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The Stone
1.58 billion years
1.58 billion years
in the making.
And then, one afternoon in November 2020, no more of them.
- 1985
- Mine
commissioned - 2020
- Production
ceased - 865m
- Carats lifted
in 37 years - 80%
- Of that output
was brown - 0
- Coming
out today
I
One hole in the ground.
Every diamond we set came out of the same place: the Argyle mine, in the East Kimberley of Western Australia, about 185 kilometres by road from Kununurra and a long way from anywhere else.
Argyle was unusual before anyone knew what was in it. Almost every diamond mine in the world works a kimberlite pipe. Argyle was lamproite — the first commercial hard-rock diamond mine that wasn't sitting on kimberlite at all. Geologists had not been looking there, because nobody thought diamonds would be there.
The stones themselves date to roughly 1.58 billion years, which makes them among the oldest diamonds ever found. They were old before there was anything alive on land to see them.
Brown was the whole point, and nobody wanted it.
II
Why the colour.
Yellow diamonds are yellow because of nitrogen. Blue ones are blue because of boron. A chocolate diamond has nothing extra in it at all.
The colour is structural. On the way up, under enormous pressure, the crystal lattice deformed — slipped and bent along its planes. Light entering a distorted lattice comes back warm. What you are looking at is not a chemical tint but a record of the pressure the stone survived.
Argyle was the world's largest producer of diamonds by volume, and roughly 80% of everything it produced was brown. For years that was considered the problem — the industrial residue left over once the whites and the famous pinks were picked out. The stones were sold by the tonne for drill bits.
Renaming them was the turn. Champagne and cognac: not a lesser white diamond, but its own colour, on its own scale.
III
The scale.
Chocolate diamonds are not graded on the D–Z scale used for white stones, where colour counts against you. They have their own, running from C1 to C7 — light straw through to deep cognac. It is a scale of intensity, not of quality. The number on your certificate is the depth of the colour, nothing more.
You will see these numbers on our pieces — a stone described as C5–C7 runs from dark champagne into cognac. Swatches here are indicative; the stone in your hand is the only true reference.
There will not be any more.
3 November 2020
IV
A closed mine.
Argyle stopped production on 3 November 2020. The pit is being filled and the country returned. It is not paused, or waiting on a better diamond price. It is finished.
Which means the supply of Australian chocolate diamonds is now a fixed quantity, sitting in vaults and in workshops and on hands. Every stone we set is drawn from what came out before that day. When a design sells through, we cannot simply cut another one to match — we work with what the parcel gives us, which is why two of the same design are never quite the same piece.
That is the honest version of “rare”. Not a marketing scarcity. A closed mine.
V
Whose country.
The mine sat on Aboriginal land, and the stones came out of someone's country.
The site is associated with the Barramundi Dreaming, and the mine operated under the Argyle Participation Agreement, negotiated with the traditional owner family groups and administered through the Gelganyem Trust. Traditional owners have been central to how the mine is being closed and the land rehabilitated.
We think that belongs on a page about the stone, not in the fine print.