The GIA’s new Mine to ­Market (M2M) program tracks select diamonds through the pipeline and provides expanded information about the stones for consumers. Vice president of laboratory operations Matt Crimmin explains how it works. 

How does this program track ­diamonds?
If you gave me a polished diamond, I couldn’t tell you what mine it came from. But if you gave me a piece of rough and let me look at the polished, I could tell you that this polished did come from this rough. Because of the limited amount of diamond producers in the world, if we collect rough from a producer in a sealed package, we can collect scientific data that includes morphology, spectroscopy, as well as crystal growth structure. Then we can capture similar data on the polished. So we can then link the polished output to that rough.

How certain are you of that ­diamond’s origin?
There will be a percentage of the time where the results are ambiguous and we don’t feel 100 percent certain. In those cases, we would say it’s undetermined. But in about 90 percent of the cases we could confirm with 100 percent certainty that particular diamond came from that particular rough.

How does the M2M app work?
Now that we have this ability to link rough to polished, it opens the door to telling stories about diamonds to the normal consumer. This is an important need in the market. The app contains information about where the diamond came from, information about the cutting, information about the transformation from rough to polished, and a section where the jeweler can provide information. Lastly, the customer can personalize the app and upload their own videos and information.

M2M is free to download in the App Store and Google Play.