How To Live Forever: Italian Father Turns Son Into A Diamond
A Swiss company has found the key to living forever - turn dead loved-ones into a diamond. A 55-year-old Italian father has decided not to let go of his son and availed the company’s “Remembrance Diamonds” product. This is a process where the carbon found in the cremated ashes are filtered and refined, secured in a chamber to create a synthetic diamond.
The firm from Switzerland specializes in converting the remains of the dead into diamonds and the cost of the process ranges from AU$5,368 to AU$19,937 depending on the stone size.
According to an ABC news report in December 2013, the procedure mainly involves the carbon in the human body.
“A diamond is composed of pressurized carbons. Conveniently enough, human bodies are about 18 percent carbon. Using about a pound of ashes, the company is able to distill out the carbon and use it to form a man-made diamond in a mold under high pressure in about a week. These synthetic diamonds created this way are often blue because of certain chemicals in the human body.”
The ashes-to-diamond business actually picked up sometime in 2012.
“Algordanza sends 200 grams of cremated remains to its laboratory in Switzerland. The carbon from those ashes is then filtered out to more than 99% purity and refined into silky, black graphite. A machine then applies volcano-like pressure and temperature: Nine hours later, a synthetic diamond -- which has a bluish rather than clear tint, owing to boron found naturally in the body -- is born,” an expert stated in a CNN interview in 2012.
The unnamed Italian father had his son’s remains exhumed and cremated to undergo the process. This was supposedly the first of its kind in the country. The 20-year-old son died in a car crash.
Diamonds are forever are taking a new meaning in life, at least to this father from Italy.