Dad turns dead son’s remains into diamond

NEW YORK: In a first-of-its-kind case in Italy, a grieving father had his dead son eternally preserved by getting the 20-year-old’s ashes transformed into a diamond.
The father had his son’s body exhumed and cremated before sending the ashes off to Switzerland so they could be compressed into the gemstone. The young son, killed in a car crash earlier this year, had already been buried in his hometown of Treviso, in northern Italy, when his 55-year-old dad came up with the idea.
Remembrance diamonds’ are created by filtering and refining the carbon found in cremated ashes, then secured in a chamber, where intense pressure and a temperature similar to that of a volcano are applied, creating a synthetic diamond, ‘The Local’ reported. The process can cost as much as $18,000, according to ‘New York Daily News’. The father recently received the synthetic ‘Remembrance Diamond’ after an eight-month weight.
A firm from Switzerland specializes in converting the remains of the dead into diamonds. According to an ABC news report, the procedure mainly involves the carbon in the human body.
The report said, “A diamond is composed of pressurized carbons. Conveniently enough, human bodies are about 18% carbon. Using about a pound of ashes, the company is able to distill out the carbon and use it to form a man-made diamond in a mold under high pressure in about a week. These synthetic diamonds created this way are often blue because of certain chemicals in the human body.” The ashes-to-diamond business actually picked up sometime in 2012.