What Are Conflict Free Diamonds?

Welcome back to our blog here at Lonnie’s Custom Jewelers! Every entry in our blog takes a look at another facet of the world of jewelry, their styles, the kinds of diamonds – everything under the sun! We offer style tips for gifts, discussions of jewelry history and crafting and more. This month’s entry is going to look at a component of the latter. A central, often -the- central piece of any number of jewelry is the diamond.

A large majority of diamonds are found and mined in the continent of Africa. Unfortunately, a number of areas where these diamonds are mined are areas of great conflict and turmoil. The mining and selling of the diamonds become a way to fund the war activities of the groups in control of the areas, and thus the diamonds are known as conflict, or blood, diamonds.

This problem in the mining and selling of diamonds came to a greater awareness in the late 90’s when Global Witness (an organization that works to sever the ties between resources exploitation, corruption, human right abuses, and more worldwide) documented the link and the United Nations recognize it.

Conflict Free Diamonds are the diamond industry’s response to this. Following attempts such as the Kimberley Process Certification, and others, the goals of these industries is to block the viability of conflict diamonds, and instead guarantee that their stones are coming from reputable mines, that the money from their sale does not filter into warlords’ coffers.

Conflict Free Diamonds, whether via the Kimberley Process Certification or other means (such as being mined in countries free of that kind of conflict, or artificially made) all are an attempt to combat this problem in the industry. Diamonds are and have always been rare and valuable, but people don’t want to be supporting terrible things while giving gifts with special meaning to loved ones.

What are conflict-free diamonds? The answer to providing a desired material and precious stone while avoiding the unfortunate negative, real circumstances that afflict many of the areas diamonds are found.