be cut from a diamond block, and will be “faceted with several thousand facets, some of which are as small as several thousand micrometers.” The inner ring will be cylindrically cut, with a micrometer thick water jet and laser beam. The finished product will see a ring “between 2000-3000 facets which has never been seen before in a single piece.”

Producing the rough was definitely not easy according to a statement released by Diamond Foundry. “It required coaxing the first 10 atoms of a layer into believing that a certain rare metal is a diamond, these atoms would assemble into real diamond and allow the creation of diamond blocks of previously unprecedented size,” it said.