It wasn’t until the 1980s that Cubic Zirconia took off commercially, when Swarovski and Co. began producing it for mass retail consumption.
CUBIC ZIRCONIA WAS DISCOVERED in its natural state in 1937 by two German mineralogists, von Stackelberg and Chudoba, however they thought so little of their discovery that they did not bother to give it a name. Some of the earliest research into synthetised Cubic Zirconia production occurred in France in the 1960s, with much work done by Y. Roulin and R. Collongues. Their technique involved containing the molten Zirconia within a shell of still-solid Zirconia, which produced only small crystals. This process was called cold crucible, referring to the system of water cooling that was used.
In the 1970s, Soviet scientists at the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow were
