The diamond industry got into this mess by insisting that the best diamonds were "flawless". This put them into competition with the semiconductor materials industry, which routinely manufactures crystals with lattice defect levels well below anything seen in natural diamonds. The best synthetic diamonds now have below 1 part per billion atoms in the wrong place.[1] Those are for radiation detectors, quantum electronics, and such. Nobody needs a jewel that flawless.
De Beers tried to squelch the first US startup to turn out gemstones in production by
intimidating the founder. The founder was a retired US Army brigadier general (2 silver stars earned in combat) and wasn't intimidated. That was back in 2011, and since then it's been all downhill for natural diamonds.
De Beers later tried building synthetic diamond detectors. There are simple detectors for detecting cubic zirconia and such, but separating synthetic and natural diamonds is tough. The current approach is to hit the diamond with a burst of UV, turn off the UV and then capture an image. The spectrum of the afterglow indicates impurities in the diamond. The latest De Beers testing machine [2] is looking for nitrogen atoms embedded in the diamond, which is seen more in natural diamonds than synthetics. The synthetics are better than the naturals. Presumably synthetic manufacturers could add some nitrogen if they wanted to bother.
This is the latest De Beers machine in their losing battle against synthetics. They've had DiamondScan, DiamondView, DiamondSure, SynthDetect, and now DiamondProof. Even the most elaborate devices have a false alarm rate of about 5%.[3]
>De Beers tried to squelch the first US startup to turn out gemstones in production by intimidating the founder. The founder was a retired US Army brigadier general (2 silver stars earned in combat) and wasn't intimidated.
Hahaha, this is amazing. All of the US ex-military I worked with was super chill but had zero tolerance for bullshit, I can't even imagine somebody trying to pull it off and thinking it's a good idea.
You'd be surprised how few people even read a resume before turning to intimidation - legal, physical, political or otherwise. It's amazing how often managers think they can bully someone, and then find out that their opponent discovered kryptonite a long time ago.
Monster Cable went after Blue Jeans Cable, a small boutique audio cable manufacturer in Seattle, threatening basically patent-driven extortion and licensing.
> After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1985, I spent nineteen years in litigation practice, with a focus upon federal litigation involving large damages and complex issues. My first seven years were spent primarily on the defense side, where I developed an intense frustration with insurance carriers who would settle meritless claims for nuisance value when the better long-term view would have been to fight against vexatious litigation asa matter of principle...
> If you sue me, the case will go to judgment, and I will hold the court's
attention upon the merits of your claims--or, to speak more precisely, the absence of merit from your claims--from start to finish. Not only am I unintimidated by litigation; I sometimes rather miss it.
Jewels don’t appeal to me or my partner at all. De Beers diamonds are a scam. After reading this, those diamonds grown in Boston sounds so friggin cool though. The amount of technological innovation behind it is incredible. Maybe I’m just wooed by science and human innovation.
Shoot, if I was in the unlikely fictional scenario where I even wore a diamond and someone asked about it, I would be THRILLED to get into the science of how it was grown in a lab. What a cool story. Instead of just going “yeah, thanks, it cost a fortune and three kids died pulling it out of the dirt”.
Do I understand that correctly: "natural diamond" businesses pushed hype towards purity of their product, yet now they can only prove it's and actual natural diamond by confirming it's much less pure than their "competitors"?
Quoting myself from elsewhere, but I would like to make a legislation proposal: all natural gems must be marketed as "crude" due to impurities not present in their synthetic counterparts.
This would end the De Beers cartel basically overnight by smashing the "appeal to nature" fallacy that "natural gem" marketing and pricing relies on.
Good, de beers is highly amoral business and there is no way around it. Blood diamonds and lies around them, artificially elevating diamond prices, making up the classic PR campaign that somehow inserted equation wedding=big diamond into minds of mostly US population for few generations.
When I see somebody with diamonds and check with them that they are naturals, its pretty clear what kind of person I am dealing with. To be kind and polite here, its not a nice evaluation and it ends up very precise. I let them know what's the general consensus on morality regarding those stones, its sometimes funny to watch their reactions and at least now they know something and can't anymore argue they didn't. What they do with that info is up to them.
I wonder where these diamonds are laundered. probably some country with a comparatively high gdp that is a big time diamond exporter despite having zero diamond mines I imagine.
For anyone else googling this like I just did, Carter Clarke Jr. is the Gemesis founder.
Took me longer than I care to admit reading the Wikipedia page for Carter Clarke Sr. (also a brigadier general) who led a pretty interesting life of his own (e.g. leading the War Department investigation of Pearl Harbor intelligence failures) before I realized I had the wrong generation of Clarkes.
I don't know anything about the industry, but I thought it would be a good test for the state of AI. I put Animats' comment and your question into DeepSeek R1 and it said (I think correctly) that the company was Gemesis and the retiree was Carter Clarke Jr: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemesis.
I’m pretty sure the death knell for the industry is changing tastes. Who is going to innovate in marketing?
Certainly this is an approach, get a bunch of nerds engaged with the product, co opted into marketing it. You’re quite literally storytelling. But something tells me that “CTO” is not the fashion industry’s most lucrative demo. And for better or worse, no matter how you’re making you’re diamond, you’re focusing on 18-45yo rich women seeking experiences, and I don’t see how the diamond’s origin, even if everything you say is 100% true, factors into the retail journey at Tiffany’s.
The death knell for the industry is the redefinition of the unit of American society.
The unit at the time of DaBeers smashing 1947 "Diamonds are Forever" campaign, in 1947, was the -family-. It wasn't too long after women's suffrage, and still women were expected to be barefoot and pregnant, after all, birth control wouldn't come for another 20 years. Families were the operative entity messaging targeted, and the campaign was successful because the diamond was a sort of foundation for the foundation of the family, the marriage, not dissimilar in spirit from long held human societal norms of dowries and such.
The sexual and hippie revolution of the 1960s shook the whole thing up. Women didn't need families, there was birth control, women could work, a revolution carrying forth to the 1980s shark killer business woman to today where in fact many universities have become female majority. The modern unit of american society is the individual, not the unit, making the diamond an anachronistic echo of a once proud culture, now seen as a bit dated, a bit weird, a bit unsettling and paternalistic, instilling the same feelings in a person that an old Playboy magazine might.
No, the industry grew over that period as diamonds were increasingly purchased for more than wedding rings and stones on rings became larger and more ornate. Over this period, a wider variety of retailers began to sell jewelry, increasing accessibility and price variance. The social trend you identified, in correlation with others, increased available discretionary income which was good for the fashion industries.
As someone who’s already cynical about the ”natural”(/extractive) diamond “industry”(/cartel), the points made on that site are hilarious and absurd — highly recommend a scroll for anyone interested in how desperate they are to attack the new tech. Just from that comparison page, my favorite argument is probably “lab grown diamonds are from (dirty, evil) India and China, whereas natural diamonds are from ~nature~”, although “lab grown diamonds are so perfect that they’re all the same grade, and therefore boring” is a close runner up.
The fact that they’re now publishing a magazine devoted entirely to this topic tells me they haven’t slowed down, just improved their ad spend so that it’s not wasted on me! Something tells me there’s quite a mountain of financial instruments secured by the warehouses of diamonds they have to keep supply tight, so I can only see this ramping up in the short term.
Like the parent comment says, there will still be demand for high-quality diamonds whether or not they're considered a luxury. It's more that the marginal utility of a diamond has plummeted, compared to cheaper and easily mass-produced iPhones or Labubu dolls. Hardly surprising that diamonds are unpopular to a generation of Americans who are overwhelmingly unlikely to ever own a house.
It's not the 1950s anymore, and blue-collar workers don't want to piss away 3 months salary to buy a depreciating asset. It's really only marketable if you lie to the customer.
Nitrogen Vacancy (diamond) magnetometers are a relatively recent development. As I understand it, the substrate is typically formed via ion bombardment of synthetic diamonds
First, it is way harder to do.Every imperfection introduces secondary effects.
Second, the people that make those diamonds are not ashamed or hiding but believe on what they do. Leo Di Caprio for example invested millions in making synthetic diamonds that do not finance wars in Africa.
New generations are proud of people not dying for getting their beautiful stones.
lastly, diamonds, like gold, are very useful for science. In particular they are amazing semiconductors with incredible heat dissipation and small power loses. If we get better, less defects diamonds ,cheaper, power electronics will be revolutionised.
Your proposed engineered randomness goes against almost everything making lab grown diamonds popular -- pseudo mined diamonds would cost more than flawless ones and increasingly no one cares what DeBeer's exotic lab tests think. Your post didn't ring LLM to me, it just seemed disconnected from the article and market trends.
What I'd pay more for is an exotic color or multicolor diamond (a diamond built around a ruby?). Or one that changed color depending on the lighting -- picture moonlight turning it a brilliant blue or purple (basically I want it to come from Middle Earth). Or one that glowed red in the dark.
Actually, I wouldn't be the target for this, but I'd love it if they existed.
I understand where you're coming from, but there's also value in setting norms publicly, especially at times like these, at inflection points. The loud point and stare can have a bigger effect on behavior than the quiet disappearance of a message here and there.
I know, and it's an ongoing and developing issue for us to manage and find ways of addressing, knowing that it's only going to get harder.
Our position now (as always) is that the negative consequences of a false accusation outweigh the benefit of a valid accusation. We don't want to be a site that shames people or piles on. We can't really know what people are thinking when they post a comment, or why they might use a tool to generate or improve it. Downvoting and flagging are strong enough signals, and do enough to hide the comment if others agree that's what should happen, and that's what happened here. It's good to email us so we can see if there's a pattern of behaviour we need to know about so we can penalize or ban the account or take some other appropriate action once we can see the full picture.
I subjected some of my own writing to an "AI-detector" and was surprised to find what a high percentage of AI I must have in my DNA.
Joking aside, I have found myself recently using phrases and styles of turning a phrase and stopped myself asking, "since when do you say that?"
Since I've spent countless hours talking to LLMs, that's when. I even had a multi-hour conversation with ChatGPT about my idea for "perfectly flawed" lab-grown diamonds, several months ago and was excited to finally find a place to talk about what I learned, hence the comment you attribute to being from an LLM.
I'm probably not an LLM, nor did I generate a response for this thread using an LLM, but you've just made me really self-conscious about how now humans, or at least myself, have to be wary that we don't start talking like the LLMs that are supposed to be talking like us.
If you want to hide the LLM tells better, you need more consistent combing. E.g. "hasn’t", "they’ve", "wouldn’t", "“natural” and “synthetic”" all use curly quotes, but other parts use straight quotes. Somebody tapping away at a keyboard will probably be consistent instead.
Another big tell is the total overuse of antithesis. ChatGPT is cringy for this. "Not this, but that". I counted six instances of antithesis in your message. There were also three instances of hypophora, another beloved of essay generators.
The em dash use is also very telling. And before “I’ve been using em dash for a while”, no, they haven’t. This is the _only_ comment they’ve ever made that uses em dash.
People, not sure you realised, but this thread is gold. Maybe even intentionally?
You are debating over a message that imagines the consequences of generating progressively more natural-looking diamonds by adding them imperfections; you are claiming that the message doesn't look natural enough because it doesn't have the imperfections of a typed message (wrong quotes, wrong dashes).
Fact is, with diamonds and intelligence we're moving to a Dickian scenario where progressively complicated and ineffective tests are needed to tell the artificial from the natural. And soon the Voight-Kampff test won't work anymore.
Christ almighty people, even the Notes app on my iPhone (frustratingly, when you're typing something destined to be pasted in a console or, apparently a comment on HN) will "correct" quotes to the squirrelly quotes and my dashes to em dashes. I never want them and when I find them troublesome I will programmatically remove them before pasting, but in this case I didn't think they would bother anything. I didn't think anyone would want to read the 12 pages or so I had written on the topic so I pasted as-is. I'm not using an LLM to write for me. Summarize for brevity at times, sure, but my thoughts are my own. (Punctuation, perhaps not. I've written about my frustration with unwanted "smart" punctuation and the principle of least astonishment elsewhere. It is frustrating.) If I thought you cared enough about my thoughts on synthetic diamond-making (from a non-domain expert) I'd post the entire thing for your reading pleasure, but I gather you're more interested in trying to make me look like I'm using an LLM to write my replies. Here, from my phone, directly into the comment field, I am certain there are no "tells" that the content may have been typed elsewhere and summarized for brevity. Already this is more time talking about something off-topic than I'd hoped for. I was genuinely excited that there was something topical that came up on this obscure synthetic diamonds topic I had written and thought extensively about, and rushed to share what I had hoped would come across as a palatable sized summary of such. (You might be surprised to read me admit that I can be overly loquacious.) I'll shaddup already but this tendency for me to ramble on when something could have been said with far fewer words is exactly what I thought might be a good use case for summarization. Y'know, got a lot to say but trying to be respectful of other people's time and all. <|ENDTEXT>
My wife is in the retail side of this market and I’ve had a lot of second hand familiarity with the transition to lab grown.
What I find most interesting is the weight put on the ethical side. I think it’s overstated. When the issue became big, the Blood Diamond movie, sales of lab grown did not markedly increase. It took another decade or so to become more prevalent. What changed over that time is the price, IIRC the price was comparable to natural at the time the movie came out. Ethics were not compelling enough for most people at that price. When prices got about 50% of natural, it became much more compelling. Now that it’s around 10%, it’s practically so compelling that buying natural isn’t even a real consideration for many people.
Anyways, I think people use the Blood Diamond talking point as a socially acceptable reason- it’s what they tell their parents and grandparents who might judge them- but in reality it’s almost completely a financial decision. If the tables were turned and natural diamonds became 1/10th the cost of lab grown, the market would completely flip back practically overnight.
It’s also worth noting that diamonds for jewelry have very little to no used market value or appreciation. Natural diamonds might be worth the premium if they could be a store of value like gold, but that isn’t the case. I think that is a clue to the absence of a fair market dynamic.
It’s really weird, how popular culture keeps using diamonds as (usually ill-gotten) currency. In reality, they are pretty terrible for the purpose, and I think most people are aware of that.
Buying diamonds has always been expensive, but selling them, is another matter, entirely.
Also, deBeers invented the diamond wedding ring fairly recently. My mother’s wedding ring was a big-ass sapphire. If you look at classical wedding rings, they are often non-diamond stones.
I think most of that perception comes from cultural depictions of jewel thieves. If you're stealing the diamonds, not paying for them, then they're a very concealable and conveniently value-dense. It doesn't matter to a jewel thief that the tiny little shard of shiny gravel was originally purchased for many thousands of dollars. What he cares about is he can hide it anywhere and get hundreds of dollars for it. Much better than stealing TVs.
> I think that is a clue to the absence of a fair market dynamic.
Also probably due in part to what's been called the best advertising slogan of the 20th century: "A Diamond is Forever" [0]. The implication being that you're not supposed to sell (or buy) a used diamond.
I bought mine from therealreal.com. I got a lot more ring than I'd normally be able to afford, and it's an elegant design you don't see everywhere.
Check with the recipient beforehand, of course. You're not the one who has to wear it, and no amount of logic is going to change a mind that wants a brand new, natural diamond.
Just make sure to pay your taxes and avoid decaf coffee, otherwise some college kid is going to buy one for you and install it in your basement porta-potty time machine.
im a bit confused ... how can most people know if the diamond has been "used"?
you typically buy jewelry with a diamond in it. the jewler could gave bought it new or pried it out of an old ring. How would you know ? (and why would anyone care?)
It is not so much that used diamonds are worth less (although they might decline in value without provenance to prove they are natural or if they are chipped) but the huge markup on retail jewellery. It's easy for any member of the public to buy and sell gold at close to market price, it's much harder with diamonds.
> It is not so much that used diamonds are worth less (although they might decline in value without provenance to prove they are natural or if they are chipped) but the huge markup on retail jewellery.
Precisely.
And on top of that some jewelry stores are worried that customers would consider a below wholesale offer to be insulting, so they often refuse to buy piece back at all.
Jewellery stores have started supplying certificates of pedigree with diamonds they sell. This helps to reassure the customer that the diamond is not second-hand.
You are obviously affected by this ailment called "science-based critical thinking". It is bad (for business) so you should consult an astrologist or a zen furniture arranger to seek remediation.
Just yesterday I was joking with friends that I wish I could give my soon to be fiancee a gold ring with a diamond shaped gold nugget in the setting as an engagement ring...
> What I find most interesting is the weight put on the ethical side. I think it’s overstated. When the issue became big, the Blood Diamond movie, sales of lab grown did not markedly increase.
It was not a switch that was pushed the moment the movie went out. In the grand scheme of things, the movie was not even that popular. But there definitely was a realisation that diamond prices were completely artificially inflated by an oligopoly, and that there were many issues with how they were sourced.
Just because demand did not follow a step function when the file was released does not imply that ethics are not relevant.
That makes it popular for a movie. It also means that most people didn't watch it, at least not in theaters. (I guess that would be true even for the most popular movie of all time. The most popular thing in some category is rarely more popular than the entire rest of the category combined.)
Even if every viewer paid $1, that would be 171 millions people, which really is not that much compared to even the population of North America and Europe combined.
Most people don't watch films in the theater run exclusively. It has been viewed by many hundreds of millions of people after it left the box office. Also, network effects account for a lot. One person seeing the film and talking about blood diamonds to their friends and family leads to 2 others who look into it, which leads to 4 more, etc. That's how ideas spread.
It does not exist in a vacuum. I am not even arguing that the movie was irrelevant, but it was not that huge a deal and it was not the only voice in the discussion. The point in the parent was that ethics was not a driver because there was no inflection point when the movie was released, which to me is fallacious.
But one big reason lab-grown diamonds are so much less expensive now is economy of scale. Something had to start increasing the demand to enable that. Especially considering the large marketing investment against lab-grown gems by established players, trying to make them seem “tacky.” The ethical issues have been a very capable counter-message to that.
> Something had to start increasing the demand to enable that.
Yes — industry. From Wikipedia:
> Eighty percent of mined diamonds (equal to about 135,000,000 carats (27,000 kg) annually) are unsuitable for use as gemstones and are used industrially.[131] In addition to mined diamonds, synthetic diamonds found industrial applications almost immediately after their invention in the 1950s; in 2014, 4,500,000,000 carats (900,000 kg) of synthetic diamonds were produced, 90% of which were produced in China. Approximately 90% of diamond grinding grit is currently of synthetic origin.[132]
> ...
> Industrial use of diamonds has historically been associated with their hardness, which makes diamond the ideal material for cutting and grinding tools. As the hardest known naturally occurring material, diamond can be used to polish, cut, or wear away any material, including other diamonds. Common industrial applications of this property include diamond-tipped drill bits and saws, and the use of diamond powder as an abrasive.
The process to produce industrial diamonds (essentially, very hard dust) does not meaningfully help scale the process to produce first-quality synthetic diamond gems for jewelry.
As your quote points out, synthetic industrial diamonds have been available for many decades. But it is only recently that synthetic diamond gems have achieved popularity and price advantage for jewelry.
Diamond dust used to be the main industrial product. But as diamond synthesis has improved, cutting tools are now using larger diamonds.[1] This has been a big win for the well-drilling industry. Newer bits cut rock, and with diamond, they last long enough to get the job done. The classic Hughes tricone bit, the thing that looks like a set of bevel gears, is not a cutter. It's a rock crusher.[2] It cracks by compressive force.
(Patents were really strong back then. Howard Hughes, Sr. became the richest man in the world by buying the patent for the drill bit. He then manufactured bits and rented them out for a fraction of the profits from the oil well.)
It depends what you use it for. Abrasives can use pretty much any horrible misshapen brown rock of roughly the right size.
But there are also applications for larger flawless crystals in things like diamond windows, semiconductor substrate and microtomes. Recently you can even buy a diamond 3D printer nozzle for extruding abrasive materials like carbon fibre. These require better processes than the ones that churn out abrasive diamonds.
A rising tide lifts all boats. The demand for industrial diamonds is insatiable. And for bigger grits. This leads to people learning how to make bigger and stronger diamonds. Eventually some of the knowledge and tech will percolate to the jewelry side.
"When a thing becomes affordable more people have access to it."
nods nods
So is our conclusion "People talk a big game but their morality clearly fails based on how the market has played out" or "People want things but the market has competing forces and sometimes takes a long time to find ways to provide people what they want?"
My rephrasing to your statement is "It took the mass market decades to figure out how to deliver consumers the solar/electric cars they wanted at a price they could afford."
Also, points in the general direction of the established energy providers I think these assholes had some incentive not to let the market get out from under them and make sure they were the ones who continued to profit from it.
> My rephrasing to your statement is "It took the mass market decades to figure out how to deliver consumers the solar/electric cars they wanted at a price they could afford."
Nicely stated. I like your style of debate / deliberation.
Um, I'm going to go ahead and point out this, probably not super relevant data point
"While trailing Gen Xers for the beginning of their adult lives, younger American households’ average wealth began to exceed that of Gen Xers at about age 30, reflecting historically high wealth levels following the COVID-19 pandemic." I have a feeling that average wealth adjustment falls very heavily on the home owners, which is only just above half of all the cohort. Had a similar thing happened to boomers in 89, almost 70% would have benefitted.
I think it's also worth pointing out: The share of wealth held by boomers in 89 (why 89? Because they didn't have data before that. It's why the graphs start in a weird spot and why it's not a great study unless you're trying to pull out a "gotcha" stat) represented almost 20% of the total wealth in the country. "Millenials/GenZ" has a hold on only HALF that percentage.
Doctors may hate your one weird statistic, but socio-demographists probably don't...
If that was true, you'd expect the younger professionals of today would have comparative amounts of wealth to the boomers when they were young professionals. It's absolutely not the case. Each generation is getting poorer and poorer as they hit the same benchmarks.
This tracks with broad trends of wealth inequality increasing as well.
So no, it's not just "they haven't accumulated yet", because it's not clear they will have the opportunity to do so.
> you'd expect the younger professionals of today would have comparative amounts of wealth to the boomers when they were young professionals. It's absolutely not the case
Source? The data I’ve seen indicate the median millennial is wealthier than the median boomer was at their age.
Boomers had a lot more sibling and lot smaller inheritances coming to them. Kids these days will inherit a lot more and share a lot less with siblings.
The point isn't comparing boomers and younger generations buying diamonds NOW, but when they marry. Boomers typically don't wait till they're 60 to get married.
It’s not generations, it’s age ;) Younger generations are still idealists. With age, you get betrayed in your ideals. You discover scientific studies weren’t so scientific as they get turned over one by one. It’s something like: Ice caps will still melt, and everything you did for the better, bad luck, they’ll have increased the warming. Same when we tried to eat better against cancer or raised or fists to defend gay people. I don’t want you to believe you’re generation won’t suffer the same fate ;)
Some of us old-heads got pushed much farther left as a result of this. I used to be a Democrat, blue and blue. These days I'm much more like, "The Dems will sell me out to make a buck, I gotta go out and actually be the change I want to see in the world."
Young folks who are experiencing disillusion -- don't give in to despair. You can make a meaningful difference in lives. Build communities, engage in mutual aid, whatever.
I never imagined I'd see a black president, same sex marriage, or cannabis legalization in my lifetime!
Now would be a terrible time to become disillusioned and despairing, after winning all those important battles. It proves that idealism works, and we really need it for current and future battles! It's the nihilistic disillusioned people who are CAUSING all the problems.
In so many aspects of life, I've noticed how there's always something devastatingly discouraging that happens right before any major successful breakthrough.
It's as if God's being a dick, and always throws something profoundly disheartening at you right on the precipice of success, just so he can laugh at you for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
I now recognize that as a sign I'm just about to succeed, and shouldn't give up no matter what.
We are living through that kind of historic transition right now, watching MAGA finally turn on Trump. Don't fuck it up by giving up now!
Yes but you see, now we have a trans person in some sport somewhere who did kind of okay in a competition nobody cares about, and that undoes all the good. Unfortunately, we have to burn it all down and start over.
... or so populist messaging from the Right would have you believe.
Why would finding out that some scientific studies weren't done correctly change any person's views when this is always the case and no one has ever said otherwise?
Blood Diamond came out in 2006. Prices were not comparable at that point and they barely existed. The ethics could easily have played a strong part in driving the demand that evolved the technology to the point where it became affordable.
But in any case, these aren’t mutually exclusive. People want conflict free diamonds but not to spend a years pay getting one.
Years and years of “diamonds suck” make a mark. It’s an evergreen topic online for a long time, and the people looking at engagement rings in 2025 have been aware of the shittiness of the diamond business for years.
The mining, corrupt trade practices, etc are all well known and sometimes subject to enforcement action.
More people have caught on to the many terrible things about natural diamonds over time and now we are finally at the tipping point for lab grown to dismantle the unethical natural diamond trade. The idea of lab grown needed time to gestate with the public, which has been manipulated for decades about the “value” of natural diamonds. Even when lab grown became a thing, the natural diamond trade did its damnedest to manipulate the public on the quality of lab grown vs natural. Coincidentally, natural diamonds are overvalued due to decades of market manipulation by a monopoly.
My then-gf (now wife) and I watched a movie together about an African man whose village got raided, him put into slavery to search for diamonds and his son becoming a child soldier by the same people and their struggles to get free, and finally pawn off a pink diamond to one of the largest diamond companies in London. At the end of it, she finally came to realise that the diamond trade was really quite shitty. And we had a long discussion about the whole thing, as well as the growth of the synthetic diamonds industry and how they’re much better on the supposed 4C properties as well as on price.
Yet in the end she still wanted to get a ring from one of the big names because that’s what she grew up with and what she had always dreamt of since young.
My wife too. She’s a jewelery buyer for national retailer, she was well aware, even has visited mines and seen the conditions first hand, admitted how good lab grown was for ethics, etc. yet- her inner 5 year old princess wedding dream won her mind and she couldn’t envision anything other than a natural diamond for her wedding set.
I have a diamond to sell her then. It a flawless synthetic diamond that has been hand curated. It’s a one of one. Therefore it is even more expensive than so called real diamonds
I think it reached a tipping point. It used to be that there wasn't much of a cost advantage, so people assumed you bought the real thing. Now that the lab-made diamonds are super cheap, many people will assume you bought one of those. When that's the case, people feel like they might as well buy the cheaper ones. It's like people buying natural mined diamonds are chumps. No one will know you spent more unless you talk about how it's natural (and that makes you annoying).
Natural diamonds are more expensive, and they therefore have a conspicuous consumption element to them. That could be valuable as a means to gain social cachet. Except you'd have to speak loudly about how they were natural.
And in doing so you are loudly proclaiming you don't care about human suffering it took to get the diamonds. That's probably fine in very wealthy circles, but in upper middle class/upper-upper middle class circles, it's likely quite gauche.
If the natural ones didn't have this faux pas attached to them by default, then they might carry more interest as a "I saved up for these" class indicator.
I've never understood this really because no-one carries their GIA certificate with them. With the existence of moissanite and artificial stones, it should be a "market for lemons" situation where a given stone on someone's finger is assumed low-value by default.
>Ethics were not compelling enough for most people
This matches my experience with people, including myself. I think it's about the feedback. The price pain or the energy pain is readily and immediately felt, whereas ethics violations are not, as people are shielded from the impact externally, and have many defenses against it internally as well.
What you're seeing in the drop of value of diamonds also reflects the general shift in tastes of different generations with income. I'm a person that likes to go to flea markets and antique stores on the rare occasion and the value of the same items on the market has drastically shifted in the last 10 years as boomers are no longer in the collectible age bracket. Younger people don't really care about Tiffany jewelry
Depends a lot on the demographic. It's still popular with young people who express status and success through culturally relevant jewelry styles (often influenced by hip-hop and sports culture).
It's more status-forward than authenticity-forward consumption, and many jewelers can assure you that it's very much still in vogue in some areas.
When discussing market shifts I think the relative nature of all these points needs to be considered. There will of course always be pockets of exceptions, but on a relative basis the prior comment is correct.
Getting married is less common which in of itself is a huge reduction to diamond jewelry demand. Of course there’s probably some town that marriage is at an all time high.
I actually predict in a few years it will become more fashionable to wear other jewels over diamonds given the rate the prices are crashing at. When diamonds are competitive with all the other gemstones, people start looking at those the same way too
You're a few years too late, as this trend has been been happening for a decade at this point. You can find many articles online about how millenialls and now gen-z are ditching diamonds.
Are they ditching diamonds because if fashion, or are they ditching diamonds like they’re ditching buying houses? I would bet affordability is more likely the cause of decline in younger people
Lab rubies, sapphires, emeralds and basically anything you can think of with a known chemical makeup is being produced en masse by factories all over India and China.
As someone who doesn’t care about the authenticity of the gems provenance and only about having consistent physical properties for rock tumbling and gem faceting, it’s been very nice for the budget
The point is more that people would move to gemstones that don't look like diamonds, if diamonds start being perceived as cheap. Moissanite was popular because it's not immediately obvious it's not a diamond, while diamonds were popular.
Diamonds are quite possibly the only stone that isn't yet essentially 100% artificial. Rubies, the next hardest stone, is trivial to make artificially:
> When the issue became big, the Blood Diamond movie, sales of lab grown did not markedly increase
Other people would still assume you might have bought a blood diamond, so instead of buying a lab diamond, I would expect these people to have bought another gem if they bought a gemstone at all.
i think you overlooked a general revulsion towards monopoly and therefore DeBeers, their laughable (though long effective) marketing, though agree it's mainly economic.
When prices are equal, I'd wager the decision is: "if prices are equal why wouldn't I buy the "real" thing? I'll just try and justify to myself that it's sourced correctly".
When the price of the grown diamonds falls, the decision might be: "Ok, so grown diamonds are cheaper AND more ethical? Ok, I'm definitely buying grown".
If the ethics factor didn't exist, "real" diamonds would still retain the kudos and still be valued highly over "nice but fake" diamonds.
It's the ethics factor that pushes the decision over the line.
As an n=1 economic animal, that's what my behaviour would have been anyway.
Why would someone with ethical concerns still buy a diamond and not just choose another gemstone if somehow synthetic was more expensive?
And it's all marketing anyway: slap a "condensed from pure carbon" campaign out there and suddenly natural diamonds are fake rich and not as pure or precise or something.
Because there is a century now of diamonds being associated with certain cultural elements in US life, and that's not easy to take away overnight. Lots of people expect a diamond ring as part of an engagement - not just the future bride, but their friends, family, co-workers. A sapphire ring or an opal ring or a ruby ring will not be easily accepted - it will be seen as weird, or cheap, or anti-traditional, etc.
Now sure, this concept was manufactured to a great extent through marketing, and it can be replaced or just fall out of favor. But established culture changes very slowly, and there's no "other gemstones cartel" to throw money at this the way DeBeers did to establish the diamond engagement ring in the first place.
People love to claim the moral high ground, believing themselves so much better. So much more noble. So much smarter.
But at the end of the day, they always do the exact same thing - buy whatever is cheaper. Doesn't matter if it's produced with slave labor, or child labor, or the product of corporate government coups.
They put all that out of their mind, and just buy the product. They rationalize it or conveniently forget it or just pretend it doesn't apply to them. Whatever will get them past it.
A similar topic: Does anyone think things like solar and wind are being used out of the goodness of anyone's heart? Concern for the next generations? A desire to give clean air to our youth? Sympathy for sufferers of all of the horrible diseases and respiratory problems? Concern about lands lost to rising seas?
No. It's because they got cheaper than fossil fuels. Anything else is fantasy.
You do realise there are different categories of users? There’s consistent evidence that early adopters and ethically motivated consumers accept price premiums to align purchases with values, identity, or status; only later—when technologies mature—do cost considerations dominate for mainstream buyers.
Those are very rare exceptions, and generally from people who already have enough money that it makes next to no difference what they buy. Or it's just performative, they're doing it for the sake of appearances.
What about the size of the market as a whole? Was there a drawdown during the period in question?
Is it possible that people decreased purchases of diamonds altogether in response to ethical qualms (in favor of other jewels or precious items), and then were later motivated by price to go with lab-grown diamonds?
When I was a kid in the 80s my mother worked at a jewelry store and CZ diamonds were already considered cheap fakes at the time. The price was not comparable to the real deal because nobody was buying them at diamond prices.
They were simply dismissed as more trash belonging in the gold-plated case. It's hard to appreciate how much less informed people were back then - we're talking pre-internet. The adults around me couldn't explain scientifically what the actual difference was between a CZ and natural diamond. Just one was a fake, held little value, and was a sure way to lose your fiance.
How do CZ gemstones compare to diamond gemstones visually/in person? It looks like CZ has a lower refraction index but higher color dispersion vs. diamond, so that seems like it would still result in an attractive gemstone. The main disadvantages seem to be slightly lower refractive index (so less internal reflection and brilliance?), lower hardness (disadvantage for the gem getting scratches - possible advantage for not scratching your sapphire glass watch or smartphone camera lens?!) and higher weight.
edit: seems that moissanite (silicon carbide, perhaps unsurprisingly) is another diamond-like (though hexagonal crystals vs. cubic for diamond or CZ) gemstone that is actually harder than sapphire and less prone to fracture than diamond.
To everyone except those with a trained eye, they're virtually indistinguishable; however, because CZ isn't as hard, they tend to scratch and dull over time and thus lose their luster.
If we're talking about 'quality', CZ just doesn't compare for longevity. That said, unless you're talking about a daily-wearing-for-many-years piece of jewelry (i.e., an engagement ring), CZ is just fine for most folks, especially considering the cost difference.
I remember watching a documentary about a man who would marry (multiple) women, then steal their money and leave.
one of the victims said she had doubted the ring he gave her was real, but he just scratched a mirror with it to prove it was real. Then she said "it was only later after he left that I found cz can also scratch glass"
My company buys a lot of diamonds - for industrial use, not jewelry related :) The falling price of synthetic diamonds has been a huge boon. Several processes I do right now would be impractical without the use of "low-cost" diamonds - air quotes because they are still not exactly cheap. So it is obviously in my interest for consumers to switch to lab-grown diamonds and thus drive volume up and prices down.
At the same time, I do understand the sentiment around wanting a mined diamond. The whole idea behind a diamond engagement ring is a marketing exercise backed up by a cartel, so if you're gonna participate in the ritual you might as well do it right. There are silly backstories buried in every part of human society today, from "some king did it and everyone copied him" to "this piece of land got special status a thousand years ago which accidentally let it become its own country" to "my grandmother was too poor to do XYZ the right way so we still do it her way." That's just part and parcel of being human.
> Calling them "lab-grown" is part of the propaganda against them.
Indeed: Even the article perpetuates this:
"Whereas a two-carat real diamond engagement ring might cost $35,000, Oymakas says a two-carat lab-grown diamond with the same clarity and colour could only be about $3,500."
My wife wanted a sapphire and we met during Ph D research. It's straight up not possible to pay more then like, a dollar for a synthetic sapphire so that's what's in her ring.
Synthetic diamonds definitely need a marketing glow up. Current names are man-made, lab grown, and synthetic diamonds. Instead we could lean into how cool the HPHT and CVD processes are and have - giga forged diamonds (gigapascal pressure of HPHT), plasma coalesced diamonds (CVD process), or even human forged diamonds (highlighting technological triumph required to achieve these).
Humans seem to have a bias against "unnatural" language. Synthetic, artificial, man-made, these all evoke negative emotions in most people unfortunately.
Again, I'm all for lab grown diamonds for both consumer and industrial use.
I think "lab-grown" is a pretty neutral term, and it is also scientifically accurate in the case of CVD and other diamonds where the process really is "growing" the diamonds. There are certainly other terms for them that sound more derogatory such as "synthetic" or "artificial" diamond.
I thought the process used to grow them in a lab was somewhat different than the process used in nature. Labs use Chemical Vapor Deposition while nature uses high pressure and high temperature. The lab grows the diamond crystal while nature squeezes a lump of carbon into one.
Also part and parcel of being a human being is logic and empathy. Anyone who possesses one of these traits, never mind both of them, should find it easy to choose the product that isn't literally the product of human suffering an exploitation.
Blood diamonds are terrible, but the overwhelming majority of diamonds produced these days are not blood diamonds relying on slave labor, they're mass-mined products relying on colossal-scale industrial machinery. That's why Russia is #1 and Canada is #3 in worldwide diamond production today: even the world's largest diamond mines have 1-3k employees vs. massive production.
That's not to paper over the issues with the industry (environmental, poor working conditions, poor pay etc) - but those are more generally applied to any mined product. I'd be willing to bet that your average set of modern electronics cause far more suffering than your average diamond: see conflict resources such as tantalum, tin, tungsten, gold.
Isn't industrial diamond use already a lot higher than jewelry use? It seems unlikely that consumers switching to lab-grown would "drive volume up and prices down" in any meaningful way - except perhaps for the jewelry grade stones themselves.
That includes stuff like diamond grit. You don’t care about the color or clarity of grit. Tenth of a carat on up? You care about that for jewelry use. And that translates into better non-grit industrial diamonds as well.
In my opinion, diamonds really are the best jewel for a engagement ring. They are really the only gem that will really never chip, fade, or cloud over time. Alternatives like moissanite are great, don’t get me wrong, but they’re just not quite as good on the longevity scale. When you buy someone a diamond, they could literally do zero maintenance on it and 100 years later they still have a diamond that looks basically exactly the same.
Is your company in abrasives or machining? I'm curious because I assume that lab-grown is actually preferred over mined because the crystalline structure may be more homogenous.
I can't go into too much detail, but there are actually a few things: our main use is machining and one of our other uses is for the extreme thermal conductivity. Diamond is an incredible material period.
I am not an expert so take this with a grain of salt, but for what I do I have seen no difference between flawless natural diamond and flawless lab grown diamond, the difference is that the flawless natural diamonds are almost always far more expensive.
If I was shopping for a near flawless diamond engagement ring and someone was offering me the lab-made version.
I think I’d be quite swayed towards the lab ones knowing that there were engineers who used them for industrial use and found them exactly the same.
Also being much cheaper, I’d likely spend money towards getting a better grade lab-grown diamond than I could afford with a mined diamond.
If I was the lab-grown industry I’d also be actively attempting to shift the narrative around the term real, and say ones mined one is lab made, both are real. But that’s its own fight I’m sure.
As it should, diamonds were made artificially scarce and controlled by monopoly:
“The major investors in the diamond mines realized that they had no alternative but to merge their interests into a single entity that would be powerful enough to control production and perpetuate the illusion of scarcity of diamonds. The instrument they created, in 1888, was called De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd., incorporated in South Africa…”
From the classic 80s article “Have you ever tried to sell a diamond” - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-yo...
> But some experts stress there is still a difference.
> Graham Pearson, professor with the University of Alberta's department of earth and atmospheric sciences, says that the natural formation of diamonds deep underground results in a "complexity" you can't get with the lab-grown variety.
For decades, the marketing message was that less defects = better = more expensive. Apparently, when lab-grown diamonds came along, that had to be inverted: now, lab-grown = less defects = "less character"
The whole thing is such an obvious marketing exercise with very little to back it up (as evidenced by the extremely low resale value of diamonds)
If they did, it would be possible to detect the difference with perfect accuracy. Instead, the detectors made by those interested in pushing the concept of "real, natural" diamonds have a false positive rate of 5% looking for the inclusion of things labs could easily add if they cared to
You can make some plausible arguments against glass. It scratches more easily and doesn't shimmer as much. But synthetic sapphire is the same league and costs a lot less.
The modern-day aesthetic of diamonds is just that they are expensive. They're not distinguished by utility, quality, or appearance from cheaper products. The ultimate status symbol, but also obviously a bit of an issue...
I need a geologist to explain this one. Moissanite has a Mohs hardness of 9.5. I guess it is easier to scratch than a diamond, but the scratability should be indistinguishable between the two for all practical purposes.
Not a geologist but Mohs hardness is an ordinal scale so the distance between 10 and 9 isn't well-defined. The numbers are defined as being specific minerals.
Diamond (10) is 4x as hard as corundum (9) which is 2x as hard as topaz (8).
OK, but there's a real difference. My wedding band has small diamonds in it, and occasionally I'll be sitting inside where the sun falls on my hand and casts a million pretty blue and white and red sparkles on the walls and ceiling of the room I'm in.
Diamonds (and other gems) really are beautifula to look at in ways that glass just isn't. And manmade ones, sparklier still out of the forge of our own cleverness, are much nicer in my opinion.
> I'd say it's like AI music or art - something made by a machine, for some reason, just doesn't have any "soul" to it.
Diamonds are a product of natural geological processes. (Or, are grown in a lab, by recreating similar conditions.)
Music and art are products of human talent, skill, and labor - that ML companies have used (without a license, permission, or even credit) to build datasets that are now being used to make money, at the expense of these artists.
I don't think "real" vs "fake" or "soulless" is what matters at all. Both issues should be discussed in terms of ethics and incentive structures. Who's profiting at whose expense.
Indeed. The oldest things on earth are the hydrogen atoms. Literally all of them were formed in the first 3 minutes after the big bang. So all of them have the same age, billions of years old, down to a few seconds difference at most.
> The oldest things on earth are the hydrogen atoms. Literally all of them were formed in the first 3 minutes after the big bang.
Stable hydrogen wasn't able to form until several hundreds of thousands of years after the Big Bang when the universe cooled sufficiently for electrons to bind to protons.
Even assuming you're counting lone protons as hydrogen atoms, it's still absolutely false. I don't know if that's true for the majority of protons in the universe, but there are mechanisms by which new protons are made all the time. Neutrons can turn into protons through beta decay, and high energy particle interactions like those involving cosmic rays can produce brand new protons. These processes can and do happen terrestrially.
> the amount of non-big-bang hydrogen is not even a trillionth of a trillionth of the total.
I didn't say it was a huge fraction of the total. You said "literally all of them" were from the Big Bang, which is just wrong. Plenty of other processes produce protons/hydrogen
The difference is instantly apparent under UV - most lab grown diamonds will not fluoresce unless they have a bad growth process that leaves flux and other impurities in the crystal.
Natural diamonds won't always fluoresce but the ones that do will do so in a variety of colors, and sometimes change depending on what wavelength is irradiating them.
Lab-grown diamonds can be tailored to exhibit the same impurities internal stresses, etc. that cause a minority of natural diamonds to fluoresce. This has not been a goal to date for synthetics because the highest price point is for diamonds that are most pure with least internal strain. If the economics of fluorescent diamonds suddenly become more attractive, I guarantee fluorescent synthetics will be on the market immediately thereafter, and will be indistinguishable from naturals without $100K worth of characterization tools.
The difference is not instantly apparent under UV.
Only about 30% of natural diamonds have fluorescence --- which is *caused* by impurities and imperfections in the material.
Manmade diamonds tend to lack this because they have fewer impurities and imperfections. Equating increased perfection and purity with inferiority is highly debatable and smacks of marketing BS.
I wanna only drink natural creek water with its natural biology and other "flaws" because, well, its natural and has a truly unique mix of critters and metals in it. Why would I want the same purified drinking water everyone else has. Natural creek water, unique and special, if unique and special were spelled g.i.a.r.d.i.a.
Spintronics: Could diamonds be a computer's best friend?
For the first time, physicists have demonstrated that information can flow through a diamond wire. In the experiment, electrons did not flow through diamond as they do in traditional electronics; rather, they stayed in place and passed along a magnetic effect called "spin" to each other down the wire -- like a row of sports spectators doing "the wave." Spin could one day be used to transmit data in computer circuits -- and this new experiment revealed that diamond transmits spin better than most metals in which researchers have previously observed the effect.
A diamond planet, "55 Cancri E", is a super-Earth exoplanet known for its high density and potential diamond composition. It is located 41 light-years away and is about twice the size of Earth and nine times its mass. The planet's extreme heat and pressure are believed to have crystallized its carbon-rich composition into diamonds.
> We exchange diamond rings as part of the engagement process because the
diamond company De Beers decided in 1938 that it would like us to. Prior to a
stunningly successful marketing campaign, Americans occasionally
exchanged engagement rings, but it wasn’t pervasive. Not only is the demand
for diamonds a marketing invention, but diamonds aren’t actually that rare.
Only by carefully restricting the supply has De Beers kept the price of a
diamond high.
Imho, that "soul" you describe is an artifact of human sentimentality and a very successful marketing campaign by a bunch of Afrikaner colonialists.
Which, coincidentally, is exactly the same soul that appears in art.
Walter Benjamin called it "aura" - something a physical original has, but a reproduction doesn't.
It explains why collectors pay $$$$$ for a guitar played by [famous musician], even though they can't play.
There's no objective way to look at any one guitar and divine its history. Without provenance or physical customisation, any Rickenbacker or Les Paul is indistinguishable from any other of the same production run.
But we believe in sympathetic magic. Objects are charged with mysterious non-physical manna through proximity to wealth and status. Owning these special objects confers that manna on us, and perhaps our fortune will increase.
It's the logic of witchcraft lurking at the heart of capitalism.
One of the fun things about AI is that it deconstructs this while reinforcing it. Huge collections of high status manna are now inside a machine, and available for free, or near as.
> It explains why collectors pay $$$$$ for a guitar played by [famous musician], even though they can't play.
They do that so, when they get together, they have a story to tell to other famous people. If that guitar were to be replaced, nobody would be able to tell the difference.
Actually soul is Christian concept that inherits it from greeks that applies to living humans spirits only.
We can talk about "anima", in latin, the same inside "animal" or "animation" to apply it to a wider concept of living beings.
We can go further in time to the greek concept "daimon", devils, allude to supernatural powers or spirits to start applying it to things.
Then we could apply De Boers sociopaths concept that goes back to using the Christian concept to rocks again.
The only "soul" those rocks have is the one of the millions of African people that died in wars, the women that were raped and the kids that were traumatised being forced to kill their family members so a woman can look at beautiful iridescence in her finger.
Disclaimer: I have worked as a volunteer helping refugees, mostly from Congo, so I am biased a lot.
The difference is that there's a detectable difference between AI and human made art, at least today. The only detectable difference between a correctly-made lab diamond and one clawed out of the ground by children is that the latter will have flaws. I'm sure you could engineer similar flaws into the lab version if became fashionable.
I agree. Kind of like factory vases vs hand thrown or glass blown vases. They’re practically the same but some people will pay lots more for certain hand made ones.
I’m not sure diamonds are popular because of what they are but what they represent.
Every gem out there is “the crystalline form” of something. Diamonds are (were?) the expensive crystalline form. And plenty of people equate “expensive” with love, or care, or respect. Even if the same people would never be able to tell the difference between diamond and cubic zirconium, knowing it’s the cheap one makes it less valuable in other ways. This depends on the person, of course.
If it’s not diamonds it will have to be something else that shows “I put my money where my mouth is”. A simple metal wedding band is the same wherever it’s made but a famous jeweler will charge an arm and a leg more than your local shop for the same amount of precious metal, same effort, and same result. And yet Tiffany’s isn’t going out of business for the same reason. It’s what it represents.
I am curious to see if tastes or fashion shift towards other rarer or more expensive gems not yet manufactured cheaply en masse.
The entire point of using diamonds in wedding rings is for the male to signal how committed he is to the marriage by expending a large amount of money on both the ring and the wedding itself. It then acts as a way for the wife to signal her status to other women by showing off how much her husband was willing and able to spend on the ring.
It is a hold-out from the tradition that the male is a provider and the female is a caregiver. If you reject traditional gender roles, you should also reject expensive diamond rings regardless whether they are mined or grown. Otherwise, embrace the shiny, but make no mistake: the cost is entirely the point.
>The entire point of using diamonds in wedding rings is for the male to signal how committed he is to the marriage by expending a large amount of money on both the ring and the wedding itself. It then acts as a way for the wife to signal her status to other women by showing off how much her husband was willing and able to spend on the ring.
That's some nice historical background (which could be post-hoc contextualization that fits certain agenda), but traditions have this weird habit of outliving their actual purpose and still having the form without the role.
So no, you don't have to commit to traditional gender roles to have diamond rings and don't have to make them expensive as otherwise it's not doing the thing it's supposed to do. The could just not do the thing at all and you can still have them.
The more rational decision, IMO, assuming you still want to signal wealth, is to buy neither, collude with your supposed life partner, buy a gigantic, flawless moissanite that you both agree to say is a natural diamond that cost 50k. Then secretly put the money you didn't spend on sparkling carbon into some appreciating asset. Rivals are still sick with envy, you have a fun joint venture bamboozle to laugh about, and the mortgage gets paid off a few years early.
"would tend to reconsider any long term relationship with such a person"
Are you arguing that anyone who would accept and display a precious gem is ineligible for marriage? More so if it is larger, but not if more expensive? The post you are replying to presents a plausible social economy of the tradition. What is your point?
Are you arguing that anyone who would accept and display a precious gem is ineligible for marriage?
No. My point is that anyone who conditions marriage on the size or cost of a diamond is ineligible to marry me.
My wife accepted my marriage proposal without a ring. One was added later --- after other more urgent finances were covered and reassuring her that it would be modest and not overly wasteful.
In other words, this was done strictly because I wanted to --- not as a pre-condition for her acceptance. She says doing it this way was more meaningful.
For anyone appreciating expensive things, giving diamonds represent the willingness to fulfill that desire. It’s easy to conflate that with love, at least for a while, even when you aren’t a materialistic person.
Jewelry is the pinnacle of “just monetary value”. Unlike almost any other possession, a car, a house, clothes, etc. jewelry serves no practical purpose, only shows the willingness or ability to spend for it. The more you spend, the more valuable the gesture, the more you cared to please the recipient.
Materialistic people have the same feelings you have. Those just happened to be triggered by different values than yours.
The other purpose of jewerly is looking nice. That's difficult to comprehend, but it's the actual important thing for people who's most expensive piece of everyday wear isn't their phone.
As people quit believing in God, they stop thinking in terms of "God brought us together/we were made for each other" (though they stop thinking that a generation or two later than they stop believing in God).
If you think that we made this relationship, then maybe a lab-grown (human made) diamond fits? (Though it may take an advertising campaign before people see it that way.)
Disclaimer: I'm not a sociologist. This is just my speculation about how the dynamic could change.
The entire point of a diamond is that it’s expensive. People buy them for status. Otherwise there are lots of gems that are much more prettier, but they are not as expensive. It’s like saying people will stop buying branded clothes because unbranded clothes have the same or even a higher quality for a fraction of the price. Kinda misses the point.
Also, people who pay extra for the same quality just for status signalling should be called fools. This is exactly what Chinese tiktokers did when the trade war started.
You miss the point. The only reason to buy a diamond is that it is expensive. It doesn’t matter if you could buy the same thing cheaper. It doesn’t matter that there are better gems that are cheaper. You buy the diamond to show that you can afford it. You buy someone a diamond to prove how much they are worth to you.
Yes, you can buy a man-made diamond the same you can buy counterfeit branded clothes. That only shows that you’re tasteless and that you can’t afford the real thing.
If you like, I will sell you a personally autographed photo of me. All for $1m cash. That's much more expensive than a diamond. Anyone who buys this for their new wife will prove that he REALLY loves her. $1m>>$35000.
If it is strictly about the money, a larger man made diamond can easily cost just as much as a smaller natural one --- while instantly conveying to the untrained eye the appearance of being more expensive.
I suspect there is pressure in the opposite direction these days.
If you see someone wearing a 6-carat diamond, you know it's either a $100,000 natural diamond, or a $4,000 lab-grown diamond. And you'll assume it's the latter, as far more people can afford the latter.
On the other hand, a 1-carat diamond would be more like $2000 natural, $300 lab-grown, making it far more believable that it was natural.
I think this is true, manmade diamonds are valuable in a way that counterfeit currency is not. But "most people" may not be as important as people who know the story of, and the person wearing, the gem, and provenance is always a meaningful point of reference for expensive luxury items.
My screenshots of NFTs are pixel accurate, but not exactly as valuable as the real thing.
The ethics of participating economically in blood diamonds is one thing - the other side of it is millions of couples who have been socially pressured for generations into putting good money into a massively depreciating asset. I hope that declines.
Not sure where you live, but that social pressure was/is very soft in Europe. Absolutely nothing happens if there is no diamond, its just people self-pressing themselves in some variant of childhood-like mentality and competitiveness. In my family line, nobody ever bought anything like that.
For any man, for past few decades (at least 3-4) a woman insisting at all costs on big shiny natural diamond is a massive red flag for undesirable personality traits. Given stable divorce rates and general misery on all sides before and after that red flags are and should be considered very intensively. Once physical attraction wanes, only personalities remain.
Two points just FYI in thinking about the sudden shift to synthetic diamonds from natural stones:
• Scale: I'm aware of one company that operates over 700 CVD systems that each make 25 stones/run - there are at least 3 others of similar volume;
• Cost: the variable cost of making a 1ct finished brilliant (D-E,F-VVSI) is <$30US. Obviously, that cost is for ex-US production. See, for example, the recent demise of de Beers' Lightbox growth center in Oregon.
Naturals simply can't compete. They are forming a completely separate market involving a much smaller, extremely wealthy clientele.
The business case for synthetics is deteriorating as production costs bottom out and margins decline in an ongoing race to the bottom.
Apparently there's a big issue in Antwerp now that they're not allowed to import diamonds from Russia. Maybe they should stop fighting the synthetic diamonds and embrace them instead, as something guaranteed free of human suffering and war profiteering. But the whole industry hinges on manufactured demand, so they'd rather see the trade move to other countries I guess.
When you buy a natural diamond, you're also buying a risk of cancer and various diseases, because all natural diamonds contain trace amounts of thorium and uranium. This is due to the fact that diamond crystallization occurs deep within the Earth's mantle, where these radioactive elements are naturally present
India, Mali, Fiji, Africa, Americas, etc have similar trace amounts across their surfaces that are detectable from an aircraft 80m above ground level traveling at 70 m/second.
If any one is really set on having a natural diamond, I highly recommend taking a trip to Crater of Diamonds State Park[0], in the middle of nowhere -- I mean, Murfreesboro, Arkansas.
Pay an entrance fee and bring or rent your own equipment and keep any diamonds you find. It's a 37 acre field that was once a volcanic crater. I never found any personally, but it was surprisingly fun and worth the detour if driving through the state. I also don't care much for diamonds, but if I ever find one it'd be pretty special. More than 600 diamonds are found each year according to wiki
My wife wanted diamond earrings. I could get flawless lab-grown diamonds for 1/10 the cost of natural diamonds. Furthermore lab-grown diamonds are not discernible from natural diamonds, so there really is no reason to get a natural diamond unless you care about providence.
Interestingly it's been possible to make rubies for years, 150 years ago rubies were far more prized than diamonds, but then fell out of fashion, mostly because diamonds were in good supply and there was a big marketing campaign for them. Consequently lab grown rubies are pretty cheap - maybe $50 carat, but here's the thing.. natural rubies are still expensive because they are rare and contain impurities that give them a glow/fire that is prized.
But here's the fun thing. You can destroy the value of a natural ruby by cooking it. If you heat it in the right way the impurities will anneal out and you will be left with a near flawless stone that appears to be artificial! Bye bye value :)
Ive been seeing this same type of article for decades now. I bought a 2 karrat flawless lab grown diamond in 2005 for around $2k, and according to this article that size sells for $3,500. Prices have increased it seems. I assumed they would drop as more were made.
You shouldn't have gotten a 2 carat diamond that cheap at that time. Either you got a really great deal for some idiosyncratic reason or your recollection is off.
Inflation is probably why the number is higher now.
A year ago I picked up a 1ct hearts and arrows (D/E. VVS1/2, IGI certificate) from AliExpress for $360. I can see the hearts and arrows and it tests as diamond. A few months later an article came out about how lab diamonds stack up against mined, and the author had also bought one with similar characteristics from AliExpress for even less.
I just checked the same store and they're (not H&A but same other stats) running around $125 plus a $14 tariff.
According to the inflation calculator at bls.gov, $2000 in June 2005 has the same buying power as $3,317 in June 2025. So in real terms the price is about the same.
Like most good things happening in the world now days this is also because of China they were not under the same de beers marketing magic rest of the world was once the Chinese abandoned mined diamonds prices have catered.
Btw Blood diamonds was also a successful marketing ploy of De beers to keep out the competition. It was weird to me how western countries only cared about the exploitation of diamonds.
Think about it like a supermarket—at scale, it’s not practical for grocery stores to source fruits and vegetables from the wild (like natural diamonds).
Wasn’t it inevitable that “farm-grown” produce (lab-grown diamonds) would become the long-term solution?
Diamonds need to become even cheaper. I want phone screens and glasses made out of single sheets of diamond. I want heatsinks and kitchen knives made out of the stuff.
Diamonds are simply NFTs of the real life: worthless coupons that only prove that you've wasted a few tens of thousand dollars. They prove your social status. The battle for purity or the origin is a distraction. For the same reason, diamonds as a gift make sense only if they are expensive.
Agree, though it should be noted that diamonds are far from the only things like this - other questionably useful social status symbols include "luxury" fashion (low quality made in low wage countries...), or even just having the latest iPhone
Extraction of natural diamonds can fund development of some of the poorest communities in the world. [0]
As the jewelry industry repositions around the uniqueness of natural diamonds I would expect to see more promotion of this kind of socially responsible production.
I have a visceral hatred for the diamond industry, and its based on nothing except my shock at how expensive a shiny rock is and the effectiveness of the advertising campaign around them. I remember going to buy my wife an engagement ring and just being incredulous at the price. I completely understand supply and demand but a lot of the supply limitation is artificial. Its one of the few things I am emotional about, I simply loath the diamond industry and the entire sham that you have to spend x number of months salary on a rock to prove to the world that you love someone. They built such an incredible narrative where people would judge each other based on the size of a rock or that it had to be of X clarity or you had to spend so much to prove whatever.
To this day I change the channel when I hear a commercial for a diamond store on the radio and its been 20+ years. I am so excited about lab grown diamonds.
Personally felt this too, though I think I hate dishonest marketers and adversarial business-customer relations more broadly.
For some reason my ideal vision of capitalism is where a company simply makes a product that solves customers' problem and makes them happy, receiving a fair amount of money in return for their efforts. No corporate propaganda campaigns or anti-consumer shenanigans needed, just a solid [thing] for people who need [thing].
Interested to hear potential problems with this approach in the replies.
I think that what you have described for the most part is just basic capitalism which I agree with as generally competitors drive prices down. The diamond industry has some how been allowed to conspire to artificially limit supply and raise prices to a level even the oil industry has not been able to achieve.
That’s an interesting question one im probably not the most qualified to answer. US capitalism was always based on prevention of monopolies and cartels (which the diamond industry is) and then a generally hands off approach by the government. Which I generally agree with although someone like Thomas Sowell would argue that even monopolies take care of themselves eventually. Unfortunately it’s been somewhat weakened due to lobbying and subsidies such as for ethanol. US probably has the closest to pure capitalism in the world though, again in my opinion.
I do recommend Sowell’s book basic economics. Its a trudge but its very educational and written in an easy to understand way
"Trace amounts of thorium and uranium enter natural diamonds during crystallisation process also emit gamma radiation, which can lead to various diseases and chronic health conditions such as thyroid disorders, blood diseases, cancer, and neurological problems."
I love synthetic diamonds. The whole investment in chasing big diamonds thing let to the situation where diamond grit abrasive right now is extremely cheap for the quality and quantity of abrasion you get. Up to the point where full size homemade casted diamond whetstones are a thing. For under 100$
Diamond windows already exist for specialized applications like infrared optics and high-pressure research, but widespread consumer use remains limited by manufacturing costs and brittleness despite lab-grown diamonds reducing prices.
If you pulled a diamond from the diamond rains on Neptune and brought it to Earth, you’re telling me it should be worth the same as a shitty lab grown?
I'm still conflicted about this. I understand the cost and blood diamond debate and largely agree. But there is something about diamonds that makes them divine: carbon atoms crystallizing and bonding over millions to billions of years to form structures, rated on a scale of color, clarity, cut, and weight. It's like gold, primarily forged in cosmic events like supernova explosions. Naaaaah let's just make it in a lab it looks the same.
People are being priced out of art and beauty and it's a shame economics and corruption make real diamonds dirty.
> But there is something about diamonds that makes them divine: carbon atoms crystallizing and bonding over millions to billions of years to form structures
It does not take millions of years to form a diamond. It takes hours. The million years are atoms sitting around doing nothing before that, and then diamonds sitting around doing nothing while some of them are eventually pushed to the surface.
You can say the same thing about any mineral. There is nothing special about carbon or the diamond structure. If anything, zircons are much more significant, being the oldest minerals we can find.
> rated on a scale of color, clarity, cut, and weight.
This is nothing special. The colour of lab-grown stones can be varied almost at will, and the rest is still an issue with synthetic stones.
> Naaaaah let's just make it in a lab it looks the same.
That’s the thing, though: it does (yes, some synthetic stones have specific defects related to how they were made and they tent to be too perfect if anything, but they still have the exact same property). It’s like complaining that the meat you are eating comes from a farm instead of being hunted.
> People are being priced out of art and beauty and it's a shame economics and corruption make real diamonds dirty.
Quite the contrary. Gemstones become more accessible to more people. The diamond industry made its bed, being completely corrupted from extraction to distribution. When stones are cheap we can have discussion about their beauty instead of their prices.
I'm all in for finding beauty in our daily lives, but I'm not sure diamonds are more special than other things we take for granted. Oil and helium have also taken millions of years to form, and yet no one spends a second before buying a plastic duck or inflating a balloon. And if the point is that diamonds are shiny and pretty (which is a fair reason for liking them) there are other types of stones around just as good.
It’s not just that, the economics of diamonds is completely fabricated. Idk about these days, but debeers used to buy up the vast majority of mined diamond, not to sell but to hoard or destroy them to maintain scarcity.
I’m not even sure that all of these recent stories about lab created diamonds to come out aren’t actually a PR pitch to advertise “natural” diamonds, an effort to emphasise the difference in the public psyche.
Anything public facing that positions diamonds as expensive, desirable, or valuable can usually be traced back to the cartel. It’s super common in movies and other media.
I'm not excusing nor rationalizing prices and the economics, obviously they hoard and manupulate the rates. Can't argue with how dark that crap must be. All I'm saying is real diamonds are 'better' and everyone knows it. Humans are emotional and that's a good thing. The manipulation of it is the bad thing. Trying to deny yourself of your emotions like a monk and yet still wishing for the iconic symbolic significance having 3month salary storybook ring, what are we doing here. Pay more for the real thing because life is real.
100percent on board. A marriage is only as meaningful as the vows and the integrity of the people that made them. The guests are there to witness and to celebrate. Trying to make it about anything else only cheapens it.
If you can, put enough gold on her to get her out of a jam and have some runway. Other than that it’s just the promises you keep.
No, that’s what the subcutaneous tracking chip is for. lol.
But seriously, for us it matters, since she is much younger than I am. We make an effort to signal that we are a committed couple so that people don’t make crass assumptions.
Still, my ring is tungsten carbide and hers is a family wedding band handed down in my family for generations. Our engagement ring was also a family heirloom. In that way the rings have meaning.
She likes to wear her ring because she feels like it is a symbol of belonging, and I wear mine to honor our relationship.
To us, the rings are symbolic of our vows, a gentle reminder that our lives are in service of one another.
> real diamonds are 'better' and everyone knows it.
Personally disagree. That whole "3 months' salary that will last forever" thing? A lab diamond will last just as forever as a mined one. I'd personally rather have one from a lab than one dug out of the earth by some African dude who spends his days sweating underground.
Yeah, idk. I’m not against the idea of a 3 month value reserve as a financial security token to de-risk a marriage proposal, but it should be something that can be liquidated for a similar value. Just setting 3 months of your work on fire is a really stupid and irresponsible move for most people, and their kids are ultimately the ones that suffer.
Not only that, imagine this scenario: something terrible happens. Your wife has to sell her jewelry to take care of herself and your child. Would you rather have bought her a $20000 ring that can maybe be sold for $3000? Or a ring with actual intrinsic value that might actually be worth more than what you paid, but at least fetch 80%.
When I think of how that would feel for her to know that I paid a foolish amount for something of inflated symbolic bling rather than a something of value, I get embarrassed just imagining it. To me that is an abdication of duty.
That’s the difference between diamonds and actual precious stones, or at lower price points a nice heavy gold ring with an inexpensive, lab grown gem.
For beauty, silicon carbide beats diamond hands down. If you want value and natural origins, a quality ruby or emerald is spectacular and actually rare and rationally market-priced. Gold is nice.
Until you get into very large and actually rare stones, diamonds are a scam, pure and simple. The value of a near flawless 1 carat stone at the mine is about two hundred dollars. Cutting costs about half that. To buy it, that stone might fetch $7000. To sell it, you might get $1000 if you’re lucky. That is not a store of value. It’s a symbol of gullibility or a boast that I have so much money that I can burn it without being irresponsible. The kind of boast that if you can’t back it up IRl makes you impossible to take seriously.
If you just really, really like diamonds, knock yourself out. But don’t delude yourself into believing they are valuable. Better yet, go get one yourself, smuggled out of a mine or otherwise at the source. Get it cut and polished, or better yet do it yourself. That I totally respect and has character, integrity, and value baked in.
As for status or something like that, I suppose there is a case to be made that it symbolizes a burnt offering. So that makes sense, but only against a backdrop of demonstrative excess. If you have a diamond ring and a loan of any kind that is anything other than strategic tax planning, that means your kids are worse off for your vanity. If you’ve got more money than god and you want to show that you can waste cash and it doesn’t matter, wear that ring studded with sub-museum grade diamonds a all day long, you’re making your point. It’s vulgar, but you’re making your point. I can see it. It’s like the track suit.
Otherwise, you may as well lace up your clown shoes.
But, that’s just my opinion. In all reality it’s a useful social signal, like certain religious expression.
If the value is in perfection. Why would I not pick one that is bigger, has less flaws and less impurities. It is like would I prefer natural rain water or artificially purified water without microplastics and pfas and so on... My pick should be clear.
"When you buy a natural diamond, you're also buying a risk of cancer and various diseases, because all natural diamonds contain trace amounts of thorium and uranium. This is due to the fact that diamond crystallization occurs deep within the Earth's mantle, where these radioactive elements are naturally present
The article emphasizes financial pressures on new couples due to rising living costs making lab-grown diamonds more appealing, and that's sad in my mind, it's sad that the cost of living prices people out from nice things, it's sad that people here are coping saying lab made are the same, which to me is like saying a veggie patty is the same as a beef and I'm a bad person for eating meat, that a knockoff purse is the same as the brand name because they are both leather; dematerialize and dissasociate from the world more why dont you, oh are you above consumerism and so romantic you could wear a string as a wedding band because its more about meaning. What's the point of any fashion then. Of any art if any paint will do. Gold is just metal too then.
> it's sad that the cost of living prices people out from nice things
Cost of living can only go up if people are willing to pay more. People are paying more for what we deem living expenses because what they consider "nice" has changed.
In the past people would spend more on a diamond and less on a house because they were out and about all day and wanted others to see the diamond. Now, they stay home to scroll through TikTok (or post on HN), so they would rather spend more on a house instead.
If diamonds, or something like it, became more interesting to people again, they'll soon start turning their sending in that direction — away from where they are currently directing it.
> Cost of living can only go up if people are willing to pay more.
, is the worst economic take i've heard in a while and I read the FT. CoL is primarily driven by supply and demand, not willingness to pay, not to mention inflation, supply chain issues, inelastcity...
> CoL is primarily driven by supply and demand, not willingness to pay
Right. Supply and demand. Not supply alone. And demand is characterized by the willingness to pay.
> not to mention inflation, supply chain issues, inelastcity...
These are already encompassed in supply and demand. Why mention them twice?
>[...] is the worst economic take i've heard in a while
Maybe so, but given that, it is curious that, in the end, you decided to repeat the exact same thing in your own words. A "worst take" is usually taken to mean that you see things differently, not see things exactly the same.
there are many naturally occuring objects that have a similarly dramatic timeline
the point is that westerners are completely drunk on the marketing from de beers and its cost lives, not to mention the disgusting machiavellian exploitation of what was once an innocent courtship gesture into an aggressive commercial enterprise, chiefly profiteering the hopelessly young and naive.
De Beers tried to squelch the first US startup to turn out gemstones in production by intimidating the founder. The founder was a retired US Army brigadier general (2 silver stars earned in combat) and wasn't intimidated. That was back in 2011, and since then it's been all downhill for natural diamonds.
De Beers later tried building synthetic diamond detectors. There are simple detectors for detecting cubic zirconia and such, but separating synthetic and natural diamonds is tough. The current approach is to hit the diamond with a burst of UV, turn off the UV and then capture an image. The spectrum of the afterglow indicates impurities in the diamond. The latest De Beers testing machine [2] is looking for nitrogen atoms embedded in the diamond, which is seen more in natural diamonds than synthetics. The synthetics are better than the naturals. Presumably synthetic manufacturers could add some nitrogen if they wanted to bother. This is the latest De Beers machine in their losing battle against synthetics. They've had DiamondScan, DiamondView, DiamondSure, SynthDetect, and now DiamondProof. Even the most elaborate devices have a false alarm rate of about 5%.[3]
[1] https://e6-prd-cdn-01.azureedge.net/mediacontainer/medialibr...
[2] https://verification.debeersgroup.com/instrument/diamondproo...
[3] https://www.naturaldiamonds.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/A...
Hahaha, this is amazing. All of the US ex-military I worked with was super chill but had zero tolerance for bullshit, I can't even imagine somebody trying to pull it off and thinking it's a good idea.
Except the guy that founded BJC was an ex-corporate lawyer. His response letter (https://www.bluejeanscable.com/legal/mcp/response041408.pdf) is full of zingers, but most appropriate for this exact point is this:
> After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1985, I spent nineteen years in litigation practice, with a focus upon federal litigation involving large damages and complex issues. My first seven years were spent primarily on the defense side, where I developed an intense frustration with insurance carriers who would settle meritless claims for nuisance value when the better long-term view would have been to fight against vexatious litigation asa matter of principle...
> If you sue me, the case will go to judgment, and I will hold the court's attention upon the merits of your claims--or, to speak more precisely, the absence of merit from your claims--from start to finish. Not only am I unintimidated by litigation; I sometimes rather miss it.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2003/09/diamond/
Shoot, if I was in the unlikely fictional scenario where I even wore a diamond and someone asked about it, I would be THRILLED to get into the science of how it was grown in a lab. What a cool story. Instead of just going “yeah, thanks, it cost a fortune and three kids died pulling it out of the dirt”.
Amusing.
This would end the De Beers cartel basically overnight by smashing the "appeal to nature" fallacy that "natural gem" marketing and pricing relies on.
When I see somebody with diamonds and check with them that they are naturals, its pretty clear what kind of person I am dealing with. To be kind and polite here, its not a nice evaluation and it ends up very precise. I let them know what's the general consensus on morality regarding those stones, its sometimes funny to watch their reactions and at least now they know something and can't anymore argue they didn't. What they do with that info is up to them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7tGZzwe4mQ
PS Question : Who is stealing the content idea from whom? Is it possible that the article author saw this video and decided to write abou it?
https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/de-beers-diamonds-price-...
In it he calls lab grown diamonds a "huge con", though doesn't really explain why...
See also: France and Nigerien uranium.
Took me longer than I care to admit reading the Wikipedia page for Carter Clarke Sr. (also a brigadier general) who led a pretty interesting life of his own (e.g. leading the War Department investigation of Pearl Harbor intelligence failures) before I realized I had the wrong generation of Clarkes.
Certainly this is an approach, get a bunch of nerds engaged with the product, co opted into marketing it. You’re quite literally storytelling. But something tells me that “CTO” is not the fashion industry’s most lucrative demo. And for better or worse, no matter how you’re making you’re diamond, you’re focusing on 18-45yo rich women seeking experiences, and I don’t see how the diamond’s origin, even if everything you say is 100% true, factors into the retail journey at Tiffany’s.
The unit at the time of DaBeers smashing 1947 "Diamonds are Forever" campaign, in 1947, was the -family-. It wasn't too long after women's suffrage, and still women were expected to be barefoot and pregnant, after all, birth control wouldn't come for another 20 years. Families were the operative entity messaging targeted, and the campaign was successful because the diamond was a sort of foundation for the foundation of the family, the marriage, not dissimilar in spirit from long held human societal norms of dowries and such.
The sexual and hippie revolution of the 1960s shook the whole thing up. Women didn't need families, there was birth control, women could work, a revolution carrying forth to the 1980s shark killer business woman to today where in fact many universities have become female majority. The modern unit of american society is the individual, not the unit, making the diamond an anachronistic echo of a once proud culture, now seen as a bit dated, a bit weird, a bit unsettling and paternalistic, instilling the same feelings in a person that an old Playboy magazine might.
As someone who’s already cynical about the ”natural”(/extractive) diamond “industry”(/cartel), the points made on that site are hilarious and absurd — highly recommend a scroll for anyone interested in how desperate they are to attack the new tech. Just from that comparison page, my favorite argument is probably “lab grown diamonds are from (dirty, evil) India and China, whereas natural diamonds are from ~nature~”, although “lab grown diamonds are so perfect that they’re all the same grade, and therefore boring” is a close runner up.
The fact that they’re now publishing a magazine devoted entirely to this topic tells me they haven’t slowed down, just improved their ad spend so that it’s not wasted on me! Something tells me there’s quite a mountain of financial instruments secured by the warehouses of diamonds they have to keep supply tight, so I can only see this ramping up in the short term.
It's not the 1950s anymore, and blue-collar workers don't want to piss away 3 months salary to buy a depreciating asset. It's really only marketable if you lie to the customer.
First, it is way harder to do.Every imperfection introduces secondary effects.
Second, the people that make those diamonds are not ashamed or hiding but believe on what they do. Leo Di Caprio for example invested millions in making synthetic diamonds that do not finance wars in Africa.
New generations are proud of people not dying for getting their beautiful stones.
lastly, diamonds, like gold, are very useful for science. In particular they are amazing semiconductors with incredible heat dissipation and small power loses. If we get better, less defects diamonds ,cheaper, power electronics will be revolutionised.
What I'd pay more for is an exotic color or multicolor diamond (a diamond built around a ruby?). Or one that changed color depending on the lighting -- picture moonlight turning it a brilliant blue or purple (basically I want it to come from Middle Earth). Or one that glowed red in the dark.
Actually, I wouldn't be the target for this, but I'd love it if they existed.
Our position now (as always) is that the negative consequences of a false accusation outweigh the benefit of a valid accusation. We don't want to be a site that shames people or piles on. We can't really know what people are thinking when they post a comment, or why they might use a tool to generate or improve it. Downvoting and flagging are strong enough signals, and do enough to hide the comment if others agree that's what should happen, and that's what happened here. It's good to email us so we can see if there's a pattern of behaviour we need to know about so we can penalize or ban the account or take some other appropriate action once we can see the full picture.
Joking aside, I have found myself recently using phrases and styles of turning a phrase and stopped myself asking, "since when do you say that?"
Since I've spent countless hours talking to LLMs, that's when. I even had a multi-hour conversation with ChatGPT about my idea for "perfectly flawed" lab-grown diamonds, several months ago and was excited to finally find a place to talk about what I learned, hence the comment you attribute to being from an LLM.
I'm probably not an LLM, nor did I generate a response for this thread using an LLM, but you've just made me really self-conscious about how now humans, or at least myself, have to be wary that we don't start talking like the LLMs that are supposed to be talking like us.
Another big tell is the total overuse of antithesis. ChatGPT is cringy for this. "Not this, but that". I counted six instances of antithesis in your message. There were also three instances of hypophora, another beloved of essay generators.
You are debating over a message that imagines the consequences of generating progressively more natural-looking diamonds by adding them imperfections; you are claiming that the message doesn't look natural enough because it doesn't have the imperfections of a typed message (wrong quotes, wrong dashes).
Fact is, with diamonds and intelligence we're moving to a Dickian scenario where progressively complicated and ineffective tests are needed to tell the artificial from the natural. And soon the Voight-Kampff test won't work anymore.
What I find most interesting is the weight put on the ethical side. I think it’s overstated. When the issue became big, the Blood Diamond movie, sales of lab grown did not markedly increase. It took another decade or so to become more prevalent. What changed over that time is the price, IIRC the price was comparable to natural at the time the movie came out. Ethics were not compelling enough for most people at that price. When prices got about 50% of natural, it became much more compelling. Now that it’s around 10%, it’s practically so compelling that buying natural isn’t even a real consideration for many people.
Anyways, I think people use the Blood Diamond talking point as a socially acceptable reason- it’s what they tell their parents and grandparents who might judge them- but in reality it’s almost completely a financial decision. If the tables were turned and natural diamonds became 1/10th the cost of lab grown, the market would completely flip back practically overnight.
Buying diamonds has always been expensive, but selling them, is another matter, entirely.
Also, deBeers invented the diamond wedding ring fairly recently. My mother’s wedding ring was a big-ass sapphire. If you look at classical wedding rings, they are often non-diamond stones.
Also probably due in part to what's been called the best advertising slogan of the 20th century: "A Diamond is Forever" [0]. The implication being that you're not supposed to sell (or buy) a used diamond.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Beers#Marketing
Perhaps to have a jeweller set it in a different setting?
Check with the recipient beforehand, of course. You're not the one who has to wear it, and no amount of logic is going to change a mind that wants a brand new, natural diamond.
It's so weird a product marketet like this even got any popularity within "normal" people.
you typically buy jewelry with a diamond in it. the jewler could gave bought it new or pried it out of an old ring. How would you know ? (and why would anyone care?)
Precisely.
And on top of that some jewelry stores are worried that customers would consider a below wholesale offer to be insulting, so they often refuse to buy piece back at all.
No one wants to buy used diamonds.
It was not a switch that was pushed the moment the movie went out. In the grand scheme of things, the movie was not even that popular. But there definitely was a realisation that diamond prices were completely artificially inflated by an oligopoly, and that there were many issues with how they were sourced.
Just because demand did not follow a step function when the file was released does not imply that ethics are not relevant.
That is popular by any reasonable definition.
The movie exposed an opportunity - what if we could have diamonds without the oppression? Oppression is very high cost.
Yes — industry. From Wikipedia:
> Eighty percent of mined diamonds (equal to about 135,000,000 carats (27,000 kg) annually) are unsuitable for use as gemstones and are used industrially.[131] In addition to mined diamonds, synthetic diamonds found industrial applications almost immediately after their invention in the 1950s; in 2014, 4,500,000,000 carats (900,000 kg) of synthetic diamonds were produced, 90% of which were produced in China. Approximately 90% of diamond grinding grit is currently of synthetic origin.[132]
> ...
> Industrial use of diamonds has historically been associated with their hardness, which makes diamond the ideal material for cutting and grinding tools. As the hardest known naturally occurring material, diamond can be used to polish, cut, or wear away any material, including other diamonds. Common industrial applications of this property include diamond-tipped drill bits and saws, and the use of diamond powder as an abrasive.
As your quote points out, synthetic industrial diamonds have been available for many decades. But it is only recently that synthetic diamond gems have achieved popularity and price advantage for jewelry.
(Patents were really strong back then. Howard Hughes, Sr. became the richest man in the world by buying the patent for the drill bit. He then manufactured bits and rented them out for a fraction of the profits from the oil well.)
[1] https://www.slb.com/products-and-services/innovating-in-oil-...
[2] https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/texas-primer-the-hu...
Diamonds are used in all kinds of things besides jewelry. Industry needs that economy of scale.
But there are also applications for larger flawless crystals in things like diamond windows, semiconductor substrate and microtomes. Recently you can even buy a diamond 3D printer nozzle for extruding abrasive materials like carbon fibre. These require better processes than the ones that churn out abrasive diamonds.
See also: views on climate change, adoption of renewable energy, etc.
So is our conclusion "People talk a big game but their morality clearly fails based on how the market has played out" or "People want things but the market has competing forces and sometimes takes a long time to find ways to provide people what they want?"
My rephrasing to your statement is "It took the mass market decades to figure out how to deliver consumers the solar/electric cars they wanted at a price they could afford."
Also, points in the general direction of the established energy providers I think these assholes had some incentive not to let the market get out from under them and make sure they were the ones who continued to profit from it.
Nicely stated. I like your style of debate / deliberation.
If ethical mining were an issue today would they lay down their devices that use critical minerals?
Solar energy was quite expensive until recently to improve adoption.
Most of it is earned over time.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/community-development/publication...
"While trailing Gen Xers for the beginning of their adult lives, younger American households’ average wealth began to exceed that of Gen Xers at about age 30, reflecting historically high wealth levels following the COVID-19 pandemic." I have a feeling that average wealth adjustment falls very heavily on the home owners, which is only just above half of all the cohort. Had a similar thing happened to boomers in 89, almost 70% would have benefitted.
I think it's also worth pointing out: The share of wealth held by boomers in 89 (why 89? Because they didn't have data before that. It's why the graphs start in a weird spot and why it's not a great study unless you're trying to pull out a "gotcha" stat) represented almost 20% of the total wealth in the country. "Millenials/GenZ" has a hold on only HALF that percentage.
Doctors may hate your one weird statistic, but socio-demographists probably don't...
This is also true for other generations.
Boomers have had significantly longer and better sustained market conditions to grow their wealth.
People accumulate wealth over a life time of work. It would be entirely expect that younger generations have less wealth than older generations.
This tracks with broad trends of wealth inequality increasing as well.
So no, it's not just "they haven't accumulated yet", because it's not clear they will have the opportunity to do so.
Source? The data I’ve seen indicate the median millennial is wealthier than the median boomer was at their age.
You are right in a sense. But it's still a very bad prognosis.
Some of us old-heads got pushed much farther left as a result of this. I used to be a Democrat, blue and blue. These days I'm much more like, "The Dems will sell me out to make a buck, I gotta go out and actually be the change I want to see in the world."
Young folks who are experiencing disillusion -- don't give in to despair. You can make a meaningful difference in lives. Build communities, engage in mutual aid, whatever.
Where people are waiting for change and the movement, they don’t realize they are the change and the movement.
Now would be a terrible time to become disillusioned and despairing, after winning all those important battles. It proves that idealism works, and we really need it for current and future battles! It's the nihilistic disillusioned people who are CAUSING all the problems.
In so many aspects of life, I've noticed how there's always something devastatingly discouraging that happens right before any major successful breakthrough.
It's as if God's being a dick, and always throws something profoundly disheartening at you right on the precipice of success, just so he can laugh at you for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
I now recognize that as a sign I'm just about to succeed, and shouldn't give up no matter what.
We are living through that kind of historic transition right now, watching MAGA finally turn on Trump. Don't fuck it up by giving up now!
Doesn't that show younger generations have a markable improvement in "being good"?
... or so populist messaging from the Right would have you believe.
I was a center-left socialist as a kid and I'm a full blown anarchist in my 40's so, idk, "people aren't a monolith"?
But in any case, these aren’t mutually exclusive. People want conflict free diamonds but not to spend a years pay getting one.
The mining, corrupt trade practices, etc are all well known and sometimes subject to enforcement action.
The thing about today is many pale aren’t seater horse beliefs and preferences (“trends”) can be manufactured.
Social media is a different kind of amplifier the past few years.
Yet in the end she still wanted to get a ring from one of the big names because that’s what she grew up with and what she had always dreamt of since young.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The irony is that as synthetic diamonds become indistinguishable from naturals, the price will plummet over time.
Virtue-signaling has always been a thing, and apparently quite useful for marketing to certain segments of the population.
I wonder if my spreadsheet still exists.
Also recent synthetic diamonds adding some kind of a marker to the synthetic diamond.
Today it makes one think there’s likely synthetic diamonds mixed in with real ones somewhere.
Natural diamonds are more expensive, and they therefore have a conspicuous consumption element to them. That could be valuable as a means to gain social cachet. Except you'd have to speak loudly about how they were natural.
And in doing so you are loudly proclaiming you don't care about human suffering it took to get the diamonds. That's probably fine in very wealthy circles, but in upper middle class/upper-upper middle class circles, it's likely quite gauche.
If the natural ones didn't have this faux pas attached to them by default, then they might carry more interest as a "I saved up for these" class indicator.
I've never understood this really because no-one carries their GIA certificate with them. With the existence of moissanite and artificial stones, it should be a "market for lemons" situation where a given stone on someone's finger is assumed low-value by default.
This matches my experience with people, including myself. I think it's about the feedback. The price pain or the energy pain is readily and immediately felt, whereas ethics violations are not, as people are shielded from the impact externally, and have many defenses against it internally as well.
It's more status-forward than authenticity-forward consumption, and many jewelers can assure you that it's very much still in vogue in some areas.
Getting married is less common which in of itself is a huge reduction to diamond jewelry demand. Of course there’s probably some town that marriage is at an all time high.
Here’s just one sellers assortment of various “roughs” https://www.gemsngems.com/product-category/rough-stones/lab-...
As someone who doesn’t care about the authenticity of the gems provenance and only about having consistent physical properties for rock tumbling and gem faceting, it’s been very nice for the budget
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybcdRQmQcHQ
Other people would still assume you might have bought a blood diamond, so instead of buying a lab diamond, I would expect these people to have bought another gem if they bought a gemstone at all.
When prices are equal, I'd wager the decision is: "if prices are equal why wouldn't I buy the "real" thing? I'll just try and justify to myself that it's sourced correctly".
When the price of the grown diamonds falls, the decision might be: "Ok, so grown diamonds are cheaper AND more ethical? Ok, I'm definitely buying grown".
If the ethics factor didn't exist, "real" diamonds would still retain the kudos and still be valued highly over "nice but fake" diamonds.
It's the ethics factor that pushes the decision over the line.
As an n=1 economic animal, that's what my behaviour would have been anyway.
And it's all marketing anyway: slap a "condensed from pure carbon" campaign out there and suddenly natural diamonds are fake rich and not as pure or precise or something.
Now sure, this concept was manufactured to a great extent through marketing, and it can be replaced or just fall out of favor. But established culture changes very slowly, and there's no "other gemstones cartel" to throw money at this the way DeBeers did to establish the diamond engagement ring in the first place.
But at the end of the day, they always do the exact same thing - buy whatever is cheaper. Doesn't matter if it's produced with slave labor, or child labor, or the product of corporate government coups.
They put all that out of their mind, and just buy the product. They rationalize it or conveniently forget it or just pretend it doesn't apply to them. Whatever will get them past it.
A similar topic: Does anyone think things like solar and wind are being used out of the goodness of anyone's heart? Concern for the next generations? A desire to give clean air to our youth? Sympathy for sufferers of all of the horrible diseases and respiratory problems? Concern about lands lost to rising seas?
No. It's because they got cheaper than fossil fuels. Anything else is fantasy.
Solar PV: https://research.chalmers.se/publication/520553/file/520553_...
EVs: https://ia600108.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/24...
Renewable energy premiums: https://research-hub.nrel.gov/en/publications/will-consumers...
Fair Trade: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Shared%20Documents/conferences/2...
Is it possible that people decreased purchases of diamonds altogether in response to ethical qualms (in favor of other jewels or precious items), and then were later motivated by price to go with lab-grown diamonds?
They were simply dismissed as more trash belonging in the gold-plated case. It's hard to appreciate how much less informed people were back then - we're talking pre-internet. The adults around me couldn't explain scientifically what the actual difference was between a CZ and natural diamond. Just one was a fake, held little value, and was a sure way to lose your fiance.
edit: seems that moissanite (silicon carbide, perhaps unsurprisingly) is another diamond-like (though hexagonal crystals vs. cubic for diamond or CZ) gemstone that is actually harder than sapphire and less prone to fracture than diamond.
If we're talking about 'quality', CZ just doesn't compare for longevity. That said, unless you're talking about a daily-wearing-for-many-years piece of jewelry (i.e., an engagement ring), CZ is just fine for most folks, especially considering the cost difference.
> The adults around me couldn't explain scientifically what the actual difference was between a CZ and natural diamond.
I was told growing up you can just check with window glass. If the gem scratches it's CZ and if the glass scratches it's diamond.
CZ is very cheap costume jewelry and won't last as it scratches and dulls so easily
one of the victims said she had doubted the ring he gave her was real, but he just scratched a mirror with it to prove it was real. Then she said "it was only later after he left that I found cz can also scratch glass"
At the same time, I do understand the sentiment around wanting a mined diamond. The whole idea behind a diamond engagement ring is a marketing exercise backed up by a cartel, so if you're gonna participate in the ritual you might as well do it right. There are silly backstories buried in every part of human society today, from "some king did it and everyone copied him" to "this piece of land got special status a thousand years ago which accidentally let it become its own country" to "my grandmother was too poor to do XYZ the right way so we still do it her way." That's just part and parcel of being human.
Like they're alive or there's some weird chemicals involved.
It's not silly stories when evil corporations with deep pockets are outright lying, like ads with doctors smoking.
Indeed: Even the article perpetuates this:
"Whereas a two-carat real diamond engagement ring might cost $35,000, Oymakas says a two-carat lab-grown diamond with the same clarity and colour could only be about $3,500."
Sorry - they're both real diamonds.
You just know they want to get the receiving partner on their side of "I'm worth the waste of money for a "real" diamond"
Next stop is the self-repairing vegan leather also made of the mycelium: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/vegan-leather-fungi-repa...
I think "lab-grown" is a pretty neutral term, and it is also scientifically accurate in the case of CVD and other diamonds where the process really is "growing" the diamonds. There are certainly other terms for them that sound more derogatory such as "synthetic" or "artificial" diamond.
Also part and parcel of being a human being is logic and empathy. Anyone who possesses one of these traits, never mind both of them, should find it easy to choose the product that isn't literally the product of human suffering an exploitation.
That's not to paper over the issues with the industry (environmental, poor working conditions, poor pay etc) - but those are more generally applied to any mined product. I'd be willing to bet that your average set of modern electronics cause far more suffering than your average diamond: see conflict resources such as tantalum, tin, tungsten, gold.
> That's just part and parcel of being human.
Yes, but what kind of human?
I am not an expert so take this with a grain of salt, but for what I do I have seen no difference between flawless natural diamond and flawless lab grown diamond, the difference is that the flawless natural diamonds are almost always far more expensive.
I think I’d be quite swayed towards the lab ones knowing that there were engineers who used them for industrial use and found them exactly the same.
Also being much cheaper, I’d likely spend money towards getting a better grade lab-grown diamond than I could afford with a mined diamond.
If I was the lab-grown industry I’d also be actively attempting to shift the narrative around the term real, and say ones mined one is lab made, both are real. But that’s its own fight I’m sure.
“The major investors in the diamond mines realized that they had no alternative but to merge their interests into a single entity that would be powerful enough to control production and perpetuate the illusion of scarcity of diamonds. The instrument they created, in 1888, was called De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd., incorporated in South Africa…” From the classic 80s article “Have you ever tried to sell a diamond” - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-yo...
> Graham Pearson, professor with the University of Alberta's department of earth and atmospheric sciences, says that the natural formation of diamonds deep underground results in a "complexity" you can't get with the lab-grown variety.
Okay; but why should I aesthetically prefer this?
The whole thing is such an obvious marketing exercise with very little to back it up (as evidenced by the extremely low resale value of diamonds)
It's much much more complex that a solid sheet of tempered glass, and it catches the light and reflects it in sparkling ways.
Maybe these so called "complex" diamonds create more interesting light interfaces?
If they did, it would be possible to detect the difference with perfect accuracy. Instead, the detectors made by those interested in pushing the concept of "real, natural" diamonds have a false positive rate of 5% looking for the inclusion of things labs could easily add if they cared to
(I don’t know if color gradients are even desirable in the market.)
The modern-day aesthetic of diamonds is just that they are expensive. They're not distinguished by utility, quality, or appearance from cheaper products. The ultimate status symbol, but also obviously a bit of an issue...
(Moissanite is even better, so it should be preferred over diamonds unless I’m overlooking some other difference in their attributes?)
But plain glass gems look comparatively bland when used as jewelry.
Diamond (10) is 4x as hard as corundum (9) which is 2x as hard as topaz (8).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohs_scale#Reference_minerals
Glass doesn't sparkle.
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Miluxas-Women-s-Glitter-Tennis-Sn...
Diamonds (and other gems) really are beautifula to look at in ways that glass just isn't. And manmade ones, sparklier still out of the forge of our own cleverness, are much nicer in my opinion.
Regardless of how it was made, one is just as much "forever" as the other. The real major difference is in the labor practices being used.
De Beers had a good run as a cartel but as they say, "the jig is up"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bfa-cKDzYSg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0wvDwSnzcw
I'd say it's like AI music or art - something made by a machine, for some reason, just doesn't have any "soul" to it.
I'm not actually entirely convinced in my argument, but there is something there...
Diamonds are a product of natural geological processes. (Or, are grown in a lab, by recreating similar conditions.)
Music and art are products of human talent, skill, and labor - that ML companies have used (without a license, permission, or even credit) to build datasets that are now being used to make money, at the expense of these artists.
These are not the same things.
Stable hydrogen wasn't able to form until several hundreds of thousands of years after the Big Bang when the universe cooled sufficiently for electrons to bind to protons.
Even assuming you're counting lone protons as hydrogen atoms, it's still absolutely false. I don't know if that's true for the majority of protons in the universe, but there are mechanisms by which new protons are made all the time. Neutrons can turn into protons through beta decay, and high energy particle interactions like those involving cosmic rays can produce brand new protons. These processes can and do happen terrestrially.
... and at rates that mean that the amount of non-big-bang hydrogen is not even a trillionth of a trillionth of the total.
I didn't say it was a huge fraction of the total. You said "literally all of them" were from the Big Bang, which is just wrong. Plenty of other processes produce protons/hydrogen
And thus, any distinction between them exists mainly in your head.
Natural diamonds won't always fluoresce but the ones that do will do so in a variety of colors, and sometimes change depending on what wavelength is irradiating them.
The difference is not instantly apparent under UV.
Only about 30% of natural diamonds have fluorescence --- which is *caused* by impurities and imperfections in the material.
Manmade diamonds tend to lack this because they have fewer impurities and imperfections. Equating increased perfection and purity with inferiority is highly debatable and smacks of marketing BS.
Urea disproved "vital force" theory. You are doing something similar.
Wired: we will put a soul in this rock for $10,000
For the first time, physicists have demonstrated that information can flow through a diamond wire. In the experiment, electrons did not flow through diamond as they do in traditional electronics; rather, they stayed in place and passed along a magnetic effect called "spin" to each other down the wire -- like a row of sports spectators doing "the wave." Spin could one day be used to transmit data in computer circuits -- and this new experiment revealed that diamond transmits spin better than most metals in which researchers have previously observed the effect.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140323151718.h...
Indeed there is a diamond planet that old too.
A diamond planet, "55 Cancri E", is a super-Earth exoplanet known for its high density and potential diamond composition. It is located 41 light-years away and is about twice the size of Earth and nine times its mass. The planet's extreme heat and pressure are believed to have crystallized its carbon-rich composition into diamonds.
> We exchange diamond rings as part of the engagement process because the diamond company De Beers decided in 1938 that it would like us to. Prior to a stunningly successful marketing campaign, Americans occasionally exchanged engagement rings, but it wasn’t pervasive. Not only is the demand for diamonds a marketing invention, but diamonds aren’t actually that rare. Only by carefully restricting the supply has De Beers kept the price of a diamond high.
Imho, that "soul" you describe is an artifact of human sentimentality and a very successful marketing campaign by a bunch of Afrikaner colonialists.
Walter Benjamin called it "aura" - something a physical original has, but a reproduction doesn't.
It explains why collectors pay $$$$$ for a guitar played by [famous musician], even though they can't play.
There's no objective way to look at any one guitar and divine its history. Without provenance or physical customisation, any Rickenbacker or Les Paul is indistinguishable from any other of the same production run.
But we believe in sympathetic magic. Objects are charged with mysterious non-physical manna through proximity to wealth and status. Owning these special objects confers that manna on us, and perhaps our fortune will increase.
It's the logic of witchcraft lurking at the heart of capitalism.
One of the fun things about AI is that it deconstructs this while reinforcing it. Huge collections of high status manna are now inside a machine, and available for free, or near as.
Do we still believe in magic, or not?
They do that so, when they get together, they have a story to tell to other famous people. If that guitar were to be replaced, nobody would be able to tell the difference.
We can talk about "anima", in latin, the same inside "animal" or "animation" to apply it to a wider concept of living beings.
We can go further in time to the greek concept "daimon", devils, allude to supernatural powers or spirits to start applying it to things.
Then we could apply De Boers sociopaths concept that goes back to using the Christian concept to rocks again.
The only "soul" those rocks have is the one of the millions of African people that died in wars, the women that were raped and the kids that were traumatised being forced to kill their family members so a woman can look at beautiful iridescence in her finger.
Disclaimer: I have worked as a volunteer helping refugees, mostly from Congo, so I am biased a lot.
https://ai-art-turing-test.com/
I recommend to all newly engaged couples to buy them and save the money for more important things like raising children or buying a home.
And if you look on eBay, you can get CVD diamonds for even less. (At a bit of a risk, of course.)
Every gem out there is “the crystalline form” of something. Diamonds are (were?) the expensive crystalline form. And plenty of people equate “expensive” with love, or care, or respect. Even if the same people would never be able to tell the difference between diamond and cubic zirconium, knowing it’s the cheap one makes it less valuable in other ways. This depends on the person, of course.
If it’s not diamonds it will have to be something else that shows “I put my money where my mouth is”. A simple metal wedding band is the same wherever it’s made but a famous jeweler will charge an arm and a leg more than your local shop for the same amount of precious metal, same effort, and same result. And yet Tiffany’s isn’t going out of business for the same reason. It’s what it represents.
I am curious to see if tastes or fashion shift towards other rarer or more expensive gems not yet manufactured cheaply en masse.
For those obsessed with materialism, real satisfaction is out of reach. There is always bigger, better and more expensive.
Personally, I would tend to reconsider any long term relationship with such a person.
The entire point of using diamonds in wedding rings is for the male to signal how committed he is to the marriage by expending a large amount of money on both the ring and the wedding itself. It then acts as a way for the wife to signal her status to other women by showing off how much her husband was willing and able to spend on the ring.
It is a hold-out from the tradition that the male is a provider and the female is a caregiver. If you reject traditional gender roles, you should also reject expensive diamond rings regardless whether they are mined or grown. Otherwise, embrace the shiny, but make no mistake: the cost is entirely the point.
That's some nice historical background (which could be post-hoc contextualization that fits certain agenda), but traditions have this weird habit of outliving their actual purpose and still having the form without the role.
So no, you don't have to commit to traditional gender roles to have diamond rings and don't have to make them expensive as otherwise it's not doing the thing it's supposed to do. The could just not do the thing at all and you can still have them.
Assume you have 2 diamonds that cost the same.
One is natural, the other is larger and man made.
Which one is more likely to convey your point to the average person?
Are you arguing that anyone who would accept and display a precious gem is ineligible for marriage? More so if it is larger, but not if more expensive? The post you are replying to presents a plausible social economy of the tradition. What is your point?
No. My point is that anyone who conditions marriage on the size or cost of a diamond is ineligible to marry me.
My wife accepted my marriage proposal without a ring. One was added later --- after other more urgent finances were covered and reassuring her that it would be modest and not overly wasteful.
In other words, this was done strictly because I wanted to --- not as a pre-condition for her acceptance. She says doing it this way was more meaningful.
Jewelry is the pinnacle of “just monetary value”. Unlike almost any other possession, a car, a house, clothes, etc. jewelry serves no practical purpose, only shows the willingness or ability to spend for it. The more you spend, the more valuable the gesture, the more you cared to please the recipient.
Materialistic people have the same feelings you have. Those just happened to be triggered by different values than yours.
As people quit believing in God, they stop thinking in terms of "God brought us together/we were made for each other" (though they stop thinking that a generation or two later than they stop believing in God).
If you think that we made this relationship, then maybe a lab-grown (human made) diamond fits? (Though it may take an advertising campaign before people see it that way.)
Disclaimer: I'm not a sociologist. This is just my speculation about how the dynamic could change.
People buy inferior, counterfeit merchandise all the time because they can't tell the difference.
But there is nothing inferior or counterfeit about a manmade diamond. It is *exactly* the same material as a natural one.
Yes, you can buy a man-made diamond the same you can buy counterfeit branded clothes. That only shows that you’re tasteless and that you can’t afford the real thing.
If it is strictly about the money, a larger man made diamond can easily cost just as much as a smaller natural one --- while instantly conveying to the untrained eye the appearance of being more expensive.
If you see someone wearing a 6-carat diamond, you know it's either a $100,000 natural diamond, or a $4,000 lab-grown diamond. And you'll assume it's the latter, as far more people can afford the latter.
On the other hand, a 1-carat diamond would be more like $2000 natural, $300 lab-grown, making it far more believable that it was natural.
My screenshots of NFTs are pixel accurate, but not exactly as valuable as the real thing.
For any man, for past few decades (at least 3-4) a woman insisting at all costs on big shiny natural diamond is a massive red flag for undesirable personality traits. Given stable divorce rates and general misery on all sides before and after that red flags are and should be considered very intensively. Once physical attraction wanes, only personalities remain.
• Scale: I'm aware of one company that operates over 700 CVD systems that each make 25 stones/run - there are at least 3 others of similar volume;
• Cost: the variable cost of making a 1ct finished brilliant (D-E,F-VVSI) is <$30US. Obviously, that cost is for ex-US production. See, for example, the recent demise of de Beers' Lightbox growth center in Oregon.
Naturals simply can't compete. They are forming a completely separate market involving a much smaller, extremely wealthy clientele.
The business case for synthetics is deteriorating as production costs bottom out and margins decline in an ongoing race to the bottom.
https://eutoday.net/antwerps-diamond-industry-facing-an-exis...
This is moot sans the "source that you quoted" and some stats and studies.
For interest, Australia: https://www.ga.gov.au/bigobj/GA13928.pdf
India, Mali, Fiji, Africa, Americas, etc have similar trace amounts across their surfaces that are detectable from an aircraft 80m above ground level traveling at 70 m/second.
"Radiation: it's everywhere"
https://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonydemarco/2025/05/09/de-be...
Pay an entrance fee and bring or rent your own equipment and keep any diamonds you find. It's a 37 acre field that was once a volcanic crater. I never found any personally, but it was surprisingly fun and worth the detour if driving through the state. I also don't care much for diamonds, but if I ever find one it'd be pretty special. More than 600 diamonds are found each year according to wiki
[0] https://www.arkansasstateparks.com/parks/crater-diamonds-sta...
But here's the fun thing. You can destroy the value of a natural ruby by cooking it. If you heat it in the right way the impurities will anneal out and you will be left with a near flawless stone that appears to be artificial! Bye bye value :)
Here's an example article from the era: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/2004/02/14/y...
I hope the parent commenter wasn’t duped by someone selling fake diamonds.
A year ago I picked up a 1ct hearts and arrows (D/E. VVS1/2, IGI certificate) from AliExpress for $360. I can see the hearts and arrows and it tests as diamond. A few months later an article came out about how lab diamonds stack up against mined, and the author had also bought one with similar characteristics from AliExpress for even less.
I just checked the same store and they're (not H&A but same other stats) running around $125 plus a $14 tariff.
The resale value of your item has gone down.
Btw Blood diamonds was also a successful marketing ploy of De beers to keep out the competition. It was weird to me how western countries only cared about the exploitation of diamonds.
“Have you ever tried to sell a diamond” https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/archives/1982/02/249-2/132...
Think about it like a supermarket—at scale, it’s not practical for grocery stores to source fruits and vegetables from the wild (like natural diamonds).
Wasn’t it inevitable that “farm-grown” produce (lab-grown diamonds) would become the long-term solution?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5403988
There is nothing to miss about the impending death of the 'diamond industry'.
(Oh, the link is broken on the HN 2013 story -- try this one: https://priceonomics.com/diamonds-are-bullshit/ )
Why is it that everyone seems to have a soft spot for industries that have some kind of monopoly, suddenly losing that monopoly.
As the jewelry industry repositions around the uniqueness of natural diamonds I would expect to see more promotion of this kind of socially responsible production.
[0]: https://peacediamond.com/
To this day I change the channel when I hear a commercial for a diamond store on the radio and its been 20+ years. I am so excited about lab grown diamonds.
For some reason my ideal vision of capitalism is where a company simply makes a product that solves customers' problem and makes them happy, receiving a fair amount of money in return for their efforts. No corporate propaganda campaigns or anti-consumer shenanigans needed, just a solid [thing] for people who need [thing].
Interested to hear potential problems with this approach in the replies.
Need to look into the differences so I can be precise when debating these things.
New metaphors: "What trim level of capitalism have we got?" "`class ImperfectCapitalism implements Capitalism`" "RNG capitalism modifiers"
I do recommend Sowell’s book basic economics. Its a trudge but its very educational and written in an easy to understand way
Natural Diamonds Had a Rough Year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42592424 - Jan 2025 (6 comments)
See how a lab-grown diamond is made - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42257245 - Nov 2024 (49 comments)
Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41488353 - Sept 2024 (490 comments)
Diamond industry 'in trouble' as lab-grown gemstones tank prices further - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40585594 - June 2024 (39 comments)
UK mining giant to offload De Beers diamond business - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40359867 - May 2024 (7 comments)
Forget billions of years: Researchers have grown diamonds in just 150 minutes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40172784 - April 2024 (61 comments)
Lab Grown Diamonds Are Too Perfect for Their Own Good - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39298644 - Feb 2024 (1 comment)
Diamonds Suck - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38247300 - Nov 2023 (163 comments)
The diamond world takes radical steps to stop a pricing plunge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38245762 - Nov 2023 (588 comments)
Diamonds are losing their allure - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37508058 - Sept 2023 (128 comments)
Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? (1982) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37396372 - Sept 2023 (11 comments)
What's the case for naturally mined diamonds anymore? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37275308 - Aug 2023 (49 comments)
Man-made diamonds are falling in price and appealing to more people - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35748205 - April 2023 (9 comments)
Diamonds Suck (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26698511 - April 2021 (53 comments)
Diamonds aren’t special and neither is love - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25978139 - Jan 2021 (90 comments)
Artificial diamonds creation process generating lonsdaleite - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25158428 - Nov 2020 (61 comments)
Diamonds Are Bullshit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25059605 - Nov 2020 (27 comments)
Billions of dollars of unsold diamonds are piling up around the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23502201 - June 2020 (104 comments)
Shaking Up the Diamond Industry - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22209364 - Feb 2020 (120 comments)
Diamonds Keep Getting Cheaper - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21522898 - Nov 2019 (389 comments)
Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? (1982) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20818618 - Aug 2019 (237 comments)
The Elite Club That Rules the Diamond World Is Starting to Crack - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20555503 - July 2019 (200 comments)
Would You Pay $32,709 for a Lab-Grown Diamond? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19287565 - March 2019 (34 comments)
Diamonds Suck (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17186457 - May 2018 (215 comments)
Diamonds Are Bullshit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17184539 - May 2018 (45 comments)
De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17183603 - May 2018 (439 comments)
Lab-grown diamonds threaten viability of the real gems - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16551147 - March 2018 (301 comments)
Lab-Grown Diamonds Come into Their Own - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13085273 - Dec 2016 (103 comments)
Diamonds Suck (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12944464 - Nov 2016 (576 comments)
A Lab-Grown Diamond Is Forever - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11903409 - June 2016 (106 comments)
What the diamond industry is really selling - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11099809 - Feb 2016 (83 comments)
Diamonds Suck (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10834567 - Jan 2016 (2 comments)
Diamonds are Bullshit (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9251952 - March 2015 (75 comments)
A Diamond Market No Longer Controlled By De Beers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7793386 - May 2014 (111 comments)
When Diamonds Are Dirt Cheap, Will They Still Dazzle? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7615712 - April 2014 (70 comments)
Diamonds Suck - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6868968 - Dec 2013 (3 comments)
Diamonds Are Bullshit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6331565 - Sept 2013 (8 comments)
Diamonds Are Bullshit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5403988 - March 2013 (734 comments)
Ask HN: How have HN readers bought diamond engagement rings? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4971735 - Dec 2012 (25 comments)
Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? (1982) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4535611 - Sept 2012 (225 comments)
Have you ever tried to sell a diamond? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1405698 - June 2010 (85 comments)
Have you ever tried to sell a diamond? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1110283 - Feb 2010 (76 comments)
The Facts About Diamonds (and why I don’t like De Beers) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1109318 - Feb 2010 (41 comments)
De Beers profits fall 92% - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=722115 - July 2009 (25 comments)
Diamonds on Demand - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=330749 - Oct 2008 (16 comments)
Haha, upvoted for this, if not for the effort :D
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
People are being priced out of art and beauty and it's a shame economics and corruption make real diamonds dirty.
It does not take millions of years to form a diamond. It takes hours. The million years are atoms sitting around doing nothing before that, and then diamonds sitting around doing nothing while some of them are eventually pushed to the surface.
You can say the same thing about any mineral. There is nothing special about carbon or the diamond structure. If anything, zircons are much more significant, being the oldest minerals we can find.
> rated on a scale of color, clarity, cut, and weight.
This is nothing special. The colour of lab-grown stones can be varied almost at will, and the rest is still an issue with synthetic stones.
> Naaaaah let's just make it in a lab it looks the same.
That’s the thing, though: it does (yes, some synthetic stones have specific defects related to how they were made and they tent to be too perfect if anything, but they still have the exact same property). It’s like complaining that the meat you are eating comes from a farm instead of being hunted.
> People are being priced out of art and beauty and it's a shame economics and corruption make real diamonds dirty.
Quite the contrary. Gemstones become more accessible to more people. The diamond industry made its bed, being completely corrupted from extraction to distribution. When stones are cheap we can have discussion about their beauty instead of their prices.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Beers#Legal_issues
Believe 15A and 19A as much as you can believe De Beers' 'Building Forever 2030 Goal's
I’m not even sure that all of these recent stories about lab created diamonds to come out aren’t actually a PR pitch to advertise “natural” diamonds, an effort to emphasise the difference in the public psyche.
Anything public facing that positions diamonds as expensive, desirable, or valuable can usually be traced back to the cartel. It’s super common in movies and other media.
If you can, put enough gold on her to get her out of a jam and have some runway. Other than that it’s just the promises you keep.
But seriously, for us it matters, since she is much younger than I am. We make an effort to signal that we are a committed couple so that people don’t make crass assumptions.
Still, my ring is tungsten carbide and hers is a family wedding band handed down in my family for generations. Our engagement ring was also a family heirloom. In that way the rings have meaning.
She likes to wear her ring because she feels like it is a symbol of belonging, and I wear mine to honor our relationship.
To us, the rings are symbolic of our vows, a gentle reminder that our lives are in service of one another.
Personally disagree. That whole "3 months' salary that will last forever" thing? A lab diamond will last just as forever as a mined one. I'd personally rather have one from a lab than one dug out of the earth by some African dude who spends his days sweating underground.
Not only that, imagine this scenario: something terrible happens. Your wife has to sell her jewelry to take care of herself and your child. Would you rather have bought her a $20000 ring that can maybe be sold for $3000? Or a ring with actual intrinsic value that might actually be worth more than what you paid, but at least fetch 80%.
When I think of how that would feel for her to know that I paid a foolish amount for something of inflated symbolic bling rather than a something of value, I get embarrassed just imagining it. To me that is an abdication of duty.
That’s the difference between diamonds and actual precious stones, or at lower price points a nice heavy gold ring with an inexpensive, lab grown gem.
For beauty, silicon carbide beats diamond hands down. If you want value and natural origins, a quality ruby or emerald is spectacular and actually rare and rationally market-priced. Gold is nice.
Until you get into very large and actually rare stones, diamonds are a scam, pure and simple. The value of a near flawless 1 carat stone at the mine is about two hundred dollars. Cutting costs about half that. To buy it, that stone might fetch $7000. To sell it, you might get $1000 if you’re lucky. That is not a store of value. It’s a symbol of gullibility or a boast that I have so much money that I can burn it without being irresponsible. The kind of boast that if you can’t back it up IRl makes you impossible to take seriously.
If you just really, really like diamonds, knock yourself out. But don’t delude yourself into believing they are valuable. Better yet, go get one yourself, smuggled out of a mine or otherwise at the source. Get it cut and polished, or better yet do it yourself. That I totally respect and has character, integrity, and value baked in.
As for status or something like that, I suppose there is a case to be made that it symbolizes a burnt offering. So that makes sense, but only against a backdrop of demonstrative excess. If you have a diamond ring and a loan of any kind that is anything other than strategic tax planning, that means your kids are worse off for your vanity. If you’ve got more money than god and you want to show that you can waste cash and it doesn’t matter, wear that ring studded with sub-museum grade diamonds a all day long, you’re making your point. It’s vulgar, but you’re making your point. I can see it. It’s like the track suit.
Otherwise, you may as well lace up your clown shoes.
But, that’s just my opinion. In all reality it’s a useful social signal, like certain religious expression.
The article emphasizes that this is a generational thing and I’m wondering which generation you fall into.
[Born during Clinton's first term]
Cost of living can only go up if people are willing to pay more. People are paying more for what we deem living expenses because what they consider "nice" has changed.
In the past people would spend more on a diamond and less on a house because they were out and about all day and wanted others to see the diamond. Now, they stay home to scroll through TikTok (or post on HN), so they would rather spend more on a house instead.
If diamonds, or something like it, became more interesting to people again, they'll soon start turning their sending in that direction — away from where they are currently directing it.
, is the worst economic take i've heard in a while and I read the FT. CoL is primarily driven by supply and demand, not willingness to pay, not to mention inflation, supply chain issues, inelastcity...
Fake diamonds are for vegans.
Right. Supply and demand. Not supply alone. And demand is characterized by the willingness to pay.
> not to mention inflation, supply chain issues, inelastcity...
These are already encompassed in supply and demand. Why mention them twice?
>[...] is the worst economic take i've heard in a while
Maybe so, but given that, it is curious that, in the end, you decided to repeat the exact same thing in your own words. A "worst take" is usually taken to mean that you see things differently, not see things exactly the same.
the point is that westerners are completely drunk on the marketing from de beers and its cost lives, not to mention the disgusting machiavellian exploitation of what was once an innocent courtship gesture into an aggressive commercial enterprise, chiefly profiteering the hopelessly young and naive.