This solid diamond ring designed by Jony Ive and Marc Newsom will fit size 5 or less.

Designed by famed Apple design chief Jony Ive and famed industrial designer Marc Newson, this Diamond Ring for the (Red) Charity auction is carved out of one massive stone. Diamond Foundry is responsible for the creation of the giant diamond with which the $250,000 solid diamond ring conceived by the pair of designers Ive and Newson was etched.

Diamond Foundry is America’s leading producer of diamonds, creating real diamonds above ground in San Francisco foundry using proprietary solar technology. Utilising renewable energy, the creators of Jony Ive and Marc Newson’s epic multi-faceted solid diamond ring, are the world’s first certified carbon neutral diamond producer.

Jony Ive and Marc Newson designed $250,000 solid Diamond Ring for (Red) Charity

Both designers have curated (RED)’s 2013 Design and Innovation auction, and they designed this unique diamond ring, made exclusively for (RED) by Diamond Foundry, which will be auctioned by Sotheby’s in Miami on December 5th as part of the third (RED) auction, with proceeds going toward the fight against AIDS.

Following Ive & Newson’s “less is more” design philosophy, the (RED) diamond ring is uncompromised by traditional metal settings and bands. Theirs was an ambition made possible because Diamond Foundry was able to grow the extraordinary scale of stone required for a ring to be completely made of diamond.

Diamond Foundry’s founding team of M.I.T., Stanford, and Princeton engineers previously developed pioneering breakthroughs in solar power technology. They had a hunch that techniques used to harness the energy of the sun could also be used to make a better diamond, atom by atom.

Processes involved in the creation of this solid diamond ring was challenging to say the least – no base plate of the required dimensions existed, and no existing earth extracted diamond would be sufficiently pure enough to allow growing a rough diamond of this size.  Diamond Foundry’s plasma reactor technology grew the diamond by coaxing the first ten atoms of a layer into believing that a certain rare metal is a diamond, allowing the atoms assemble into real diamond of unprecedented size.

Each Diamond Foundry-made diamond grows in its own unique shape.

Diamond Foundry’s Antwerp based master cutter, a veteran with large diamonds, then conceptualised custom tools from a supplier in Belgium to work with the world’s largest diamond. Having no precedence and no guidelines, the diamond block will be faceted with several thousand facets, some of which are as small as several hundred micrometers.

Using adapted gem cutting techniques, the interior ring will be cylindrically cut out for the desired smoothness using a micrometer thick water jet inside which a laser beam is cast. The finished ring will have between  2000-3000  facets which have never been seen before on a single piece.

Follow the (RED) 2018 auction here.