Hundreds of mini Polaroids are strung along the white hallways at the Eterneva lab in Kerrville, each one clipped to a long string by a clothespin. There’s Hassan, Luis Manuel, and Millie. Jojo, Angie, and Big Al. They’re fathers and sisters, children, mothers, astronauts, teachers, fisherman, and pilots. Their backgrounds and life experiences may have been vastly different, but their images all hang here for the same reason: a loved one didn’t want their stories to disappear, so their ashes have been turned into diamonds. Scattered among the photos, you’ll also find Camembert the dog and Scooter the cat.
“It’s about sixty/forty pets to people,” says Eterneva co-CEO and cofounder Adelle Archer. She’s riding in the front passenger seat of the company Tesla that is taking us to the lab. Abraham Levy, the company’s director of operations, drives the three of us out of Austin and along U.S. 290 into the Hill Country. I’ve never seen a diamond-growing lab and I’ve also never been inside of a Tesla. It took me at least 25 agonizing seconds to figure out how to open the car door. News flash: you push the button. As I was about to discover, extracting carbon from cremains to create a diamond is a little more complicated.
Archer founded the company in 2015 with her business partner Garrett Ozar. After college in Montreal and a quick stint working in Washington, she realized that D.C. politics were not for her, so she moved to Austin to get her M.B.A. at the now-closed Acton School of Business. When her friend and mentor Tracey died of pancreatic cancer, Archer was granted some of her ashes. Not long after, she had dinner with a diamond scientist who told her about the process of turning ashes or hair into lab-grown diamonds. “It blew my mind,” Archer says.
As an entrepreneur, her mind went straight to the idea of starting a company. The first piece of jewelry that Eterneva made was a black diamond ring created from Tracey’s ashes. From the front seat of the car, Archer turns and holds out her hand to show me the delicate black diamond ring on her finger. Once the business plan was in place, Ozar and Archer took their start-up to the combative stage of the ABC show Shark Tank in 2019, where they held their ground and convinced Mark Cuban to invest $600,000. They recently made megamotivational guru Tony Robbins cry during one of his virtual events, and Archer landed on the Forbes “30 Under 30” list in 2020. Despite these wins, a self-described “diamond expert” named Grant Mobley accused the company of being a scam after the Shark Tank appearance, claiming that the carbon content left over from cremation isn’t enough to produce a diamond. Cuban—who has since reinvested in the brand—hopped to Eterneva’s defense, and Eterneva then announced a partnership with TDI-Brooks and B&B Laboratories in College Station to test carbon content in the name of scientific transparency. The samples tested at the labs resulted in a 56-page report that stated there was enough carbon in the remains to refute Mobley’s claims. Mobley isn’t the only doubter; there is debate online about whether carbon can even survive the high temperatures of the cremation process (it can), and how much of any remaining carbon goes into the creation of the diamond.
When Archer compares Eterneva to other memorial diamond companies out there—there are plenty of competitors based around the world—she stresses the importance of transparency and honesty. Other brands might send ashes to labs in Russia or China without a tracking number, leaving loved ones in the dark. Eterneva uses facilities in Texas, Seattle, Canada, Germany, and Switzerland (the size and color of the diamond determines which lab it’s sent to), and they provide tracking numbers and updates throughout the process. Other companies might offer cheaper prices, but Archer is adamant that the price reflects the quality of the work. According to the pricing chart on their website, the cost for a .25 carat diamond starts at $3,499. (Compare that to a natural diamond of the same weight, which runs in the $300 to $500 range.) It’s $15,000 for a one-carat diamond ring or pendant, and three carats will set you back $42,000. You can also customize your diamond, picking a color that reflects the blue of your loved one’s eyes, or having the gem placed in a Star Trek setting. One woman had a heart-shaped diamond placed in a setting that looked like her dog Vixxie’s floppy ears. A customer named Jonetta put a blue diamond inside of a crown-shaped ring, because she called her mother Queen Elizabeth.
I like the idea of transforming a loved one into a diamond, but as we drive toward the lab, I’m curious to learn how the science checks out. Does your beloved person or pet make up 80 percent of the diamond, or .8 percent? As the online skeptics ask, how do you know they’re really in there? Death and grief are hard enough. A bereft person shouldn’t have to stress about carbon content.
Inside the lab, I’m shown the wall of mini-Polaroids. There are quotes from Carl Sagan and Lao Tzu on the walls, and Levy points out a massive bank vault that they use to store, well, anything that should not be stolen.
“We got it from a Doomsday guy on eBay,” says Levy. Pouring the lab’s foundation was serious business, since it had to handle the 60,000-pound vault, plus several 20,000-pound custom made steel machines they use to grow the diamonds.
Eterneva uses the HPHT (high pressure, high temperature) process to extract carbon from human or pet remains and create a diamond. The remains are placed into a graphite crucible, and the crucible is placed into one of the machines, which uses extreme pressure and heat to simulate the process that a natural diamond goes through over millions of years deep inside the earth’s crust. The other method, CVD (chemical vapor deposition), is less expensive and much quicker, but Archer says that HPHT is better suited to memorial diamonds since you’re growing one diamond in one machine at a time, as opposed to CVD, which entails growing hundreds of diamonds at once. This also contributes to Eterneva’s higher price point and longer wait time. “It’s kind of like buying a mass-produced piece of art at Target, versus commissioning an artist to paint you a custom one-of-a-kind painting.”
I asked Kenny Befus, associate professor at the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas at Austin, for his take on lab-grown memorial diamonds. Are they legit? Do actual scientists recoil in horror at the thought of millions of years of geological magic being reduced to several months inside a machine?
“It’s kind of cool from a geological perspective,” Befus says. He didn’t have a definitive answer as to whether he would have a memorial diamond made for a loved one, but as far as diamond legitimacy, he’s on board. “They may be synthetic and not made in nature, but they are real diamonds.”
As we walk through the lab, Archer and Levy introduce me to various Eterneva employees, who in typical start-up fashion, all seem to be 100 percent behind the company mission. They know the stories of every person in every Polaroid on the wall because they share those stories and photos via the company Slack channel. In the first room of the lab, an employee sets up fancy royal blue welcome kits that include a video explaining the process, a pamphlet that helps people pick their diamond, a container for half a cup of ashes or hair, and a return label. Once the ashes are sent off, customers receive weekly updates about the process. When the diamond is ready, it’s hand-delivered via FedEx, and displayed in another royal blue box. Eterneva isn’t immune from the language of grief—this final stage of the journey is called the Homecoming.
The business of grief is not a new phenomenon. We’ve been paying for coffins and gravestones and funeral arrangements for hundreds of years. I’ve flipped through a large binder full of laminated pages looking for a coffin for my mom, and I can tell you with 100 percent certainty, it would have been slightly less miserable and more meaningful to pick out a pretty diamond to remember her by. Not everyone utilizes cremation, even though it’s becoming more popular in the United States, and not everyone can afford an HPHT diamond, but the process of designing a ring or pendant or necklace and then wearing that piece of jewelry every day isn’t really about the bling. It can be a healthy way to process death.
After my tour of the lab, I reached out to Nanci Boice of the Austin Center For Grief and Loss. When I told her about Eterneva, she immediately mentioned Victorian mourning jewelry, or memento mori, which were sentimental symbolic pieces made to commemorate someone. Brooches or necklaces were also created from the deceased’s hair. Then and now, these objects serve as important ways to integrate grief into your life. “No matter what percentage of someone’s ashes are in the diamond, it seems like a meaningful thing,” says Boyce. “It’s just one more way to remember someone.”
Candi Cann, an associate professor at Baylor University who teaches a class on death and dying, was commissioned by Eterneva to do a study on whether memorial diamonds can help a grieving person process a loss. Cann says she spoke to 81 people who’d gotten Eterneva diamonds created from human or pet remains. She stresses that the study is general and not conclusive, but that an object like a memorial diamond (or any other object that links you to the person or pet you’ve lost) can be beneficial in processing the trauma of loss. “It can reintegrate the deceased into the living person’s life in a way that isn’t perceived negatively,” says Cann. “If you’re dragging around your mom’s urn with you to work or to a wedding, people might find that strange. With a diamond, it becomes a way to continue bonds in a way society looks more favorably upon.”
Cann tells me about a Buddhist custom in which people will look through a person’s cremains, and if they find little amber bead-like or crystalline objects, they believe it’s a sign of enlightenment and a life well-lived. The beads become an object that links them to the person who died and commemorates their life. Some choose to keep an urn full of a loved one’s remains on a fireplace mantle, or frame an imprint of their dog or cat’s paws. Others have their pets taxidermized for all eternity. There are even companies that allow you to preserve a loved one’s skin so you can frame their tattoos and hang them on the wall (no thank you, but whatever helps). If diamonds or tattoos aren’t your thing, you can always wear your dad’s old Astros cap or your mom’s favorite sweater. And as for my concern about what percentage of the diamond is someone’s ashes? In grief, .8 percent or 80 percent matters much less than how something makes you feel.
