Diamonds Created Out Of Thin Air Sounds Like Magic. Aether Is Doing It.

Diamonds Created Out Of Thin Air Sounds Like Magic. Aether Is Doing It.

"We take harmful carbon that is warming the planet and turn it into a beautiful form of carbon that ... [+] warms the heart – diamonds," says Ryan Shearman, co-founder Aether diamonds. It sounds like alchemy: taking the lightest thing on earth – air – and turning it into one of the earth's hardest – diamonds. The 21st century alchemists who mastered the process are Ryan Shearman and Daniel Wojno and their company Aether. Aether pulls the greenhouse-gas carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to create lab-grown diamonds (LGD). And an Aether diamond is uniquely differentiated from other LGD, because all others are produced from petrochemicals like methane. Now with a round of $18 million Series A funding, led by Helena, a company founded by Forbes 30 under 30 Henry Elkus, Aether will ramp up production of its diamonds sold in jewelry settings direct-to-consumer or loose, including a wholesale program that is just getting underway. Aether is poised to change the calculus in how consumers buy diamonds, whether the mined or lab-grown variety. No other company can claim to extract 20 metric tons of CO2 from the air for every one carat diamond produced. That cancels out more than the