Diamond is a metastable allotrope of carbon, where the carbon atoms are arranged in a variation of the face-centered cubic crystal structure called a diamond lattice.
Russian scientists already synthesized diamonds from graphite at the beginning of the 1990's. The project moved to the US, due to a lack of funding, and nowadays it may well be a competition for natural diamonds (they are colored diamonds, that are rare in nature, and the only way to identify them is by the arrangement of tiny gas bubbles inside, the synthetic diamonds have a more perfect gas distribution inside).
The diamonds are made using high pressure, and are grown around tiny seed diamonds. They are colored due to impurities. Their value is a quarter of real diamonds value on the market.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_synthetic_diamond_manufacturers
Diamond preparation from pure carbon under high pressure conditions may not yet carried out in organic synthetic or other labs. Similar to natural process where carbon in coal allotrope form converted into diamond under huge pressure conditions.
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