Not all lab grown sapphires are the same

[00:00:00]People assume all lab grown sapphires are made the exact same way, but they aren't. The quality depends heavily on the manufacturing process. The most common method is flame fusion. You take powdered aluminium oxide and drop it through a 2,000° flame. The powder melts and drips onto a rotating pedestal, building up a crystal stagmite called a bull. It takes just hours, so it's highly efficient. But because the crystal grows so rapidly, it can trap high internal stress and leave curved growth lines inside the stone. Then you have the Cherolski process, also known as crystal pulling. Instead of dropping powder through a flame, you melt the chemicals inside an aridium crucible.

[00:00:36]And then you dip a tiny sapphire seed crystal into the liquid melt and very slowly pull it upwards. As it pulls, the liquid crystallizes perfectly onto the seed. It can take days instead of hours, but the resulting crystal has extremely low internal stress and no curved growth lines. The process is so structurally perfect that it's the exact same method used to manufacture ruby rods for industrial lasers. Both methods create a chemically authentic sapphire, but one is built sort of like a dripping candle and the other one is engineered like real optical hardware.