Why We Started
THE SILMARIL was founded in 2024 with a clear purpose: to make memorial diamonds accessible to New Zealanders without the overseas price premium. For too long, families in New Zealand who wanted to transform a loved one's hair into a diamond faced a difficult choice — pay NZ$3,500–$4,000+ to an international provider, or go without.
We built Silmaril to change that. By managing customer care, sample intake, lab logistics, and final delivery from New Zealand while working directly with specialist HPHT lab partners in China, we offer transparent pricing from NZ$2,650.
Every detail of our process — from the sample preparation instructions we post to your door to the One Guest, One Chamber guarantee — is designed around the trust that this kind of memorial requires. We work with human hair and pet hair equally, with no difference in care, quality, or price.
Hair Only — By Design
We work exclusively with hair. Not ashes, not bone ash — hair. This is a deliberate technical and quality decision. Hair is rich in carbon-bearing keratin, which can be extracted, purified to at least 99.95%, converted into graphite, and grown into a genuine diamond through the HPHT process completed by our specialist lab partners in China. Cremation ashes, by contrast, contain high levels of calcium phosphate, metal oxides, and other impurities that are incompatible with reliable HPHT growth and would compromise the integrity of the finished stone.
If your loved one has been cremated and you saved hair beforehand — even a small amount — we can still help. If you have only ashes, we explain your options on our dedicated ashes page.
The Technology
We use High Pressure High Temperature technology. Carbon purified from your loved one's hair is converted into graphite, then placed in a specialist HPHT growth cell with a diamond seed and metal catalyst. At typical conditions of approximately 5.5 GPa and 1,450°C, carbon crystallises on the seed over roughly 35–50 days.
The result is a stone with the same diamond crystal structure and core physical, chemical and optical properties as a mined diamond — not a simulant or cubic zirconia. It tests as diamond using standard gemological tests; specialised equipment can identify its laboratory-grown origin. GIA or IGI certification can be arranged on request.
