As the price of diamond continues dropping, I wonder if people will find more interesting applications of the material and it'll eventually become as mundane as things like steel and aluminium. Besides its hardness, it also has very high thermal conductivity. Diamond is still too expensive to be a bulk material, but I look forward to when things like this become cheap and commonplace:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Single-crystal_CVD_diamond_disc.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Single-crystal_CVD_diamon...</a>
> De Beers fights fakes with technology as China’s lab-grown diamonds threaten viability of the real gems<p>From what I understand, these gems are actually <i>better</i> than natural ones, since they're 100% pure. Maybe it's time to call lab-grown diamonds "real" and mined ones "fake".
The thing is that these diamonds aren't fakes - they are real diamonds. Also for many years there have been gluts of diamonds and the market has been rigged to keep them expensive. Eventually the flood gates will open and diamonds will get real cheap.
I recently went shopping for a diamond.<p>Price depends on grading factors such as cut, colour and clarity (inclusions). I was surprised to learn that lab grown diamonds also vary in colour, and may have inclusions, and as such are graded on the same scale as natural diamonds.<p>At most of the stores I visited, the price of lab-grown diamonds was about 30% cheaper compared to their natural counterparts at the same grade.<p>Most surprising though was that the sales people were really pushing hard to sell the lab grown diamonds over the natural ones.<p>I would imagine the markup and commission is much much higher.
> De Beers is fighting Chinese lab-grown diamonds<p>And I hope they lose.<p><a href="https://priceonomics.com/post/45768546804/diamonds-are-bullshit" rel="nofollow">https://priceonomics.com/post/45768546804/diamonds-are-bulls...</a> (and HN comments on original posting 2013-03-19 -- <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5403988" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5403988</a> )
From the article:<p>>The arrival of lab-grown diamonds has challenged the widely-held assumption that diamond prices could only go up<p>I'll admit I don't know a lot about the diamond market and perhaps I'm misinformed, but how on earth was this a widely held assumption? In a world where people are increasingly aware that De Beers and other companies hold major stockpiles of diamonds solely to keep the price inflated, and when man made diamonds for industrial purposes have been a thing for a long time?
Good! ... The DeBeers cartel is monopolistic and exploitative. There's an interesting article that talks about how they initially created demand for diamonds as they weren't commonly associated with an engagement. I'm glad to hear there's a competitor that should at a minimum lead to a price correction.
> At a trade fair in Hong Kong on Tuesday De Beers unveiled its latest diamond verification technology, the coffee-machine sized AMS2 that costs US$45,000 – already a substantial discount to the US$65,000 price tag of its predecessor. Within the first few hours of its release, over a dozen orders had flooded in, the company said.<p>All I can think when I read this is that of course they get orders -- all the companies producing synthetic diamonds want to get hold of this machine so that they can train their production process to produce synthetic diamonds that register as organic.
>Indeed, even the most experienced diamantaire’s in the world can’t tell the fakes from those extracted from mines when using their naked eye, which is where technology comes in<p>if they look identical to the naked eye, how can jewelers and debeers justify buying the naturals? are you now buying the diamond for its "history" or "story"? is it like buying "organic" food? or is it purely because it was never about the diamond itself; the diamond was just a representation of how money you sank into your spouse?
Fuck De Beers, their blood diamonds, and their useless engagement ring scam.<p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/how-an-ad-campaign-invented-the-diamond-engagement-ring/385376/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/ho...</a>
My SO is a geologist and likes the idea that Earth created the mineral over millions/billions of years through extreme processes. I'm a technologist, so I kinda like the idea that humans created something "better" using our tools and techniques.
I'm not sure if this article refers to cubic zirconia, moissanite or some new flavour of human-made diamonds but in either case, this is has been going on for 40 years.<p>The market for diamonds isn't rational, so how it will behave is not predictable.<p>First, the idea that diamonds maintain value is nonsense. This isn't gold or some other mineral "currency." You can sell gold anywhere for close to its spot price. Diamonds OTOH, have buy-sell "spreads" more like antiques or collectible shoes.<p>So, the subtitle is already on the wrong path. Diamonds have never been good stores of wealth, that's why the earlier dowry traditions use gold, cattle, secret recipes or some other reliable asset.<p>With cubic zirconia & moissanite, the diamond industry learned to recognise the "fakes." They've had machines for a while, but the industry also invested a lot in jeweler training. The reason for this is perception. If only machines know the difference...<p>For the average buyer, they're encouraged to note differences in "brilliance" & "fire" which is kind of visible in certain light. Ironically, zirconia & moissanite are different from diamonds in opposite ways, one more and the other less fiery.<p>This is a pure pr fight. If people use terms like "fake diamonds" then de beers wins. "Blood diamonds," then they lose.<p>Curious side note: the CCP has influence on Chinese consumer culture that doesn't exist elsewhere. If they say manufactured diamonds are real, then they are. China doesn't mine diamonds, but they do manufacture them....
At some point De Beers is going to do an elegant little flip and suddenly proclaim “engineered diamonds” to be far superior to anything that ever came out the ground... only just their particular brand of engineered diamonds.
Ten years ago I actually tried to buy a synthetic diamond engagement ring. My wife is a geek, I thought she would think it was cool. The jewelry store was offended when I asked.
I just don't get it. Who cares what the source of a diamond is?<p>Isn't the point of a diamond its beauty in the eye of the beholder? If I had a big diamond I would definitely want the cheapest one possible with a visual aesthetic I like. Fortunately, my wife and I don't like diamonds and we have purple sapphires in our wedding bands.
Why would you want a mined diamond with all the possible moral complications of child labour and third-world safety standards when you could get a lab-grown diamond of of objectively better quality?
So De Beers argument is that their shiny rocks dug out from the ground are worth far more than shiny rocks made in a machine. When no one really cares and people cant tell the difference apart from experts saying they are "fake" to keep their own industries assets from plummeting in value?
Article is unahamedly biased and provably incorrect:<p>> De Beers fights fake<p>No. De Beers is fighting man made diamonds. They are no less real than mined diamonds.<p>> De Beers to invest tens of millions of dollars on methods to identify the man-made stones that look exactly like the real thing.<p>Man made diamonds are the real thing.
I chose a lab-grown diamond to have set in my fiancée's engagement ring. It looks stunning, is significantly larger than I would have been able to afford if sticking to "natural" stones, and nobody can tell the difference. It's certified by IGI, which most people will tell you is not a good thing (you would generally look for GIA certification, and GIA refuse to certify lab-grown diamonds), but if you find a stone that is graded highly across the board by an IGI lab (colour D or E, cut Ideal or Excellent and clarity >VS1) it seems unlikely you'll be disappointed once it's set in a ring.
WIRED had a cover story about this back in 2003:<p>"THE NEW DIAMOND AGE"<p><a href="https://www.wired.com/2003/09/diamond/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/2003/09/diamond/</a>
I wonder if I could buy lab diamonds from alibaba, I'm currently not able to check.<p>I would certainly get the cheap "fake" over the ""real stuff"".
About 10 years ago, I had to deal with a vivid bunch of folks from Belgium. Some of them were related to the diamond industry in Antwerp. One just came back from Congo where he got screwed by a local hi-tech crook that managed to fake a diamond using a plain kitchen microwave oven.<p>No idea how authentic his story was, but the microwave fake stuck in my memory.
You can't argue the genius that came up with "chocolate diamonds." You have a diamond that looks brown and ugly and can somehow make it desirable and even rare. While I swore off natural diamonds a long time ago, somehow I feel like DeBeers will be able to spin this and come out ok.
This is great. I've heard of lab-grown diamonds for over 10 years now (and they've been making them longer than that). If the diamond market gets shook up over time, which I believe it really should, I hope the engagement ring market also gets a little shook up, which would be good too. It might encourage people to branch out a bit and look at other interesting and cool gems, like emerald, ruby, sapphire, and many others. The whole De Beers "Diamonds are forever" advertising from the mid-1900s is all bullshit anyways and yet managed to successfully brainwash generations of people into buying diamonds for their engagement rings. It wasn't always that way!
"... has challenged the widely-held assumption that diamond prices could only go up."<p>Did people really believe this? Sounds like these people are as delusional as cryptocurrency folks. No bubble lasts forever. When will people learn. Nothing can go up forever.
The sub-headline (is there a better term for it?) reads "The arrival of lab-grown diamonds has challenged the widely-held assumption that diamond prices could only go up," which only makes me chuckle. Did people seriously believe that?
I think that many of us are missing the main factor in what makes organic diamonds so expensive. Organic diamonds are "desirable". Desire is strong emotion that can defy logic and is pinnacle to the purchase of any luxury item. It is always the same argument when many of us like to compare a luxury item based on its utility rather than its desirability be it $100k tesla vs. $2k beat up honda, $1k iphone x vs. $600 android. The old honda can take you from point a-b, the android can do what the iphone can. Sure you can nit-pick differences between them but we forget how much of a premium we all pay for things we desire.
There are extensive diamond mining operations in the Canadian arctic. I always thought it ironic that people choose for a symbol of their love an object that necessitated destruction of the natural landscape and the production of toxic tailings.
Often it is the government who has to do the clean up when it is done at all.
It would be a fine thing if lab diamonds could stop this.
Better product, cheaper, with less people exploitation, is a win for everybody on Earth.<p>Except the old cartel. (Which, btw, artificially limits supply of mined diamonds)<p>There were attempts to do the same in the US fifteen years ago -- see for example "Apollo Diamonds." Maybe this time it'll stick?
I love these sorts of "is it the real thing" tests. This poses a great economic incentive for the producers to put effort into R&D to advance the state of the art. It's just like how image-based captchas have been incentivizing advances in computer vision.
This is a bizarre take. There's no such thing as a "fake" diamond, just synthetic or natural. I can't imagine caring that a diamond is natural, especially when the synthetic can be engineered to have superior optical qualities.
I would like to know who held this "widely-held assumption" because everyone outside of debeers at this point knows full well how much of a scam diamond pricing is.
This is an industry that has a long history of human rights abuses and funding conflicts, not even mentioning the price fixing they've done by forming straight cartels.<p>Boo hoo.
What will happen to the economies of South Africa, Botswana, and many other sub-Saharan countries if the market for mined diamonds and other jewels collapses?
How much does it cost to produce synthetic diamond? Can I expect the price drop in half in 10 years time?<p>I think Gold is way too cheap while diamond is way too expensive.
here is one of the Chinese diamond companies<p><a href="http://www.llgem.com/product/High-Purity-Synthetic-White-Rough-Diamond-for-Jewellery-with-VS-or-VVS-Level.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.llgem.com/product/High-Purity-Synthetic-White-Rou...</a>