You might have heard about people who are allergic to their rings. Metal allergies affect approximately 15% of people who wear jewelry, primarily due to autoimmune diseases that make the body perceive specific metals as poison.
These autoimmune skin diseases cause the skin to respond to metal, resulting in blisters, rashes, swelling, itching, discomfort, and other symptoms such as arthritis, weariness, and depression.
If you have any of these symptoms while wearing rings, you should contact a dermatologist or doctor to evaluate whether the cause is a metal alloy allergy or another condition.
Due to the risk of your ring being allergic, you might be wondering whether you are safe wearing your lab diamond rings every day, right? The good news is that you can do it. The reason for this is that the rings are set in hypoallergic materials.
The most common hypoallergic metals used in lab diamonds include:
Platinum
If you have extremely sensitive skin, platinum is a sturdy, safe, and stunning choice for your engagement ring. Although platinum is a silver-colored metal, engagement rings are not entirely made of it.
You should get rings that are 95% metal because they usually contain only a trace of another metal, commonly iridium. Platinum rings are hypoallergenic and highly durable so that they can survive for several generations.
Palladium
Palladium is close to platinum in terms of strength and endurance. The silver-colored metal is tougher than platinum, making it an ideal choice for a hypoallergenic engagement ring.
Palladium has a Mohs hardness of 4.8, whereas platinum has a hardness of 3.5. The rare metal is also less expensive than platinum and extremely lightweight, so many people who wear palladium rings don’t detect them.
Cobalt
Cobalt usually appears black or silver. Cobalt, in addition to jewelry, is utilized as a metal alloy in orthopedic and dental implants due to its strength and hypoallergenic properties.
Cobalt is scratch-resistant, extremely durable, and much cheaper than platinum. The metal also prevents oxidation, thus cobalt does not need to be replaced too often, if ever.
High karat gold
If you’re seeking for a hypoallergenic gold metal, high-karat gold is an excellent choice. Eighteen-karat yellow gold is the most wearable metal in the yellow gold family, made up of 18 percent gold and six percent alloy, typically copper and silver.
Eighteen-karat yellow gold is far more hypoallergenic than white gold.
This is because white gold is commonly paired with high amounts of nickel, which is known to cause allergies.
Other benefits of lab-grown diamonds
Besides lab-grown diamonds being hypoallergic and hence safe to wear every day, they come with plenty of other benefits that include:
They are the only true conflict-free diamonds
Do you think mined diamonds with a Kimberley certificate are not blood diamonds? Think again. There is a lot of history and explanation to be done here, but we’ll try to describe this tragic legacy of mined diamonds as briefly as possible.
Blood diamonds, also known as conflict diamonds, rose to prominence in the 1990s as many African diamond-producing countries (Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast, Liberia, and Sierra Leone) faced criticism for the unregulated trade of diamonds and, worse, the funding those diamonds provided.
Civil wars had occurred in several countries, and blood diamonds were supplying financial and physical resources to rebel forces.
Civil wars cause turmoil and heinous crimes against citizens.
To try to halt these horrific occurrences, the United Nations organized a coalition of 54 countries to assist in preventing blood diamonds from accessing the market. This coalition is now referred to as the Kimberley Process.
The Kimberley Process (KP) is a multilateral trade regime established in 2003 to prevent the flow of conflict diamonds. The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS) is at the heart of this regime, requiring states to install controls on rough diamond shipments and certify them as ‘conflict-free.'”
So, the problem is solved, right? Wrong. Although the KP has been instrumental in enforcing stricter controls to reduce the use of blood diamonds, it is not without flaws and has received widespread criticism.
As a result, the only true way to ensure that you’re investing in a conflict-free diamond is to buy a lab-grown diamond.
Lab-grown diamonds are more sustainable.
There are various issues to consider when it comes to sustainability. Let us begin by discussing what Earth requires to mine diamonds. Did you know that finding just one carat of diamond requires sifting through around 200 to 250 tons of Earth?
Heavy machinery is necessary for these jobs, resulting in a massive amount of fossil fuel being emitted into the environment. Diamond mining also leaves huge holes in the middle of villages.
Furthermore, diamond mining is becoming less sustainable year after year. One reason for this is that nearly all diamonds have been removed from the Earth’s core, but another is the location of diamond mines.
Because so many diamonds have been extracted from Africa’s most famous kimberlite pipelines, mining operations are now migrating to extremely frigid arctic regions in Canada and Russia. As you can imagine, this requires significantly more energy to extract.
Lab-grown diamonds are cheaper.
Lab-grown diamonds are far more affordable, not because of huge supply-chain differences, but because they do not come with an exorbitant markup.
When you pay for a lab-grown diamond, you are only paying for the process of creating it in the laboratory.
Earth-mined diamonds, on the other hand, are marked up 100% or more, and there’s a lengthy murky history about how the De Beers organization monopolized the market and devised deceptive ads to make people feel that the bigger the diamond, the greater the love.
Parting shot
These are some of the things you should know about lab-grown diamonds. As mentioned, they are completely safe to wear every day, and there is no reason you shouldn’t.
While this is the case, you should be cautious of the metal used to set the diamond. As a rule of thumb, double-check and confirm that the diamond is set on a hypoallergic metal.
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