Photo Credit: Courtesy Rinaldo Willy/Algordanza
These diamonds, made from animal ashes, were created through the same process used to make diamonds from human remains.

Sure, diamonds are a girl’s best friend, but now these diamonds on this girl’s lovely neck might be her relatives. You say it sounds gory? Of course it does, and it yodels, too.

NPR reported today about the Swiss company Algordanza, which takes cremated human remains, applies high heat and pressure that mimic the Earth’s, and compresses them into diamonds.

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Rinaldo Willy, the company’s founder and CEO, says he came up with the idea a decade ago, and people loved it. His customers, he says, span 24 countries.

I know you’re tempted to bring up the past, as in, roughly, 1942-45—I am, too. I suppose the Swiss who stashed away the deposits of Jewish customers who perished in the camps, would have been delighted to also put their ashes to good use. There, I said it, so you won’t have to.

Each year, Mr. Willy processes the remains of between 800 and 900 people. It takes three months, and, presto, there’s grandma on a necklace.

Willy says human ashes turn out as bluish diamonds, because our bones contain trace amounts of boron. But once in a while these human diamonds come out white, yellow and even black.

“Every diamond from each person is slightly different,” Willy says, sounding almost poetic and not at all ghoulish. “It’s always a unique diamond.”

Willy says about 25 percent of Algordanza’s customers are from Japan.

Why am I not surprised?

The turn-mom-into-jewelry process costs between $5,000 and $22,000, more than a funeral, but also shinier. And it takes the average natural diamond millions of years to transform from charcoal to gem—here you get it in 12 weeks.

“The more time you give this process, the bigger the rough diamond starts to grow,” Willy says.

An American company called LifeGem offers the same services, but, somehow, you trust a Swiss person to turn expired people into wealth.


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Yori Yanover has been a working journalist since age 17, before he enlisted and worked for Ba'Machane Nachal. Since then he has worked for Israel Shelanu, the US supplement of Yedioth, JCN18.com, USAJewish.com, Lubavitch News Service, Arutz 7 (as DJ on the high seas), and the Grand Street News. He has published Dancing and Crying, a colorful and intimate portrait of the last two years in the life of the late Lubavitch Rebbe, (in Hebrew), and two fun books in English: The Cabalist's Daughter: A Novel of Practical Messianic Redemption, and How Would God REALLY Vote.