Diamond company, LifeGem says it will turn a lock of Michael Jackson's hair into 10 diamonds.
Company founder, Dean VandenBiesen, confirms that an article in today's Daily News is legitimate and that the company will use hair retrieved from Jackson's horrific Pepsi commercial fire tragedy in 1984.
Vandenbiesen said the video footage from the commercial clearly shows a man throwing an Armani suit jacket over Jackson's burning scalp.
Shortly after, the same man is seen retrieving a lock of hair from the floor. A photo on the LifeGem website seems to show the Jacket and a square of paper on which a lock of hair is placed.
LifeGem says it needs only a relatively small amount of biological material to create a gem. "We only need 200 miligrams to create a 1 carat diamond. In this case, we have enough to easily make 10," Vandenbiesen says.
As to whether the hair is actually Jackson's, Dean said that based on the footage and verification by someone he calls 'the most famous hair collector in the world,' they are confident what they have is the real thing. However, Dean says the hair has not been DNA tested. He did not comment on whether that testing was planned.
According to a report in the on-line publication Orato, that surfaced days after Jackson's death, Gunther Von Hagens, anatomist and inventor of the plastination process and originator of Bodyworlds claims he will plastinate Michael Jackson's body.
The report claimed that von Hagens had been in talks with the Jackson family in the months prior to Michael Jackson's death and that permission had been granted for Jackson's body to undergo the procees in the event of his death. However, scandal rag TMZ, which was first to report Michael Jackson's death, claims the Orato report is false.
According to TMZ.com, "The director of publicity for Dr. Gunther von Hagens tells TMZ someone claiming to be from Jackson's management team did contact BodyWorlds several months ago about Jackson's interest in being preserved in plastic.
Although she says, "We can further confirm that Mr. Jackson is not now a registered body donor in the Institute for Plastination's Body Donation Program," the director does not categorically deny contact, nor did she state the Jackson family has denied the possibility, leaving much open to question.
