A YORK company at the cutting edge of innovations that could transform the jewellery industry by opening up the UK market to laboratory-grown diamonds has revealed plans to expand.

Nightingale already has a website where customers can browse through its bespoke jewellery selection, which uses both mined diamonds and ones produced in a laboratory in the US.

But the business is now set to expand, having agreed to supply lab-grown diamonds to the jewellery trade in the UK, and having decided to open a showroom in the centre of York.

Founder and head jeweller Stephen Nightingale, who spent 46 years in the jewellery trade on the buying side before helping to launch Blake Street-based Nightingale last September, stressed that lab-grown diamonds were just the same as mined ones - except they took weeks to produce rather than millions of years.

“It’s the most exciting thing to hit the jewellery industry since quartz watches,” he said. “They really do appeal to those people who have a strong ethical sense.”

Mr Nightingale said lab-grown diamonds did not generate the environmental concerns sometimes associated with mining, nor were they ‘blood diamonds’, gems mined in a war zone and sold to finance conflict. He said Nightingale subscribed to the Kimberley Process, which ensured ‘blood diamonds’ did not enter the mainstream market, for the mined gems it used.

The allure of lab-grown diamonds was not particularly the price. “They are still quite expensive, about a third less expensive than mined diamonds, because they are diamonds - it’s just the whole process is speeded up in a laboratory,” he said.

The production process started with the tiniest seed of diamond. Within a chamber in the laboratory there was a plasma containing carbon atoms. Under incredible pressure and temperatures, the carbon atoms crystallised into a diamond around the seed. The end results varied as much as mined diamonds and still had to be cut and polished.

Mr Nightingale has been invited to debate the issue of lab-grown diamonds at the International Jewellery Show in London in September. “In America it’s not an uncommon thing, but here in the UK there is a certain amount of resistance,” he said.

But he did not share concerns about the man-made gems, and he revealed it had been agreed that Nightingale would start supplying them to the UK jewellery trade.

The business began after Mr Nightingale overheard a conversation in a York coffee shop, which led him to team up with Allies, a city-based ecommerce company.

Allies chief executive Ryan Atkins said Nightingale was ‘on the cusp’ of becoming the UK and European distributor for a US laboratory, and would probably supply other independent jewellery designers.

He said at Nightingale customers could work with its designers to produce the jewellery they wanted - and revealed that the company would soon open its own showroom in York city centre.