Emerald Cut Moissanite Drops
£238.62
Moissanite Dreamcatcher Necklace
£178.78
Moissanite Wings Necklace
£216.18
2ct Moissanite Halo Ring
£185.82
Lab-created moissanite from our collection
Every gemstone has an origin story, but moissanite's is genuinely stranger than most: it arrived from space, was mistaken for diamond by one of the greatest chemists who ever lived, and waited a century before anyone could put it in a ring. Here's the true story — no embellishment needed.
A crater in Arizona, 1893
Around 50,000 years ago, a metallic meteorite slammed into the Arizona desert, leaving the mile-wide scar now known as Meteor Crater (or Canyon Diablo crater). In 1893, the French chemist Henri Moissan began examining mineral samples collected from the site. Among the fragments he found tiny, brilliantly sparkling crystals that he initially believed were diamonds — a reasonable guess, since the crystals were extraordinarily hard and dazzlingly reflective.
The beautiful mistake
It took over a decade to solve the puzzle. In 1904, Moissan concluded the crystals weren't diamond (crystallised carbon) at all, but silicon carbide — a compound of silicon and carbon with an entirely different crystal structure. The mineral was named moissanite in his honour the following year. There's a pleasing irony here: Moissan spent years of his career trying to synthesise diamonds in his electric arc furnace, and the mineral history remembers him for is the one that outsparkles them.
The Nobel Prize (not for moissanite)
In 1906, Moissan won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry — though honesty compels us to note it wasn't for moissanite. He was honoured for isolating the element fluorine (a feat that had injured or killed several chemists before him) and for developing the electric furnace. The meteorite crystals were almost a footnote in a remarkable career.
Why you'll never own natural moissanite
Natural moissanite is one of the rarest minerals on Earth. It turns up as microscopic grains in meteorites, in kimberlite deposits, and occasionally as tiny inclusions inside diamonds — never in crystals large enough to cut into a gem. Every moissanite in every piece of jewellery, ours included, is lab-created. That isn't a compromise; it's the only way this stone can exist at wearable size, and it comes with a guaranteed conflict-free origin.
From laboratory curiosity to jewellery box
Silicon carbide had actually been made synthetically since 1891, when Edward Acheson produced it as an industrial abrasive — under the trade name carborundum, it spent a century grinding metal rather than gracing hands. Gem-quality crystals were another matter entirely: it wasn't until the 1990s that researchers grew single crystals large and pure enough to facet, and the first moissanite jewellery reached the market in 1998. When the original patents expired in the mid-2010s, prices fell dramatically — which is why a stone that outperforms diamond on brilliance and fire is now one of the most affordable brilliant gems you can buy.
The stone that fell to Earth
We won't oversell it: the moissanite in our collection was grown in a lab, not chipped from a meteorite. But the crystal structure is the same one Moissan found in that Arizona crater — a mineral literally first known from space, harder than sapphire, with more fire than diamond. As origin stories go, jewellery doesn't get better than that.