Altr Brought a 4-Carat Man-Made Pink Diamond to Borsheims

Omaha, Neb.—Altr, the lab-grown arm of the Riam Group, has created a pink diamond that’s nearly 4 carats.

Displayed at Omaha, Nebraska, retailer Borsheims over the weekend, the diamond is a 3.99-carat Asscher cut grown using the chemical vapor deposition process (CVD) and was graded by GCAL as a fancy orangy pink of VS2 clarity.

While there are larger lab-grown diamonds in the world—WD Lab Grown Diamonds announced the growth and sale of a 6-carat round white diamond earlier this year, and St. Petersburg, Russia-based New Diamond Technology has created blue diamonds as big as 10 carats—Altr President Amish said that to his knowledge, this is the biggest man-made pink in the world.

It has been more than a decade in development.

In an interview Thursday afternoon at Borsheims, Shah said back in the early aughts, he was working for diamond company Grosbard, which was attempting to grow pinks using the HPHT method. But, he said, they couldn’t get the “baby” pink shade that’s most desirable. Instead, the stones were turning out a sort of raspberry color.

In 2011, he took over Grosbard and his family, which has been in the mined diamond business for 75 years, incorporated R.A. Riam Group Inc. in New York.

The company began growing diamonds using the CVD process, but Shah said they didn’t even try to make pinks at first because the cost of the research and development wasn’t worth the potential return.

Now, with the Riam Group’s Altr brand off the ground, it is.

Altr had 10 pink lab-grown diamonds at Borsheims, and Shah said they aim to have at least 20 more for the JCK Las Vegas show.

The 3.99-carat lab-grown pink diamond, dubbed “The Pink Rose,” retails for about $110,000. (A mined pink diamond of the same size and similar color would sell for more than $1 million.)

Altr brought in its lab-grown pinks to Borsheims for the Berkshire Hathaway shareholders weekend, the annual series of events scheduled around the shareholders meeting on Saturday, during which Chairman Warren Buffett and Vice Chairman Charlie Munger sit on a stage on the floor of CenturyLink Center and answer questions for six hours.

Save for a lull during the meeting on Saturday, shareholders crowded the 33,000-square-foot store over the weekend, some doing serious shopping while others just browsed.

In an interview on Saturday afternoon, CEO Karen Goracke, who has headed Borsheims since 2013, said while she didn’t have sales figures yet, it seemed