Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined

881 pointsposted a year ago
by bswud
(worksinprogress.co)

510 Comments

Animats

a year ago

That's a good article. The whole history is there.

The commercial side has made huge progress, too. Look up "diamond making machine" on Alibaba. You can buy a high-pressure, high temperature six sided press for about US$200,000. A chemical vapor deposition machine is about the same price.

De Beers, the diamond cartel, has an R&D operation, Element Six. They sell synthetic diamonds for lasers and other exotic applications. The technology is good enough to achieve flaw levels in the parts per billion range, and to make diamond windows for lasers 10cm across.[1] This is way above jewelry grade.

Over on the natural diamond side, there's been a breakthrough. The industry used to break up some large diamonds during rock crushing. Now there's a industrial X-ray system which is used to examine rocks before crushing to find diamonds. It's working quite well. A 2500 carat diamond was found recently.[1][2] TOMRA, which makes high-volume sorters for everything from recyclables to rice, has a sorter for this job. This is working so well that there's now something of a glut of giant diamonds too big for jewelry.

The finishing processes of cutting and polishing have been automated. The machinery for that comes mostly from China and India.

Diamonds are now something you can buy by the kilo, in plastic bags.

[1] https://e6-prd-cdn-01.azureedge.net/mediacontainer/medialibr...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/amandakooser/2024/08/23/monster...

[3] https://ikcabstracts.com/index.php/ikc/article/download/4101...

mitthrowaway2

a year ago

This is certainly good news for lasers. Many people don't realize how good diamonds are for this. Transparent with a 65% higher refractive index than glass, and 8x the thermal conductivity of copper. And completely scratch-proof!

biomcgary

a year ago

Diamond eyeglasses? The lenses would still be cheaper than the Luxottica frames.

_ph_

a year ago

I am pretty sure, diamonds would make awful eyeglasses. While their index of refraction is high, which makes glasses thin, their chromatic dispersion is high. That is the very thing which makes their glitter so colorful. For good optical systems you want to try to reduce the dispersion, to 0, if possible.

Another story is the scratch-resistance. For that it would be sufficient to coat the surface of the lens with a thin layer of diamond. Which is done in several applications.

amelius

a year ago

Maybe we can have diamond-based scratch protection on smartphones?

chasil

a year ago

Gorilla glass is already some percentage of "Prince Rupert's Drop" in strength.

This is not sufficient?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Rupert%27s_drop

Stedag

a year ago

It’s definitely price performant at 6.5 on the mohs scale, sapphire panels are 2-4x more expensive to produce but 9 on the mohs scales so they’re typically only found in watches I bet. At a 10 on the mohs scale diamond is still best for hardness. Maybe the same effect of the prince Rupert’s drop could be induced on a round diamond with an alpha particle beam treatment where you add these ions primarily on the surface of the stone.

vladvasiliu

a year ago

I'm not exactly a watch nerd, so don't know how true this is, but I hear that sapphire shatters on impact. Or maybe that's just an excuse for people peddling "alternative" materials for their watches?

But if it is true, then I'd say that sapphire is a poor choice for mobile phones. IME I'm far more likely to drop the phone, preferably on some form of hard surface, that to scratch it. Phones are nowadays so ridiculously big, that there's zero chance I'll have anything else in my pocket.

regularfry

a year ago

Diamonds also shatter. It's got roughly the same toughness as sapphire but the cleavage planes are more annoying (in that it has them, while sapphire doesn't).

saagarjha

a year ago

I believe Apple tried to get sapphire for phones screens at some point, but their supplier folded.

dijit

a year ago

They did however manage to get Sapphire on the watch display (at least on the stainless steel LTE edition of the apple watch series 4 and 8, which I'm aware of).

The difference between my watch (which was 4 years old at the time) and a colleagues almost brand new apple watch (without the sapphire) was really telling, is his was lightly scratched on the edges despite him being quite careful, and I was exceedingly reckless with mine as I considered it old- yet there was not a single defect.

That was a major reason for me to upgrade to the LTE of the next version of apple watch that I bought.

craftkiller

a year ago

The sapphire on the Apple watch was a marketing gimmick, barely better than gorilla glass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RF72hGIdrG8&t=10m20s

But there are other devices with better sapphire that actually live up to the hype.

dijit

a year ago

Well, maybe.

I have now had watches for 10 years without issue and my phone displays seem to scratch.

I’m not doubting you’re correct, I never boight it for this reason, it was just an interesting retrospective observation. Clearly its working for me, and I’m not sure I have anything with gorilla glass.

Unless the Pixel 7 has it.

EDIT: My Pixel 7 does have gorilla glass indeed and it has two scratches on the display despite being extremely rarely used. (its my work phone and sits on my desk mostly)

user_of_the_wek

a year ago

I have a Series 5 with the Saphire glass but my clumsy ass dropped it in the kitchen onto a stone floor. The edge of the glass shattered and while I still use it to this day, it's an ugly reminder of my clumsiness. The repair offer from Apple was to get a new one with a very slight discount.

Long story short, it is more scratch resistant but also more prone to break. So be careful.

DoctorOetker

a year ago

I wonder if they could put in tiny reaction wheel gyroscopes (to make it land in a safe orientation) or tiny linear reaction masses, or perhaps tiny replacable airbags or tiny sodium azide NaN3 charges/nozzles to blow air just before landing, to make for a gentler landing, replacable of course.

Tiny replacable airbags, on the corners. Preferably it should somehow detect the elasticity of the surface its falling to or going to hit.

kjellsbells

a year ago

There was a prototype design that a German student, Philip Frenzel, produced in 2018 that used the accelerometers to detect freefall and push out little spring claws to protect the device. It was supposed to be in production circa 2019 I think but I can't see evidence that it made it. YouTube has videos.

dijit

a year ago

Thanks for the warning!

I suspect the edges are more at risk than the face, as I've struck the face very hard against the edge of a scaffolding pole and there was no damage - which, actually shocked me a lot based on the force.

user_7832

a year ago

From what I remember, it was mainly because it was a fair bit more expensive to manufacture.

LorenPechtel

a year ago

The threat isn't so much scratching it in your pocket (but that is possible, I typically have my sunglass clip in the same pocket--it's supposed to be in it's own case but in theory something could happen) as scratching it against things.

fsh

a year ago

Gorilla glass is easily scratched by sand, whereas sapphire or diamond stays flawless for decades.

roshankhan28

a year ago

gorilla glass with olephobic layer would be really helpful unless am missing some product that has already implemented this.

callalex

a year ago

I wonder if the process would be cheaper than the current high end (smart)watch and lens practice of sapphire coating?

namibj

a year ago

No, it's substantially more expensive. At least for anything too large to just cut out of HPHT chunks, just due to CVD at optical grade being pretty slow.

opan

a year ago

Don't we already have good scratch protection? Cracks from drops seem like the main issue.

perth

a year ago

So scratching definitely still happens, both on sapphire camera lenses and new scratch-resistant screen technology. I’ve mainly had it happen with concrete. I think concrete sometimes just has some rocks in it that have a very high hardness because I’ve gotten pretty thick scratches in new iPhones when they’ve taken a slide over a rough concrete sidewalk due to a drop while walking.

kuschku

a year ago

I've similarly experienced bad scratches whenever my phone and my keys come into contact, hardened steel may still be able to cause scratches?

IgorPartola

a year ago

Your keys are by no means hardened steel. If they are steel at all (most are brass or silver/zinc), they would be mild steel. If they were hardened they would be really difficult to cut. The harder you make a steel the more brittle it gets. Think about what happens when you slam a file with a hammer vs a large nail.

kuschku

a year ago

Considering how easy it is to break keys in the lock, I'd say they're definitely more brittle than malleable?

serf

a year ago

I think that's mostly from mild work-hardening, I haven't experienced that with a brand new key.

kuschku

a year ago

What kind of material are your keys and locks made from? Over here nickelsilver or nickel plated hardened steel is common for keys and a combination of brass, steel and titanium for locks.

UniverseHacker

a year ago

This should not be possible with any type of modern phone screen. Do you perhaps have a plastic screen cover that is scratched? Or key metal could be deposited on the screen and just need to be scraped off

kijin

a year ago

Depending on your location and lifestyle, your keys and other possessions can easily collect a dusting of tiny sand particles. Quartz in the sand can scratch most types of glass.

gs17

a year ago

No, it's possible on modern phone screens. My Pixel 8 Pro has Victus 2 (AFAIK), which scratched very easily from fingernails alone.

kuschku

a year ago

No cover, just straight up gorilla glass victus.

And it's not just key metal deposited on the screen, there are deep grooves cut into it.

UniverseHacker

a year ago

I believe you, but there is some other explanation here- it warrants further investigation. You can scrape a regular glass window (about MOHS 6.5) clean with a razor blade (about MOHS 6.0) and it is impossible to scratch it, just from that tiny difference in hardness. I do this all the time, e.g. recently to get paint that my kid painted on the house windows off.

Your brass keys should only be about 3.0, and gorilla glass a 9.0- you should be able to rub keys into brass dust all day long and not mark the screen.

I store my keys right in my pocket with my glass iPhone SE, and it doesn't have a mark on it.

I suppose it is possible you have keys with some weird material or coating, or as another poster suggested- maybe something like an abrasive dust got stuck on your key.

kuschku

a year ago

Brass? Who said anything about brass?

Typical keys are made from nickel plated hardened steel and nickelsilver. Considering the shiny coating is long gone and the keys are ferromagnetic, I assume it's the first. The keys are certainly hard enough to scrape my glass ceramic stove.

And reports online say that gorilla glass victus is the mist scratch prone gorilla glass, scratching at or around 6 already :/

ralphhughes

a year ago

I think you may be onto something here. Taking apart old machinery I have often observed that the hardened part of a shaft is worn and has a noticable groove detectable with a fingernail. However the part that rubbed on it is often much, much softer eg a rubber oil seal. My theory is that the much softer material is so soft that microscopic inclusions of something much harder (grit?) are caught in the material and then abrade the harder shaft. Something similar may be occurring in the keys on glass case?

drjasonharrison

a year ago

Cutting with a lubricant and grit is super effective. Silicon dioxide, that is sand, is everywhere.

HWR_14

a year ago

Aren't both the lens and the screen are resilient to steel/metal scratches? I'm not willing to run keys or a knife over a phone on purpose.

gs17

a year ago

And it's a tradeoff. I found out the hard way that newer Pixels have incredibly soft screens to avoid cracks and shattering. Unfortunately, they're so soft that a fingernail (a 2.5 on the Mohs scale) will leave huge gouges quickly. Fortunately, there's third-party covers that use an adhesive that fills in the scratches well.

kazinator

a year ago

That's a little hard to believe. There are resin finishes that are hard to scratch by fingernail.

kazinator

a year ago

Think about it; you couldn't put a fingernail scratch into a cheap soda glass beer bottle. Why would Google make a phone with glass that could be scratched by a nail, let alone easily? Does that even exist? Perhaps there is some coating on the glass you didn't remove and that's what you're scratching?

gs17

a year ago

I'm sorry if you don't believe it, but it really happens. The "coating" would have to be pretty thick, this gouge was something you could easily feel with your fingertip. I was very careful to not let my keys or anything else get near it, and the gouge (which was essentially the only scratch on the otherwise flawless screen) was exactly where my thumb hits the screen.

My Pixel 4a, meanwhile, was in my pocket all the time and never got a scratch.

UniverseHacker

a year ago

I love going to the beach, and find that modern phones still scratch easily with sand.

pie_flavor

a year ago

It's possible, and I remember seeing a very expensive prototype for it, but sapphire is already Good Enough for almost any cause of scratching you're likely to find.

david38

a year ago

We already have sapphire

shiroiushi

a year ago

Before I got to the end of your comment, I was just about to ask if it's possible to make a diamond coating. The scratch resistance would be very valuable, and I'm guessing if it's very thin, the chromatic dispersion wouldn't be an issue. This would probably be valuable for other applications too. However, I don't see how this would work on today's predominantly plastic (polycarbonate) eyeglass lenses, and switching back to glass lenses would make eyeglasses much heavier. It'd be great for smartphone screens though.

rlpb

a year ago

> While their index of refraction is high, which makes glasses thin, their chromatic dispersion is high

Isn’t the layer caused by the former? For a given required refraction, isn’t the chromatic dispersion the same?

In complex lenses corrections can be made, but for a simple single eyeglass lens, how is chromatic dispersion affected by anything apart from simple refraction?

namibj

a year ago

No, chromatic dispersion is due to wavelength/chroma dependant refraction. This is a separate thing from the overall/average index of refraction.

passwordoops

a year ago

Like Luxottica wouldn't immediately roll up the diamond lens company...

Balgair

a year ago

I know this is a bit of a throwaway comment, but I'd never thought of diamonds for eyeglasses.

And, honestly, that would be really really cool.

Yeah, there are other materials with better refractive indices and that are tougher and cheaper and dont shatter. Sure.

But if we can get diamonds down to something that could be made into lenses for the (very high end) retail market, man, that would just be so cool!

LtdJorge

a year ago

I'd rather use the diamonds to manufacture the laser machines that do eye surgery and remove glasses lol

shiroiushi

a year ago

No, because eye surgery can't take the place of corrective lenses in all cases: it's not a full replacement for glasses or contacts. For people the farther ends of the spectrum (either needing very light correction, or extremely heavy), surgery doesn't work, or for very high prescriptions it only helps but it's not enough by itself. (Ophthalmologists please feel free to chime in.) And there's other reasons people aren't eligible for surgery, such as being too young.

kazinator

a year ago

Laser eye surgery cannot fix the problem of the lens having become inflexible and losing its focusing range. In such a case, surgery can only change where the focal distance lies.

shiroiushi

a year ago

Laser eye surgery won't do that, but intraocular lens implantation could. I think those lenses still don't work that great for reading, but I imagine they will eventually.

gosub100

a year ago

A lot of people regret LASIK. Dry eyes and diminished night vision are the top complaints.

parineum

a year ago

I know of these as side effects but I don't know if they are ubiquitous and people prefer them to glasses or of they don't happen to everyone. Do you happen to know amd know about what the rate of regret is?

gosub100

a year ago

I don't have the data. I think it depends on the severity of the correction. Also, age factors in, if you get it too young your eyes can go blurry again by middle age.

cainxinth

a year ago

Sounds like something from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age.

divbzero

a year ago

How about diamond smartphone screens? Beats Gorilla Glass or sapphire.

mathgeek

a year ago

You probably don’t want more conductive lenses, though.

Lucasoato

a year ago

Luxottica is top tier.

ykonstant

a year ago

Top tier monopolist that needs to be broken up, preferably with a sledgehammer.

thfuran

a year ago

I just want a diamond heat sink. And a diamond kitchen knife.

adrian_b

a year ago

Zirconia kitchen knives are very hard and they are less fragile than diamond.

They have the advantage of keeping a sharp edge for a much longer time than steel blades, but they cannot be sharpened again with simple tools and for some purposes it may be inconvenient that the zirconia blades cannot be made as thin as the best steel blades, due to the risk of breakage, and there are also less choices of blade forms, e.g. there are no bird's beak zirconia blades, which is the best shape for peeling and paring vegetables.

High-quality zirconia kitchen knives, like those made by Kyocera, are very pleasant to work with. Diamond blades could not feel much different, even if they should remain sharp for a longer time, but with a higher risk of breakage when mishandled.

chii

a year ago

> And a diamond kitchen knife.

Which shatters on contact with a small bone.

adrian_b

a year ago

In my opinion, the right way of cooking is to always start by removing all bones with a specialized knife, i.e. a boning knife or a filleting knife.

The meat without bones and also most vegetables can be handled by the currently existing ceramic kitchen knives and they could be handled by a diamond knife (though diamond, even in polycrystalline form, is much less tough than zirconia ceramic or silicon nitride ceramic, which are better suited for kitchen knives).

gpm

a year ago

I believe that issue is solved with polycrystalline diamond.

nsteel

a year ago

Why are they not more popular as a material for heatsinks? Especially with those that like decorating the inside of the PC with fairy lights.

namibj

a year ago

Oh they are. But heat pipes/vapor chambers have them beat. So they are only used where electrical insulation (pure diamond sheet) or mechanical strength (cheap diamond grains sorted into a densely packed single layer of diamonds embedded into a copper matrix; this fits nicely for silver sinter bonding dies to due to the low thermal expansion of diamond) is needed from the heatsink.

nsteel

a year ago

Thanks. I since found https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-physical-science/fulltext/..., perhaps it makes sense where you don't have a lot of space.

namibj

a year ago

Oh, nice; I was thinking of what I believe is this, though: https://sumitomoelectric.com/products/cu-diamond : size-selected diamonds to match the thickness profile of the power module/brick base plate, then encased in copper. Benefit is arguably more the expansion matching to GaN/SiC than the thermal conductivity improvements over plain copper.

jaggederest

a year ago

Riffing on this, the amazing thing about diamond is not merely that it's a better conductor of heat, but that it's about 2.5 times higher than copper.

The only thing that beats it is single crystal boron arsenide which has some obvious downsides, being of course much more expensive and involving arsenic, which is considered a bad thing.

And with that, diamond is destined to be even cheaper than silicon, I think. Much more available and easier to purify, the hard part is rendering it into a crystal which is relatively solved.

trissylegs

a year ago

No for PC heatsink, but in 3d printing heat is really important for the nozzel. And a company makes them with Polycrystaline Diamond, which is harder than normal diamond. The company needed it themselves as the carbon fibre filament they were using kept wearing out heads. They though "Why don't we make our own heads".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96eFnTescoY

Animats

a year ago

That makes sense. Dies for drawing fine wire have been made of diamond for most of a century. Seems like that's filtered down to 3D printers, which is a less demanding application.

bitmasher9

a year ago

It’s still prohibitively expensive for such applications.

hhh

a year ago

Diamond heat sinks inc?

userbinator

a year ago

The machinery for that comes mostly from China and India.

It's worth noting that the Chinese word for diamond is literally "drill stone", which highlights its application as an abrasive more than jewelry.

Xcelerate

a year ago

> diamond windows for lasers 10cm across

> Diamonds are now something you can buy by the kilo, in plastic bags.

I can’t wait to use diamond cookware. A pan with a thin layer of 430 stainless steel for induction, a wafer of diamond, and then another thin layer of stainless on top will be amazing. Almost perfect evenness over any cooktop.

chronogram

a year ago

> Thermal conductivity of natural diamond was measured to be about 2,200 W/(m·K), which is five times more than silver, the most thermally conductive metal. Monocrystalline synthetic diamond enriched to 99.9% the isotope 12C had the highest thermal conductivity of any known solid at room temperature: 3,320 W/(m·K), though reports exist of superior thermal conductivity in both carbon nanotubes and graphene.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_properties_of_diamond...

I had no idea it was that good. I wonder why they don't make them that way then, as expensive cookware already seems to be a high margin business.

amluto

a year ago

I’m not sure how hot one would need to get one’s pan to have potential problems, but diamond is carbon, and carbon is soluble in hot steel.

The mismatched coefficient of thermal expansion could also be a problem.

TheRealPomax

a year ago

This is what oil-core cookware already does. But there's only so much "heat spreading" you can do before faster conductivity does basically nothing. The thermal conductivity of steel itself becomes the limiting factor pretty quickly.

That said, if they can figure out vapor depositing diamond onto stainless steel, I'd take a diamond surface over an enamel surface. Provided they can figure out how to make it perfectly flat rather than so jagged at the molecular level that literally everything sticks to it.

("wouldn't that burn? It's just carbon after all": only if you give it the cast iron pan treatment and manage to have it sit on so much gas for so long that you get it up to 700C, which would make no sense)

amluto

a year ago

Having contemplated pan materials a bit, it seems to me that high thermal conductivity is nice, but one really wants is even heating, and that might be best accomplished by highly anisotropic thermal conductivity. Or maybe by having a good conductor sandwiched between poor conductors.

pavel_lishin

a year ago

Aren't diamonds fairly brittle? I'd be worried about such a cooking pan snapping in half as I flip an omelette.

dragontamer

a year ago

That's what the steel is for.

Steel for induction and strength. Diamond (like copper cores) for heat traversal.

agumonkey

a year ago

How will they maintain their jewelry business ? It feels like Sony CD-R drives in the Playstation era.

karunamurti

a year ago

Do it like here in Japan. They charged you 3x-4x the gold price and said "Oh it's not the gold price, but the craftsmanship".

wkat4242

a year ago

Maybe they'll just stop caring about it because they have a much better new business.

The same way rolls royce no longer sells luxury cars to stuffy British aristocracy but makes a mint building huge jet engines.

mr_toad

a year ago

On an unrelated note, Rolls Royce is probably more synonymous with Rap artists than British aristocracy these days.

taneq

a year ago

Better to move into a new related business than to Kodak yourself.

trissylegs

a year ago

I think people will keep buying diamond jewelry with natural because it the product is sold as real/natural diamonds. Prestige is important for the high-end market and most of the price will be markup anyway. (Well diamonds are nearly all markup anyway).

Tiffany's isn't suddenly going to be cheaper.

foobarian

a year ago

Or even the other way around: with the economies of scale created by industrial use cases removed, mining diamonds just for jewelry could get more expensive.

nprateem

a year ago

Nobody ever bought a CD-R to impress a cute piece of ass to marry them.

DeBeers are just positioning on price, natural more traditional and romantic, etc.

Who wants to know their engagement ring was half price?

foobarchu

a year ago

> Who wants to know their engagement ring was half price?

I mean...a ton of people. My fiancee and I just purchased her ring together and it was pretty much a silent agreement from both sides that lab grown was the way to go (confirmed out loud of course). The stone we ended up getting was about 1/10 the cost the closest natural we could find, and both of us agreed that there are way better ways to spend that money with everything else in the future.

Many people also love jewelry but would rather not have something worth a brand new car on their hand.

nimish

a year ago

The same way vinyl still sells.

trhway

a year ago

>diamond windows for lasers 10cm across

sounds like may be soon we'll see diamond wafers for the chips (especially as the price of processed wafer from a fab increases, the cost of the source wafer itself is becoming less important) Add to that X-ray lithography, and the Moore's Law will continue for quite a while.

namibj

a year ago

AFAIK you can still only buy diamond diodes outside of secret military stuff, and even those are not at all accessible.

Sadly GaN suffers from horrible p-channels (they use resistor/nmos logic as the non-differential logic family for GaN ICs), and SiC from kinda sorta delaminating gate oxide (JFETs are fine though, and vertical ones are very nicely behaved, including a lot of resilience like avalanche resistance (though actual (non-capacitive) current flow through the gate junction has to be limited to prevent damage)).

N-type diamond is just difficult, along with diamond itself at a purity approximating "intrinsic"/"none" levels of doping. The issue is that you have to continually etch graphitic carbon during the CVD process, requiring aggressive chemistry.

regularfry

a year ago

Impure diamonds for semiconductors were a plot device in Michael Crichton's Congo. I never knew if there was much basis to it.

samplatt

a year ago

And at 8x the thermal conductivity of copper, we might see some diamond HSF's as well.

hammock

a year ago

Incredible, great info. We are now living in the Diamond Age.

db48x

a year ago

Well, not quite. They were making diamond windows from atmospheric carbon dioxide at room temperature in household machines or machines you could rent at the post office. We’re a ways off from that yet.

Terr_

a year ago

Also the whole aerostat thing where you make a diamond "balloon" full of vacuum that floats in air, using the strength of the rigid diamond to avoid it being crushed and popped.

I'm no materials-scientist, but I did some napkin-math on that once and it came out to some ridiculously-thin-sounding layer of diamond.

Terr_

a year ago

Redoing the napkin math because I can't find the original and I've somehow nerd-sniped [0] myself. Assume a sphere that contains a cubic meter of air and is neutrally buoyant:

    Vacuum volume           1.00        m^3
    Vacuum radius           0.62        m
    Air density             1.23        kg/m^3
    Displaced mass          1.23        kg
    Diamond density         3250        kg/m^3
    Diamond volume          3.77E-04    m^3
    Sphere surface area     4.84E+00    m^2
    (Thin shells can be approximated by ignoring curvature)
    Shell thickness         7.79E-05    m
    Shell thickness         77.94       μm (microns)
    Human hair thickness    17 to 181   μm (microns)
So the big vacuum-ball somehow needs to withstand crushing using only the strength of a diamond skin, and that skin is around as thick as (some) human hairs. It has to be thinner if you want it to float with a payload.

Remember: The walls of party-balloons and soap-bubbles are a very different situation: They can have extremely thin skins because the gas inside is doing almost all the "don't get crushed" work, the skin is really just there to keep the two gases from mixing.

[0] https://xkcd.com/356/

db48x

a year ago

Perhaps they use a diamond frame filled in with graphene instead. Still seems pretty unlikely though. And probably too easy to puncture, ruining the vacuum.

Or perhaps they just build surfaces out of more complicated things than carbon. Hydrocarbons could be as easily assembled as diamond with similar techniques, and are a lot lighter than pure carbon. Plus they would want to put electronic advertising on the surface of the ball anyway, so it’s got to have a bit more going on to form LEDs and whatnot.

Terr_

a year ago

I was thinking about smaller bubbles and aerogels, but when the volume changes by a factor of 0.10, the thickness-budget only changes by a factor of ~0.46.

So while many smaller spheres--or pockets sharing walls--might be easier to engineer, the square-cube law [0] eats away at your lifting-power as everything becomes mostly-diamond with very little air-displacing vacuum.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube_law

db48x

a year ago

Yup, the scaling works the wrong way for small objects. A vacuum–zeppelin makes a lot more sense than a beach ball.

IgorPartola

a year ago

Exactly. That’s why a cubic meter of air is probably not the right range to look at. Something several magnitudes larger might do better.

Terr_

a year ago

Likely, but even a cubic meter is already a large step up from the scales in the book, ex:

> Each aerostat in the dog pod grid was a mirror-surfaced, aerodynamic teardrop just wide enough, at its widest part, to have contained a pingpong ball.

It doesn't say they aren't relying on some kind of down-thrust, but at that point I'd wager it's much easier to skip the whole marginal buoyancy part entirely. Use those conductive diamonds for an ionic thruster or something.

HPsquared

a year ago

Buckling would be a problem.

jayd16

a year ago

so I guess it needs to be like 1/4th the thickness of the latex in a balloon (diamond is 4x the density). Vacuum gives you a bit more lift than helium but not that much. Yeah, seems pretty thin.

UniverseHacker

a year ago

The pressure across a latex balloon is only about 0.5% that of maintaining a vacuum in earths atmosphere. I’m guessing the diamond would need to be much more than 1/4 the thickness of a latex balloon.

db48x

a year ago

Yea, a bit of artistic license on the author’s part. You could make things quite light though.

user

a year ago

[deleted]

hammock

a year ago

I guess there is some sci-fi book everyone has read but me?

db48x

a year ago

Yes!

It’s called “The Diamond Age, or a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer” by Neal Stephenson. I definitely recommend it.

mmoskal

a year ago

Literally The Diamond Age.

fennecbutt

a year ago

Where's my magic book then. And my atomic fabbers! Lemme 3d print a phone.

dredmorbius

a year ago

eBook readers exist, and with a bit of jiggery you could have programmatic content.

One of the hibernation screens for one of my ebook readers reads "Don't Panic", for all the obvious reasons. (Different franchise, similar concept.)

jiggawatts

a year ago

Magic book = iPad or Remarkable

Atomic fabber = chip fabs making things on ~10 atom scales

3D printing homes is possible now, just a bit niche

db48x

a year ago

And yet we’re not really there yet. The book wasn't just a tablet computer; it was programmed to continually analyze everything happening around it and relate those events back to the education of the owner. It shocked a bully who was playing keep–away with it. It noticed that the owner was eating junk food, and taught her a better diet. It taught her to read, as well as manners and exercises and elocution. Later a constable unobtrusively scanned it and then very carefully explained (so that it wouldn’t shock him) that nobody would try to take it away from her during her visit, so long as she didn’t show it to anybody or try to interface it with a printer. It told her stories that aided her in running away from an abusive father, in avoiding police patrols so she could sleep in a public park undisturbed, etc, etc. It invented new stories with fractal depth, allowing her to ask questions and get more and more detailed information. Its pages were both a sophisticated microscope and telescope. She used it to design and print a nanotech sword and later to infiltrate a hive–mind society.

And it also contained the text of every other book ever written, of course.

And arguably it was that character’s mother too.

I’m going to have to reread this one soon; it’s such a good story.

pixl97

a year ago

When I first read Diamond Age is was 90% science fiction, now it's seemingly far less than that.

Environmental sensing is a little weak in our own devices, but in theory your cell phone could listen to everything you do and (externally) analyze it for things like a bad diet. You'd have to point the camera intentionally at things you're doing for it to capture that information.

Now, no one is going to make a product that shocks people holding it, yet this isn't an impossibility. Failing to login, or having the camera capture the wrong person is using could very easily be designed in to the product. No one is going to do that for fear of lawsuits.

db48x

a year ago

Yea, I agree that it’s a little less science fiction than it used to be.

But remember the subtlety of it; the constable didn’t have his face recognized, or log in, he literally made a promise to the book while pretending to talk to the owner. It’s still mostly science fiction :)

jiggawatts

a year ago

About 70% of those are covered by the Internet especially if you include ChatGPT.

db48x

a year ago

I think you are overestimating ChatGPT, but perhaps one day. And the book was capable of doing all of this while off line. Again, perhaps one day :)

fragmede

a year ago

A Bambu P1S will let anyone just print a phone case with no fuss, so we're on the way there!

fennecbutt

a year ago

I already got an A1 mini to trial the brand, looking at replacing my Ender 5 Plus. Not bad Bambu, not bad at all.

taneq

a year ago

“You wouldn’t download some RAM”

failuser

a year ago

Not yet, not even diamond phone screens are here. And tax evasion has not killed the nation-states yet.

newZWhoDis

a year ago

I just want solid diamond cookware.

Wouldn’t a diamond skillet be incredibly non-stick, easy to clean, and totally non toxic?

UniverseHacker

a year ago

There are diamond pans that I think are a ceramic mixed with industrial diamond dust. I had one once and it was amazing- very non stick and didn’t scratch like teflon.

IG_Semmelweiss

a year ago

I am actually.surprised you arent getting any responses

With the current focus on PFOS and just amount of garbage materiel used to prepare our foods, I think some innovation is just around the corner.

semi-extrinsic

a year ago

> some innovation is just around the corner

It's already here! Stainless steel for pots, carbon steel for pans.

Once I got my first carbon steel pan (not cast iron) I knew it was game over for the teflon pans in my house. I'm now gradually replacing the teflon pans with carbon steel, and then I'll never have to replace another pan in my lifetime.

The upcoming PFAS ban in Europe will probably accelerate this transition greatly, unless DuPont et al have too much influence over politicians...

alex_duf

a year ago

I replaced my téflon pans with carbon steel. I find the transition and learning curve to be much more difficult than téflon.

Cooking an egg is a big no-no, I need to think about when to squeeze a lemon or when to put my tomato sauce otherwise I might damage the seasoning. Nothing blocking but definitely a lot of things I don't want to think about.

semi-extrinsic

a year ago

For stuff like eggs or pancakes, stainless is actually better in my experience. Just use a little oil and get the pan hot enough so that you have the initial Leidenfrost effect until the bottom of what you are frying has had time to solidify, then you're golden.

adrian_b

a year ago

The fastest and the easiest way to cook eggs is in a closed glass vessel in a microwave oven.

The power and time must be selected carefully, to avoid explosions, but once the right combination is determined it will always be perfectly reproducible.

I prefer to separate the egg whites and the yolks before cooking (and mix them with different ingredients, possibly whipping the egg whites first), but making fried eggs or scrambled eggs is as easy.

The eggs can be cooked alone and mixed later with other ingredients, or they can be mixed with other ingredients before putting them in the oven.

user

a year ago

[deleted]

the8472

a year ago

> a glut of giant diamonds too big for jewelry

Time to commoditize crowns.

user

a year ago

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user

a year ago

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A_D_E_P_T

a year ago

Over the past 10 years, there has been an explosion in cheap lab diamond and moissanite producers in China and India. 10 years ago, it was hard to find quality lab diamonds at a reasonable price, and moissanite was still reasonably expensive at $400-600/ct.

Today, given cutthroat competition and "race to the bottom" pricing strategies, lab diamonds are ubiquitous, extremely high quality, and cheap. Less than $200/ct and sometimes much less: https://detail.1688.com/offer/751071300271.html

Moissanites are now less than $5/carat at retail: https://detail.1688.com/offer/586468555080.html

These are legit. I've bought some.

Within 10 years of today, I expect diamonds to lose almost all of their value. Moissanites have already become as near-worthless as synthetic rubies. This is going to open up new industrial uses for those gemstones.

godelski

a year ago

Diamonds have lots of uses beyond being pretty.

I have to bring this up because a lot of people are talking as if this is the entirety of the reason for their decrease. But there's diamond files, diamond cutting blades/wheels/drills, you can make glass from it (really only used in labs that absolutely need them because the price), and many more uses. Many of these don't care about size, quality, or clarity. So instead of pulling from scrap material from jewelry making or rejected diamonds you could just make your own and ensure your own supply.

One of the things I've loved about synthetic diamond prices coming down is just how cheap and available diamond cutting wheels and filing tools have become. You can now get a set of diamond files on Amazon for under $10. That's crazy

notfed

a year ago

> diamond files on Amazon for under $10

Link? I'm skeptical. It seems more likely someone is abusing the term "diamond", no?

jdietrich

a year ago

Diamonds are just dirt cheap. You can buy a set of ten diamond needle files for $8 on Amazon, or less than $2 in wholesale quantities. I have hundreds of grams of diamond in my workshop in the form of lapping compound; if you're so inclined, you could buy half a kilo of loose diamonds for a couple of hundred bucks.

A wide range of very ordinary cutting tools are now tipped with big chunks of polycrystalline diamond - cutting tools for machining aluminium, inserts for rock drills, saw blades for cutting fibre cement boards. Even woodworkers are starting to use diamond saw blades and router bits, because the improved wear life over tungsten carbide gives a rapid return on investment.

https://www.amazon.com/Yakamoz-10-Piece-Diamond-Jewelers-Pre...

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/140mm-160mm-180mm-Dia...

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32719545477.html

https://union-diamond.en.alibaba.com/index.html

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003335883020.html

grues-dinner

a year ago

I bought that exact set of red-dipped-handled cheapo rifflers 19 years ago (2005, I remember I was still at school, and I think they came from Maplins, possibly Rapid). They were cheap then too, probably about the same numerical price, perhaps £10 with the Maplins tax, and AliExpress shipping was just a gleam in Jack Ma's eye. Industrial-grade diamond dust has been pretty cheap for a long time.

godelski

a year ago

Same. I even have that set from Amazon and am happy with it. It's not the best, but there's always uses for cheap files.

Also this is the first time I've tried to go to ali from my phone and holy hell are they aggressive in trying to get you to use the app. And express links require login? WTF. It crashed my browser

dotnet00

a year ago

Not the same thing, but you can get diamond tipped 3d printer nozzles for ~$100: https://www.amazon.com/Diamondback-Nozzles-Compatible-Polycr...

Considering that these are a niche product requiring a precisely shaped diamond insert made by a relatively small operation in the US, I think it's believable that a Chinese company could produce diamond files for ~$10, considering that it only needs diamond powder and has more space for mass production.

TuringNYC

a year ago

>> Link? I'm skeptical. It seems more likely someone is abusing the term "diamond", no?

The carat-cost curve is not linear, so it seems plausible. As carats go down, there is a huge supply of diamonds, especially those without beauty attributes (color, cut) which can be used for non-jewelry purposes.

avhon1

a year ago

Sets like this one

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B092D4CV56

are also sold in U.S. hardware stores

https://www.harborfreight.com/needle-file-set-10-piece-69876...

https://www.menards.com/main/tools/hand-tools/files/tool-sho...

They are very cheaply made, but as far as I can tell are actually diamond. They're good for shaping glass and ceramics. For metal, you're better off using hardened steel files, but these ones will work, just slowly and with less precision.

godelski

a year ago

I actually have that exact set. Yeah, they aren't high quality, but as far as I can tell they are diamond. They have that hardness and the filing is omnidirectional as one would expect.

Of course you can get much better sets that will last longer and are much more expensive. But I remember as a kid that trying to buy a diamond bit was quite expensive but most Dremel kits come with one and a wheel now

hintymad

a year ago

And I'd be very happy to see the demise of De Beers. It's amazing that De Beers can thrive for more than 100 years, but still, using clever marketing and tight control of supply to artificially jack up the price of diamond is counter-productive.

ChrisMarshallNY

a year ago

I have heard that they are the ones that made diamonds the engagement stone, and that was relatively recently.

My mother and grandmother had sapphire engagement rings.

dboreham

a year ago

So did Princess Diana. Some of this is regional -- the US is the epicenter of marketing diamonds while other places don't value them so much.

jajko

a year ago

They never had any value, apart from specialized ie glass cutting tool. Only when DeBeers realized they could push some fictious heavy marketing 'to prove your worth to woman you are asking to marry' for those shiny stones nobody wanted to buy, people who didn't know better got manipulated into buying them. They are supposedly very common in universe, and probably in deeper Earth too.

Correction is healthy and benefits mankind long term, there was nothing good coming from ie impact on Africa. Nobody cared about that, so things are fixed from another direction.

murukesh_s

a year ago

>They never had any value

They had immense value in ancient world. They were valued much more than gold - due to their rarity. Southern India was the only known source for mining diamonds in ancient world [1]. They were used as currency and was valued higher than gold. In fact there were wars fought for diamonds.

There is a saying about Koh-i-Noor, one of the most famous Diamond - "If a strong man were to throw four stones – one north, one south, one east, one west, and a fifth stone up into the air – and if the space between them were to be filled with gold, all would not equal the value of the Koh-i-Noor" [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golconda_diamonds

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/16/koh-i-...

mr_toad

a year ago

Good quality sapphires, rubies and emeralds are rarer and in some parts of history were considered more valuable. They’re not hyped to the extent that diamonds have been in the last 100 years.

user

a year ago

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myrmidon

a year ago

The 5 stone gold comparison is utter BS (unless those 5 stones are like 5 stones heavy :P).

All the gold available to humans on earth right now fits into a ~20m cube, and that is most certainly worth orders of magnitude more than a single diamond in a historical artifact.

murukesh_s

a year ago

Not at that time when the diamonds were mined only from one mine in the entire world for several hundreds of thousands of years.

RandomLensman

a year ago

Diamonds where valued before DeBeers even existed, but diamonds in engagement rings (especially in the US) are (at least partially) from a heavy marketing push by them in the 20th century. Previously engagement rings tended to be colored gemstones.

euroderf

a year ago

Yes, I've read that in the early 20th century, other precious gemstones (like rubies & emeralds) had more than a third of the market for engagement rings.

ipsento606

a year ago

  > Who does not love diamonds? Where is there a mind in
  > which the bare mention of them does not excite a
  > pleasant emotion? Is there any one of rank too exalted
  > to care for such baubles? The highest potentates of the
  > earth esteem them as their choicest treasures, and
  > kingdoms have been at war for their possession
From "Diamonds" by William Pole, published in 1861 [1] (27 years before the formation of the De Beers company)

[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Diamonds/ENwOAAAAYAAJ?h...

adrian_b

a year ago

The Europeans have encountered for the first time what are now called diamonds during the expedition of Alexander the Great in India, where they had been appreciated for jewelry for a long time.

This is why the Romans, e.g. Pliny the Elder, used for diamonds the name "Indian adamant". The name "adamant" without the "Indian" specifier had already been used for many hundreds of years (the oldest attestation is in Hesiod), but it had not been applied to a gem, but to nuggets of native osmium-iridium alloy, which can be found mixed with the nuggets of native gold in the alluvial deposits of gold (and which, unlike the gold with which they were mixed, could be neither melted nor forged, hence their name, "untameable"; "unconquerable", which is used in the article is a bad translation for "adamant").

Pliny the Elder described the "Indian adamant" as consisting of octahedral crystals, which is the most frequent form of the natural diamonds. It appears that at that time it was impossible to cut the diamonds, at most they might have been polished a little, so the crystals used in jewelry retained their native shape.

By the time of Pliny the Elder, the "Indian adamant" was the most expensive gem, surpassing even the noble opals, the pearls, the emeralds and the beryls, which were the next most expensive gems at that time. The Romans did not care much for transparent crystals, they appreciated much more the higher quality exemplars of noble opals or pearls, if those exhibited a nice play of colors.

thehappypm

a year ago

Diamonds certainly have value as a material for jewelry -- essentially unscratchable jewelry is pretty awesome. They also don't get cloudy over time or anything. That's the cool part.

cma

a year ago

They can be burned up in a house fire though.

modderation

a year ago

Who needs a house fire? A bit of quartz glass, a blow torch, and an oxygen supply, and you can convert your unused diamonds into carbon dioxide without losing the house*

Nile Red uses this approach to make Diamond Water: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0wvDwSnzcw

* You might still lose the house if you opt for the bigger diamonds.

Vox_Leone

a year ago

>>They never had any value

As they say, "If you want to know a diamond's worth, try selling one"

darby_nine

a year ago

There's no market for e.g. diamond lenses? Sure it's going to be on the expensive end of the market but the same forces are pushing those prices down.

tonetegeatinst

a year ago

I think diamonds are used in some lathes as cutting tools. So suprising thats not more common. I though diamonds strength and iirc its heat tolerance would be attractive to the folks who cut stuff.

adrian_b

a year ago

Diamonds are excellent for cutting some materials, e.g. ceramics or some non-ferrous alloys, but they are bad for cutting metals that are good at dissolving carbon, e.g. iron, cobalt and nickel alloys.

So for the iron alloys, which are the material most frequently processed by machining, diamond is not suitable. Other hard crystals, like alumina a.k.a. corundum, are much better for this purpose, even if they are less hard than diamond.

pfdietz

a year ago

For those metals, cubic boron nitride works and has about half the Knoop hardness of diamond (and more than twice the hardness of aluminum oxide.)

c-BN is isoelectronic with diamond; h-BN is isoelectronic with graphite (but is an insulator).

grues-dinner

a year ago

They're not that heat tolerant. They're fantastic heat conductors, but they'll burn away into carbon dioxide (via carbon monoxide). The temperatures needed to do that are high, around 900C, but that's not that high. Angle grinder sparks can be hotter than 1000C, as can the edges of carbide tools.

folmar

a year ago

The hardness is attractive but the poor heat resistance is a major problem for many uses. For a normal angle grinder you can use normal abrasive disc without paying much attention, but with a diamond-grit one you can easily burn the diamonds.

Ekaros

a year ago

Anything rare does have value. So why not big enough diamonds. With big being critical part. The tiny stuff really is very stuff. The big is rare and thus rarity along reasonably brings some value.

wonderwonder

a year ago

Radio waves around me are just constant drumbeat from large jewelry stores about why its such a bad idea to buy a synthetic diamond as it wont hold its value. They already know what is coming.

Joker_vD

a year ago

> I expect diamonds to lose almost all of their value.

Artificial diamonds, you mean. The natural ones will keep their price, just as "hand-crafted" goods did (and, I suspect, as "human-produced" content in the future will); it's a matter of status and signalling that you can afford to buy an inferior, more expensive product.

gwbas1c

a year ago

It's based on supply and demand.

In 2012, when I was shopping for an engagement ring, a natural 2ct diamond cost $250,000. (I bought a 2ct moissanite for much, much less, and my wife is very happy with it.)

When I looked in fall 2023, a natural 2ct diamond cost $20,000. That's a loss of over 90% of value, not counting inflation! (Now the supply of diamonds is much higher, and the demand for natural diamonds is much lower.)

I suspect that natural diamonds will be sold for a 40-300% premium over manufactured. I also wonder if impurities will become fashionable, just to show that a specific diamond is actually natural and can't be made in a lab.

> Artificial diamonds

BTW, there is no such thing as an artificial diamond. A manufactured diamond is 100% diamond, for all intents and purposes.

dboreham

a year ago

Quick note that a very nice 2ct stone has never cost $200,000. Not sure who was trying to charge you that much in 2012 or why, but gem diamond prices haven't changed much in the past 30 years, although there was an uptick in the covid/inflationary years, and a reversion to trend more recently.

https://www.pricescope.com/diamond-prices/diamond-prices-cha...

FireBeyond

a year ago

Even today, Tiffany will want to charge you $142,000 for a 2ct IF (internally flawless) colorless (D) diamond. Not quite $200K but nonetheless.

paulcole

a year ago

This is like arguing about somebody saying a car costs $25,000 when you’re talking about a Bentley. It’s expensive because it’s a Bentley not because it’s a car.

IG_Semmelweiss

a year ago

I take your point but theres a still a huge gap to make up for.

I went deep on this topic a couple of years before OP' 2012 date. An IF 2ct would not have exceeded ~80k usd. Not from Tiffany but from a national US shop. And the retailer shouldnt have mattered anyway.

80 is orders of magnitude lower than 250k.

paulcole

a year ago

> 80 is orders of magnitude lower than 250k.

Well 80k is one order of magnitude smaller than 250k.

Remind me again, how many orders of magnitude difference are there between say a Bentley Continental ($242k) and a Tesla Model S ($76k)?

Luxury products cost a lot.

asdff

a year ago

The realities of this market have not hit the consumers. Even young people are still out there spending 5-6 figures on a rock and ascribing real value and aspirations towards eventually "upgrading" into said rocks from perhaps an existing synthetic alternative already set in the ring. Even if the supply side price argument is so perverted now, we still have a culture that wants to put a high value on this object for sentimental reasons. No one wants to hear that diamond rings are worthless. They want to spend money on it. Spending an appreciable amount of your savings on it is the entire significance of it, not really the value prospect.

gwbas1c

a year ago

> No one wants to hear that diamond rings are worthless.

You might convince them that their diamonds are worthless, and that a better investment is cryptocurrency!

koolba

a year ago

Someone should market a synthetic diamond that has a crypto address etched onto it. It just had to be big enough that the augmented reality glasses can automatically pick it up to render the account balance.

pyrolistical

a year ago

A good example of how marketing can produce cultural values

takinola

a year ago

I am curious to know if there is precedent for goods losing their veblen status.

dredmorbius

a year ago

Pineapple and aluminium come to mind. Both were considered absolute luxuries in the 19th century.

Mechanical watches, perhaps.

chronogram

a year ago

Sugar was a Veblen good, now its superfluousness is the worst part about it.

dredmorbius

a year ago

When and where?

AFAIU by the time of British colonisation in the Carribean / West Indies, sugar was cheap and afforded plentiful calories (and caries) to the working class.

Along with (relatively) inexpensive tea, the practice of serving boiled water-sugar solution greatly improved health (given the lack of water treatment at the time), reduced alcohol consumption, and provided additional food energy. And that was by the mid-to-late 18th century so far as I'm aware.

I'm not aware of any time or place where sugar was considered a luxury item, at least not for any substantial duration (say, excepting famine, economic recession, or war).

slt2021

a year ago

>> They want to spend money on it.

no guy ever wants to shell out $$$ for a useless rock

Smaug123

a year ago

It's not useless as such, although certainly its use is exceedingly niche. My headcanon is that Cecil Rhodes saw something back in the 1880s, something which drove him to create a corporate engine which would continue to bend the culture centuries after his own death. Now, a hundred and fifty years later, an appreciable fraction of the population carries with them at all times an object capable of scratching everything. What he saw, I cannot say, but one day in our hour of need the population will be equipped.

slt2021

a year ago

bitcoin is the 21 century's diamond. Same useless string of cryptographically signed bytes, but for some reason the humanity agrees to assign some value just because of scarcity mindset.

mobilefriendly

a year ago

At least diamonds are shiny and you don’t have to pay miners literally forever

slt2021

a year ago

Bitcoin has its value due to anonymity and global footprint.

I can ransom hospitals with cyber attacks and get paid millions sitting on North Korea/rusia/Iran and dont have to stand up from my desk.

I can run distributed anonymized illicit drug distribution risk free and get paid a lot.

I can hire hitmen to gather intel and harm my adversaries and arrange kinetic campaigns.

A lot of good use cases.

Joker_vD

a year ago

Haven't you heard about goldbugs?

kaashif

a year ago

> BTW, there is no such thing as an artificial diamond. A manufactured diamond is 100% diamond

What do you believe the distinction between artificial and manufactured is? As far as I'm aware, they're almost synonyms.

Dictionaries literally list "man made" as one of the definitions of artificial.

SamBam

a year ago

Indeed, "artificial diamond" is one of the top examples of the first definition of "artificial" at Merriam-Webster, which is "man-made." [1]

Etymologically it means "made by skill."

But I understand the hesitation to use the word, as it gives an impression of "fake."

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/artificial

pessimizer

a year ago

A man-made television isn't an artificial television; a man-made taco isn't an artificial taco.

Man-made beef and artificial beef are both the same thing: a not-beef beef substitute. Beef is by definition cow-made.

Man-made diamonds are just diamonds.

Nevermark

a year ago

Last I heard from the forefront of geology and ecology, "natural" televisions and tacos have yet to be found.

So I don't think the distinction is best analyzed with examples like that.

If something is normally created and nature, and humans find a way to reproduce it, it is common to call the human produced versions artificial even if the result is identical in principle.

Humans make lots of distinctions that fall apart if we get too pedantic, but have useful casual, cultural, or practical associations and meanings.

LanceH

a year ago

Burn hydrogen to make water. Is that artificial water? Or is it forever artificial water? Is all water that mixes with it artificial water? Is all water now artificial since it has mixed with human made water?

While the basic definition seems to be merely "man-made", I would say it holds there is some underlying distinction between the natural and artificial. Natural light vs artificial light -- the two are distinctly different. But are the photons produced by a light bulb artificial, or are they natural photons?

Artificial diamonds are more diamond than diamonds. The diamond portions are identical, regardless of origin.

Or maybe there are trapped gasses or other identifiers left in them that make them distinct. I don't really know about this point.

Anyhow, the natural vs artificial distinction really seems to break down when things are (literally) physically and chemically identical.

kortex

a year ago

That's not what makes things artificial vs natural. Artificial vanillin is "more vanilla than real vanilla". A natural vanillin molecule is indistinguishable from fully synthetic vanillin from crude oil. The latter is still called "artificial flavor".

Nursie

a year ago

Artifical vanillin is not the whole package though, as there are other compounds in natural vanilla that make up the flavour, so it doesn't reflect the full product. "Natural" vanilla extract may also never have seen a vanilla bean, as it could be plant derived, or even from a beaver's ass.

Until the rise of synthetics the perfect diamond had no flaws or impurities. Now the language has changed and apparently it's all about just the right number of imperfections and impurities, though those will also be mimicked in short order (if they haven't been already).

There is a genuine physical reason to prefer 'real' vanilla extract over artificial. Not so much for diamonds.

shiroiushi

a year ago

>Burn hydrogen to make water. Is that artificial water? Or is it forever artificial water?

This depends on whether you ask a scientist or a homeopathic practitioner.

HeyLaughingBoy

a year ago

> "natural" televisions and tacos have yet to be found.

I refuse to give up hope!

acchow

a year ago

> also wonder if impurities will become fashionable, just to show that a specific diamond is actually natural and can't be made in a lab.

Why can’t you add impurities when manufacturing a diamond? “Doping”

JonChesterfield

a year ago

You get them whether you want it or not, at least some of the time. Entropy and so forth. The synthetic ones with worse imperfections are cheaper.

It's probably possible to guess by inspection whether the imperfection properties imply mined vs lab grown, with some level of accuracy.

Source for the existence of imperfections is reading through lists of specific diamonds a few years ago. The synthetic ones didn't vary much in colour but did vary in number and distribution of inclusions.

db48x

a year ago

You can, but a flaw in a gem is usually an inclusion of some other mineral, a crack, or a hollow space.

grues-dinner

a year ago

This is Gary: his job is to give the machine a solid kick once a day and crack the vacuum seal on Fridays. Gary made us 120 million in imperfections last quarter.

tikhonj

a year ago

> I also wonder if impurities will become fashionable, just to show that a specific diamond is actually natural and can't be made in a lab.

I hope that happens for purely aesthetic reasons too: natural "imperfections" add a lot of visual variety and interest that's otherwise missing in a lot of diamond jewellery—at least the sort that I've seen.

meling

a year ago

Pretty sure you can add random/natural imperfections in the lab too!

bambax

a year ago

High-end watches are worse at telling the time than electronic watches, but they are visibly different and identifiable, so they can broadcast status.

Diamonds made by man or nature are now indistinguishable, except to highly trained experts (and even then, not always), so it's unclear why anyone would prefer the expensive kind.

GJim

a year ago

> so they can broadcast status.

Ummmm no.

As a lover of clockwork, I couldn't give a toss what anyone else thinks of my clock or watch collection.

Nursie

a year ago

>> will keep their price

I think this is a bit of a strong prediction. It's already been interesting to watch the rhetoric switch from "Natural ones are stronger and more pure" to "Manufactured diamonds don't have the flaws that give character". Which itself is fairly short-sighted, we can already manufacture things like star-sapphires with specific impurities in them.

So in the end all that will be left is "this one is natural". It will be a 'veblen' type signal for some people... but maybe it'll start to be a signal of gullibility, and also of recklessness or callousness, because diamond mining has both environmental and human costs.

bluGill

a year ago

Given the moral conditions around natural diamonds it is artificial diamonds that should command a premium.

rodgerd

a year ago

Basically you're paying extra money for the murdering at this point.

bluefirebrand

a year ago

Seems like it would have the opposite effect from what you want

You want people to prefer artificial diamonds because they're cheaper, so it becomes less financially viable to sell natural diamonds, so the people involved in that immoral stuff you're mentioning go out of business

batch12

a year ago

Now we just need artificial diamonds that are flawed enough to be indistinguishable from real diamonds.

vlachen

a year ago

Just like the "distressed wood" trend caused a booming business of making products that all have the exact same "distressed" pattern. History doesn't repeat, but it certainly rhymes.

iteratethis

a year ago

I know somebody that works in a wooden floor business. They take perfect new wood and move it through a cylinder that drops pebbles on it. They sell it for 2-3 times the price of undamaged wood.

Joker_vD

a year ago

There is a whole sub-industry of putting fake mosquitoes into fake amber.

sdenton4

a year ago

As long as the mosquitos contain real dinosaur blood, it's all good.

pfdietz

a year ago

From chickens, right?

red1reaper

a year ago

Chickens are indeed dinosaurs by all means, so sure, from chickens.

A_D_E_P_T

a year ago

They already do this with emeralds -- fake inclusions and flaws to make them look more like natural stones. If a natural emerald and a good synthetic emerald are distinguishable, it's often only because the synthetic one still looks too much better -- its color and overall clarity are still a little bit too good.

striking

a year ago

I'd expect this to be true if you could tell at a glance. But the new stuff looks like the old stuff, but bigger and better.

diebeforei485

a year ago

> The natural ones will keep their price

But they haven't.

olalonde

a year ago

Did they? I can't think of many hand-crafted goods that survived a superior massed produced version.

Plus, the signal value is lost once the natural and manufactured versions become indistinguishable.

GJim

a year ago

> Artificial diamonds, you mean.

Synthetic diamonds, you mean.

There is noting artificial about them! They are diamonds.

Joker_vD

a year ago

They were created by humans; therefore, "artificial", or "manufactured". Just because there is no practical way to distinguish them from the ones that appeared naturally doesn't mean they weren't created artificially.

"But this is a purely philosophical difference then!" Yes, it is. Humans still take such silly differences into an account, consider e.g. replicas of artwork made by the original artist themself. Are they genuine? Debatable!

rowanG077

a year ago

Why? Natural diamonds are the inferior product in every way.

crazygringo

a year ago

For the same reason you can make a print of a classic painting, and digitally brighten and re-saturate the colors to counteract the darkening and yellowing of the original with age. Remove all of the cracking too.

And you'll still only be able to sell the print for tens of dollars, while the original is worth millions.

People attach value to authenticity and originals and tradition, however they define that.

TylerE

a year ago

Except that with diamonds the authenticity is actual human suffering in virtually slave like conditions.

notfed

a year ago

It sounds like some people want to pay more money. Good for them. I'm happy to have a cheaper option.

fidotron

a year ago

The whole point is to spend money and to be an honest signal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory

In the event artificial diamonds are genuinely indistinguishable from natural ones they will all, natural and artificial, become worthless aside from practical applications.

notfed

a year ago

That's a really, really dim signal though, right? You literally need a microscope to see the signal.

DoughnutHole

a year ago

A higher-end Rolex knockoff is indistinguishable from the real thing to the naked eye of a casual observer, and yet people still buy the real thing for 10 times the price.

Brands will make themselves known as the more expensive option. People don’t give cubic zirconia engagement rings as is because they’ll look cheap if they’re honest and be outed as a cheap fraud if it’s found out that it’s not a diamond when they pretended it was.

De Beers will find a way to make aspects of the jewellery other than the gem identifiably theirs. Then when you’re caught pretending a $100 lab diamond ring is a $6,000 natural diamond De fBeers ring you’ll be in just as much trouble as if you’ve given them a cubic zirconia.

Nursie

a year ago

But even that surely is less useful these days?

In the west we're no longer living in a time where most people get married and then start their lives together. People often cohabit for years before marriage, and with more women working and earning as well the "hey I've got money and I'm dedicating a chunk to you!" signal isn't so much of a thing.

freen

a year ago

Sylvester McMonkey McBean at work.

satvikpendem

a year ago

Yes, this is a form of signaling in social psychology, an interesting phenomenon that happens with originals versus "replicas."

derriz

a year ago

> People attach value to authenticity and originals and tradition, however they define that.

That (some) people might attach (some) value to those attributes does not guarantee that the monetary value will be preserved. Pre-20th century antique "brown" furniture is a notorious example - where market value has collapsed in the last few decades as fashion has shifted.

listenallyall

a year ago

But something else - authentic mid-modern furniture like Eames chairs - took its place. Old furniture is still in very high demand (and expensive), it's just that the specific pieces have changed.

rowanG077

a year ago

The prints most certainly aren't better. Hand painted is not something that can't be defeated with a printer currently. Besides you pay for the history of the original not the paint. A natural diamond has essentially the same history as any other rock you can pick up anywhere for free. People pay for the feeling. That doesn't mean a synthetic diamond is physically superior in every way.

Xenoamorphous

a year ago

I never bought a diamond in my life and have zero intention of doing so, but I can see how to some people there would be the appeal of knowing that a diamond came from some rock where it had stayed untouched for millions of years vs. an artificial one made in some China lab last month.

consteval

a year ago

I think the value of diamonds has always been their rarity and cost. Historically, for married women this allowed them some financial strength and safety net. Of course as time goes on that function becomes less useful, but the idea has still stuck around a bit.

I predict people will turn to other gemstones, or will stick to "natural" diamonds and maybe even get them certified and stuff, producing another artificial market to inflate their value.

garbageman

a year ago

Your use of "historically" in the context of diamonds only means the past 100 years. Prior to the marketing of diamonds, sapphire was most common.

anjel

a year ago

You omit functional value referred somewhat euphemistically as "portable wealth." See also: why doesn't the US circulate 1000 dollar bills?

A_D_E_P_T

a year ago

It's not, though. This is old, but it's a classic: https://archive.ph/VdR8C

The short version is that it's very tough to sell diamonds. You're much more likely to get fleeced or get arrested than you are to get a fair deal.

anjel

a year ago

Having inherited a stupidly large rock that had been in my family since 1905,I moved immediately to divest, and it wasn't in any way hard to sell, just really costly. Even with step-up cost basis cancelling out huge capital gains, Sothebys bit off about 22% in commissions and fees for itself. I also explored selling through an individual jeweler, and was offered 6 figures cash in a briefcase, but the commission would have been about the same, just more camouflaged, and I had no reason to want to explain a six-figures-of-cash deposit to my bank I'd have had to make thereafter. Big high quality diamonds at least, are liquid these days. (Your link is from 1982!) Just expect considerable slippage when you sell, the inevitable middlemen have sharp teeth.

mNovak

a year ago

Diamonds are already certified by GIA, so that you prove their clarity and quality and such (which no untrained observer would be able to differentiate)

wkat4242

a year ago

Was it ever that handy for it?

I mean, having something valuable as a safety net and then carrying it around day and night where it can get damaged or stolen doesn't really sound like the smartest thing.

scheeseman486

a year ago

Grab a shovel and dig down in your garden deep enough and you'll get hundreds of old rocks for free

Glyptodon

a year ago

I think large natural diamonds will exist as a market. Just expect large real gems to become much less common for the non-wealthy. And large gemstone jewelry to become more ubiquitous with the increasing spread of lab gems. Definitely a trend towards seeing more such gems paired with silver as the prices have gone down.

neallindsay

a year ago

Sorry for the pedantry, but “real” isn't a synonym for “natural”. My phone is real and is as artificial an object as I can imagine.

gwbas1c

a year ago

> Within 10 years of today, I expect diamonds to lose almost all of their value. Moissanites have already become as near-worthless as synthetic rubies. This is going to open up new industrial uses for those gemstones.

And for jewelry too. I bought my wife a 2ct moissanite in 2012. There was no way we could have done that ring with a real diamond back then.

When I was shopping, I happened to see a girl at a conference who had many large moissanites on her ring. It was gorgeous, and well within the price range of upper-middle-class.

sinuhe69

a year ago

You said they are legit, does that mean you have them tested by an independent lab? I know that almost all shops in China (and India) show nice certificates for such purchases. But I also know from experience that many of these certificates are worthless as rubber stamps. Maybe you live in China and know more about such things? I'm thinking about buying and would like to know more from your perspective. Thanks!

fortran77

a year ago

I need diamonds to play my records! What do you think a record stylus ("needle") is made from?

A_D_E_P_T

a year ago

Sure, but those aren't gem-grade. They're usually black and opaque (polycrystalline) or yellow. And in any case they're very small.

When I say new industrial uses, I'm thinking of things that haven't been done before and hinge on large bulk volumes of material: Windows, very large diamond anvil cells, high-performance heatsinks, and stuff like that. Lots of cool things are going to be developed.

jalk

a year ago

Worthless (as in low monetary value) doesn't mean useless.

HPsquared

a year ago

Funnily enough this concept is literally called the "diamond-water paradox".

euroderf

a year ago

Shibata needles always commanded a premium. Can they now be manufactured in that shape ? Can all vinyl lovers now get Shibata needles ? The great thing about them is that they go deeper in the record grooves, so even if your record has been played a lot using cheaper needles, a Shibata might find virgin vinyl. Which also means that on the first play with the Shibata, it will excavate a lot of gunk.

anjel

a year ago

The moon-rock tipped styluses are vastly superior. /Zappa

thaumasiotes

a year ago

> Moissanites have already become as near-worthless as synthetic rubies.

I've noticed that synthetic sapphires are (or were?) much more expensive than synthetic rubies. Do you know why?

zettabomb

a year ago

I'm going to take a guess and say it's because of ruby lasers. They make massive synthetic ruby rods for lasers, but it needs to be one solid piece with very low impurities. A small defect will cause the rod to be entirely unusable for a laser, but there can still be large portions usable for other purposes with less stringent requirements. An example is ruby tipped 3D printer nozzles, used for abrasive filaments, which can be had for around $50.

avhon1

a year ago

Other mass-market uses for small rubies are for bearings in precision gear trains, and wear-resistant tips for precision measuring devices.

spondylosaurus

a year ago

I'm also curious about this. Especially since natural rubies and natural sapphires are the same type of gemstone, just in different colors. It sounds like the synthetic equivalents might not be similar at all!

thaumasiotes

a year ago

The synthetic equivalents have to be similar, because they're the same thing as the natural stones, and the natural stones are similar.

A ruby is corundum with chromium coloring it; a sapphire is corundum with (most typically) iron coloring it.

Iron isn't rare, so either it affects the process used to make rubies, or there's no real reason for the price gap.

adrian_b

a year ago

Iron is not enough for sapphires, it must be combined with titanium.

I do not know how this is done, but while the doping with chromium for rubies is simple, chromium will just substitute aluminum in the crystal lattice and it will provide a color determined by its concentration, for sapphires there may be necessary a more complex thermal treatment, so that the iron and titanium will form the right type of coupled defects in the crystal, in order to have the desired color.

spondylosaurus

a year ago

"No real" reason wouldn't shock me. Not a gemstone expert so I can't say, but if natural sapphires are more expensive/in higher demand than natural rubies (despite both being corundum) then it makes sense for that demand to map onto their synthetic counterparts. But with the synthetic stones, it's more obvious how arbitrary that demand/price difference is.

thaumasiotes

a year ago

My impression was that natural rubies are generally more expensive than natural sapphires.

tiagod

a year ago

This is just speculation, but assuming you're talking about gem-grade rubies and sapphires, perhaps there's more industrial uses for similar rubies and the gem industry sees the benefit.

IG_Semmelweiss

a year ago

For those that bought into natural stuff at exhorbitant prices, what would you suggest the appropriate move is?

garbageman

a year ago

Keep it if you have sentimental feelings towards it. Sell it if the primary value is the price of the materials.

rhplus

a year ago

Cut your loses and chalk it up as a learning opportunity.

dist-epoch

a year ago

How big can you get?

Do they make olive sized ones (1-2 cm diameter)? How much would such one cost?

namibj

a year ago

They make 150mm wafers in quantity, up to a couple mm thick, but I don't see why they shouldn't be about to go olive thick. Other than the slow growth, that is; I think it might take a couple months to grow optical grade that thick.

silexia

a year ago

Awesome! This is how the free market works without government regulations.

iamgopal

a year ago

200 USD is retail price, bulk purchase is even less than 100 USD

Modified3019

a year ago

Yeah, these days when it comes to gems like diamond or moissanite meant for high quality beauty, the actual cost is in the time and skill it takes to properly cut one for optimal optical properties.

Mind you most people won’t be able to tell a difference unless you put the $5 cut next to a $500 cut.

program_whiz

a year ago

For any aspiring inventors / engineers out there, take a good look at how Hall was treated by GE. He literally invented game-changing tech with every obstacle thrown in his way by management, and was given a 10% raise and $10 savings bond.

Had he done it on his own, he would have been extremely wealthy, being the supplier of synthetic diamonds to the world (assuming he wouldn't have faced legal challenges by former employer). He would have also been able to pursue this full time, who knows how much he could have improved the tech.

Just because the powers that be don't think its a good idea, doesn't mean it isn't (it also doesn't mean it is). And if they don't want you building it, for goodness sakes, don't just give them your amazing idea, build it so you can profit when it turns out to be a golden nugget.

AStrangeMorrow

a year ago

I have seen lab grown diamond being quite a bit cheaper than mined ones for a while now. As in ×2 to ×3 times cheaper even.

And yes, funnily it seems that the purer a diamond is (clear, few impurities etc) the higher its price/carat, until it is so pure that it means it is a lab grown diamond and not a natural one and the price drops

throwaway48476

a year ago

Veblen good.

djtango

a year ago

Because synthetic diamonds are indistinguishable to the naked eye (IIRC a trained eye with a magnifying glass can spot faint nitrogen impurities which are characteristic of natural diamonds) the thing you're really paying for is the piece of paper, the certificate. You're not really paying for carbon allotrope.

So it's less like gold which is fungible and a more natural form of money.

Diamonds feel more like an NFT...

kelnos

a year ago

While yes, you are literally paying for the certificate, what you're really paying for is propagandized emotion.

The diamond cartel did a great job equating "real", mined diamonds with love and romance. For some couples, unfortunately, lab-grown just doesn't have the same feel to it.

pharrington

a year ago

More importantly, you're paying for the human rights violations. Hopefully, synthetic diamonds eventually become popular enough to destroy the perverse incentives fueling the traditional diamond trade.

justinparus

a year ago

Agreed. So much so I wonder if they engrave all lab-grown ones, so they don’t get mixed up easily with mined and ruin their price.

onlypassingthru

a year ago

If I'm not mistaken, diamonds get etched with a serial number when they get graded so you can look up the history later.

heavenlyblue

a year ago

In fact, De Beers have been agressively hiring for their osn blockchain-for-diamonds project.

andrewflnr

a year ago

Not really. The comment is talking about price increasing with the quality of the "good", which is perfectly conventional. The weird price cliff is especially out of place for a Veblen good.

istrice

a year ago

I started looking into diamonds two years before I proposed to my now wife and went really down the rabbit hole of the chemistry, history, and marketing behind diamonds.

Lab-made was a no brainer, I got a flawless and huge stone for the price I would have paid for a crappy 1ct from DeBeers. My only regret is that whatever I paid for the diamond will still be way over-market in a few years but well, had to get married at some point. I guess I'll get her a golf-ball-sized diamond for our 10th anniversary.

poisonborz

a year ago

Why and how became diamonds a necessity of marriage in the US? Did your fiancé really expect a diamond, and would have she be disappointed by something that has only worth to you?

Spivak

a year ago

It's all kind of arbitrary, some things catch on. Rings as signs of commitment and everlasting love go as far back as ancient Rome. Precious metals like gold for the actual ring symbolize the same thing because they don't rust. And DaBeers had the right messaging at the right time to popularize diamond, a white stone that matches a wedding dress, is clean and pure meshing well with Christianity in the US, and was already mythologized as the hardest and unbreakable.

It's the same symbolism for why it's popular for guys' wedding rings to be made out of super strong, super hard metals.

People give DaBeers too much credit for what was an extremely natural extension to the engagement ring. Advertising only gets your foot in the door, it does have to be a reasonably good idea for it to take on a life of its own.

dimgl

a year ago

Women expect it. It's that simple.

GJim

a year ago

> Women expect it in the USA. It's that simple.

You will find quite a few cultures with bride prices and dowries that turn this on its head.

hungie

a year ago

Some women in some cultures in the U.S. expect it. Many women in the U.S. expect a ring, diamond or not.

tiborsaas

a year ago

Why do plastic/silicone wedding rings exist then?

red-iron-pine

a year ago

commonly as placeholders, for people using their hands and at risk of de-gloving incidents that would seriously hurt them.

wkat4242

a year ago

Hmm that sounds a bit shallow and materialistic tbh.

But I have to say I'm an outlier anyway, I've never been married and I prefer polyamorous relationships. And I've never had real money to speak of. So I'm not really the right type.

I do know the families with a big house and fancy dinner parties with Sunday silverware. But I tend to stay away from those settings :) I don't fit in and I don't even own a suit or dress shirt that fits.

So yeah I probably just don't 'get it' :)

kelnos

a year ago

> Hmm that sounds a bit shallow and materialistic tbh.

It is. But the diamond cartel's marketing (at least in the US, I won't speak for other countries) has been so good since well before I was born that diamond = love, romance, relationship, marriage. For many, many, many people, there's an inextricable link between the two.

It's super lame. But it's how it is. Hopefully that's already changing.

ninetyninenine

a year ago

It is shallow. Women want tribute or some sort of proof that you care. This is the true meaning of romance. Romance is essentially a man paying some sort of tribute to a woman mostly in the form of time, effort and/or money.

hungie

a year ago

Can we avoid painting with such a broad brush? "Women want tribute" is a wild thing to assert.

ninetyninenine

a year ago

[flagged]

hungie

a year ago

[flagged]

dang

a year ago

Yikes—you can't post like this to HN and we have to ban accounts that do. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

hungie

a year ago

I'm sorry, I come from an English speaking part of the world that uses swear words quite differently. (As is very common in pidgin English variants.)

The parents post was objectively sexist, and objectively highly sexist. Calling that out must be ok, apologies I dropped expletives, it's a cultural difference.

That said, it's very telling that the post says using expletives to call out sexism is bad, but there's not a similar chastisement of the sexism itself. (Which garnered no comment.) Is decorum more important than cleaning out obvious and odious sexism from HN?

ninetyninenine

a year ago

A lot of women want some sort of tribute as proof of your love. It's common in the animal kingdom and diamonds are debeers method of capitalizing on it for humans.

If debeer didn't exist, something else would exist in its place, because the root of this is not debeer. The root is female nature.

It's better this way to artificially jack up the price of diamonds. Because then you can find people who are selling the diamond at an undercut price and satisfy the female instinct. Is the diamond mined? How would she know?

Otherwise if debeers didn't do this, women may influence the culture to latch onto some other form of tribute that can't be made artificially. Gold let's say.

throwuxiytayq

a year ago

There's nothing funnier to me than reading Americans explain their worldview.

Just kidding, I doubt this has anything to do with nationality. I'm sure you guys have plenty of women that don't expect a cartoonish diamonds-and-gucci tribute from prospective partners.

ninetyninenine

a year ago

No I believe in equality where I’m from. Men also want tribute from women. That’s why millions of men are receiving diamond wedding rings from women in America.

I believe in equality to the point of delusion. It is more important to be inclusive than it is to be honest about the truth. That’s my world view.

sam_goody

a year ago

I would think Moissanite is a no-brainer.

It has a much better shine, is cheaper, and (anecdotally, in my circles), is just as cool.

Unless she wants a "real diamond", in which case lab-grown is no good either.

saghm

a year ago

When my fiancee and I got engaged last year, we bought our rings from a place that (in addition to having a robust process that allowed us to avoid having to go anywhere in person) uses lab-grown gemstones. Not only is the quality quite high and the color impressive (she picked a pink sapphire), the prices were much lower than we expected. I'm not really sure why anyone would want a "real" diamond at this point; you can get a better one for cheaper without any ethical qualms, and in my opinion the fact that we can basically assemble the gemstones we want at the molecular level is incredibly cool from an science nerd perspective.

sxv

a year ago

Many see a value in "natural" objects that is absent in those engineered by man. There is a raw energy and story behind it. Would you be just as awe-struck by a magnificent waterfall built by engineers flowing atop beautiful factory-produced rocks as one created by geologic forces over millennia?

taormina

a year ago

Many marketers have convinced you of that. To many, the story is a story of blood and tears. Diamond mines are terrible places.

CamperBob2

a year ago

Would you be just as awe-struck by a magnificent waterfall built by engineers flowing atop beautiful factory-produced rocks as one created by geologic forces over millennia?

Why wouldn't I be? Human creations can be every bit as awe-inspiring as anything found in nature.

No waterfall is as impressive as a smartphone, if you know what you're looking at and what it took to make it happen.

red-iron-pine

a year ago

I've seen some beautiful waterfalls.

But none of them filled me with awe the way that the Hoover Dam did.

What story is there behind a rock in the ground outside of a middle-school tier earth science lecture?

heystefan

a year ago

^ What he said. There's something in story/branding/nostalgia too.

gruntledfangler

a year ago

“ Lab diamonds are a testament to the principle that what nature can do, man is capable of doing better.”

Profound hubris in an otherwise interesting article.

indoordin0saur

a year ago

Would love to see us turn iron into gold as well as nature does with supernovas.

cyberax

a year ago

You can do that in an accelerator. It's not going to be cost-effective for a long time, though.

Once we get to asteroid mining, we'll be able to get gold cheaply enough to not care about it. On Earth, most of the gold sank into the planet's core because it dissolves well in molten iron. So the gold that we're mining comes mostly from meteorites.

indoordin0saur

a year ago

If you do the math on the theoretical maximum energy efficiency of turning iron into gold we'll never be able to do it cost-effectively until energy becomes cheaper by like 10 orders of magnitude. That's why heavy metals all come from the most energetic processes in the universe, like supernovae and neutron star collisions :)

cyberax

a year ago

Well, you don't really need iron, lead is good and abundant enough (since it's the first stable element at the end of the decay chains).

para_parolu

a year ago

I thought this is possible and theory is well known. It just to expensive compared to mining

bell-cot

a year ago

Doing "better" isn't so hard...when you get to pick the metric.

agtech_andy

a year ago

There has been a massive (but slow) sell off of natural diamonds. People in the industry have known this time was coming for a while.

It is very much a bag holder problem.

In some countries, people (often families) have saved for a long time to accumulate some inventory of something that is now worth a lot less. The diamond industry varies a bit by country, but in places where individual dealers hold a lot of inventory, there is a lot of incentive to be against synthetics.

I saw this firsthand in Turkey. I gave my a fiancée a ring with a very nice moissanite stone about a year and a half ago. She showed it to some jewelers and most had to really make a show of things like, "Congratulations on your upcoming wedding, but I can only work with real stones. We are not supposed to even look at these."

And I don't blame them for at least having to act this way. A lot of these family stores have hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars worth of natural diamond inventory that they took years to accumulate, and along comes something that is superior in every way for a fraction of the price.

Yes. In some other places around the world, the resistance to lab grown stuff has been violent. But the industry of natural diamonds is much more violent, and it is great to see that the way we mine diamonds will soon be a thing of the past.

Ekaros

a year ago

One thing to consider is sell back value of diamonds. Which is horrible. For something that really should not wear too much, it seems the price someone is willing to pay for them after some use should be the real price.

Kaijo

a year ago

This is true with some qualifications. If you're interested in the kind of investment grade diamonds that a major auction house would deal with, then you're looking at heavy weights and/or fancy colors that synthetics can't reach yet. In the diamond trade the word "paragon" is sometimes reserved for flawless or near-flawless stones above 100 carats, of which there is a long list of famous examples, but the largest gem grade synthetic is still around 30 carats I believe. Vivid colors top out at much lighter than that. I guess we'll be able to outdo nature within a few decades though (as far as terrestrial diamonds go, anyway -- I seem to recall reading somewhere about the discovery of moon-sized space diamonds).

A_D_E_P_T

a year ago

Vivid colors are a trivial engineering problem, and one the Chinese have already cracked. Screenshot: https://ibb.co/s6gWTy1

Prices are dropping like a rock from a high tower, and colors and other options are becoming more available. Within 10 years you'll be able to buy virtually any diamond you like, in any common color, for less than a 2ct stone would have cost in 2014.

Also, if you really like huge gems, you can buy a moissanite today at 1000ct. Even on Amazon.com there are examples at 100ct. https://www.amazon.com/Gemonite-15CT-100CT-Moissanite-Colorl...

This would have been unthinkable 10 years ago. Things in the diamond and gemstone business are changing fast.

bluGill

a year ago

Though if you are interested in investment grade diamods I'd say it is time to get out - diamonds have never been as rare as investors like to pretend, and things are going to get worse.

canucker2016

a year ago

Diamonds have been used as plot devices in movies and TV shows as a liquid asset for criminals.

*Spoiler Alerts*

Marathon Man (don't watch if you're squeamish about dental practices) with Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_Man_(film)

Also the 2021 Irish/Belgium TV series, Hidden Assets, involves diamonds.

djtango

a year ago

A diamond the size of a moon? Does that mean it's a single molecule of pure carbon the size of the moon? I wonder what effects gravity has at that scale

indoordin0saur

a year ago

I don't know about moon sized but there are solar systems out there where carbon is more common than silicon. In such a system if you had a terrestrial planet then you're likely get diamonds instead of quartz being the most common mineral in the crust. You also might possibly get diamonds in an octagonal crystalline form which are theorized to be far stronger than the diamonds we have here on Earth.

elihu

a year ago

The density of diamond is about 3.5 g/cm^3. The Earth's moon has a density of around 3.3 g/cm^3, so if you replaced it with a diamond of about the same size, it actually wouldn't be all that different in terms of gravity. Solar eclipses would be pretty wild though.

djtango

a year ago

Was more thinking about whether there are any interesting gravitational effects on the internal chemistry of a giant crystal. Say it is one single crystal, how would its centre differ from the surface?

defrost

a year ago

Earth, Moon, or Big Fine Diamond, the gravity at the surface is 1 unit (for whatever normalised radius, density to get a 1 works) while the gravity at the centre is 0.

A_D_E_P_T

a year ago

It's certainly polycrystalline rather than a giant single-crystal. It would contain lots of every other element that's soluble in it, to its limit of solubility, and whatever's insoluble or over that limit would have to form different mineral inclusions at grain boundaries.

FactKnower69

a year ago

"Investment grade", hahaha! "Speculation grade" would be a much less pathetic way to articulate this absurd concept

failuser

a year ago

But does it have enough suffering embedded to be a worthy engagement gift?

gwbas1c

a year ago

> A perfectly cut, flawless lab diamond costs a fraction of the price of a mined diamond of lesser quality.

When I shopped for an engagement ring in 2012, there was a clear cohort of women who significantly valued a diamond from the ground. Fortunately, my (now) wife and I saw through the marketing gimmick, and laughed all the way to the bank.

dirtdobber

a year ago

I'm genuinely curious why you bought a diamond at all then? Isn't the diamond itself a marketing gimmick, or do you and your wife honestly find them more beautiful than other stones?

gwbas1c

a year ago

>> When I shopped for an engagement ring

> I'm genuinely curious why you bought a diamond

You do know that engagement rings don't have to be diamond, right? Mark Zuckerburg bought his wife a $25,000 ruby ring: https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/pic-mark-zuck...

I bought Moissanite. It was a reasonable price, the ring is gorgeous, my wife loves it, and it helps with family / cultural pressure around diamonds.

(It also leads to interesting situations with people who don't understand Moissanite. My wife used to get a lot of "what does your husband dooo???" questions before people understood the changes in the jewelry market.)

trillic

a year ago

It won’t wear. That’s what was the cool part for me. A diamond won’t scratch and if set in a platinum band, the band essentially won’t tarnish. It’s as close to a “forever” item as one can reasonably get. Oooo and very shiny.

CatWChainsaw

a year ago

On FM radio, Mervis Diamond Importers talks about how they offer both natural and lab-grown, but they make sure to mention that natural will "increase in value over time" (I assume because limited quantity + as lab becomes more common, natural becomes rarer). As cynical as I am, I'm sure they'd justify a high price for a natural diamond on those grounds, but also justify a similar high price for lab-growns because they're so environmentally conscious or something.

indoordin0saur

a year ago

I'm planning on buying an engagement ring very soon and my own plan (as someone who has never done this before!) is to get a good lab grown diamond but spend more money on the metal in the ring. You can make a gem stone in a lab but until we become a Kardashev II civilization we won't be making any sufficient quantity of gold in a lab. If I buy a good loose lab grown diamond will I be able to find someone who will fit it into a high quality gold ring?

BrentOzar

a year ago

> If I buy a good loose lab grown diamond will I be able to find someone who will fit it into a high quality gold ring?

Yes, and even better, don't design the ring by yourself. Get a nice jewelry box for the diamond, use it for the proposal, and when you open the box, say:

"Our relationship is something we're going to build together. I want your opinion on everything for the rest of my life, because you're going to be my partner. I got the diamond, but let's design the ring together, you and I, because this is too important for me to do by myself. I need your help."

They'll melt, and the ring will mean even more.

cman1444

a year ago

Do not do this unless you are extremely confident it will go over well.

Usually people want to be able to put the ring on their finger (for pictures and engagement announcements) as soon as the question is popped.

Also, the "I need your help" line falls a bit flat to me. Reads like the proposer isn't capable of completing a very important task without some handholding from the "proposee".

brandonmenc

a year ago

This is... not good advice.

You're supposed to know what kind of ring your soon-to-be fiancé wants ahead of time.

And they're going to want to be able to put it on their finger right away.

Glyptodon

a year ago

Lots of people are pretty into treating gems and rings as separate goods, or want grandma's diamond in a new ring. So I don't think getting them separately will be an issue. But I'd definitely consider looking up shiny precious gems on Reddit - for less money than a diamond you can really get some nicely cut and much more interesting Sapphires.

andoando

a year ago

Yes pretty much any jeweler will be able to custom make a ring for you. I imagine its how the majority of engagement rings are sold, theres way too much variability in the stone and ring/setting people want for jewlers to only sell premade rings.

Also theres not much to a high quality ring and not much for you to spend money on there.

object_Object

a year ago

Yes, I did this with my wife, and it was a fantastic experience. She was able to design the ring exactly how she wanted, and working closely with the jeweller allowed us to ask all the right questions and get personalised advice.

You could also consider using a temporary ‘semi-set mount’ for the proposal. Then afterwards you could go to a jeweller and have them create the perfect ring to your specifications.

Now, 6 or 7 years my wife has a big birthday coming up and I’m considering a diamond pendant - when I bought the diamond for the engagement ring there was far fewer options but now there’s lots of places online. LooseGrownDiamond seems very competitive but if you find anywhere better priced I’d be interested!

thomasahle

a year ago

> If I buy a good loose lab grown diamond will I be able to find someone who will fit it into a high quality gold ring?

I hear many jewelers are not big fans of this. It's like a customer who bought their own steak to a restaurant and asks the chefs to cook it at a discount. It's not like the jewelers don't know where to buy cheap stones online. Some jewelers are just happy to get the business, but expect others to sneer a bit.

DabbyDabberson

a year ago

most people taking this strategy that I know use platinum instead of gold. Most engagement rings only have ~~~$200 worth of gold on them.

indoordin0saur

a year ago

Do ring vendors put a higher markup on gold than platinum?

stoolio

a year ago

The price of gold is through the roof. Gold is ~$2500 per oz, while platinum is $950 per oz. However, most gold is 14kt (58%) or 18kt (75%) while Platinum is 90%+. That, and platinum is a heavier (technically denser is more correct?) metal, so there is more platinum in an equivalent ring, and it weighs more. The actual price on finished jewelry isn't as big as you would think.

However, "retail" jewelry stores often price things using what they call Keystone (2x markup) or even triple keystone (3x). So, a $500 piece would sell for $1000-$1500.

dboreham

a year ago

Jewelry stores will also come up with endless nonsense to justify high prices such as Platinum is so much harder to work with, etc.

snark42

a year ago

Did you mean rhodium?

BobAliceInATree

a year ago

Rhodium is very expensive. It's used as a coating for white gold, but actual rhodium jewelry doesn't really exist.

dirtdobber

a year ago

I would ask your soon-to-be wife whether she'd be ok with a lab grown diamond vs a natural (and let her come to her own conclusion without mansplaining to her that only morons would prefer naturals).

Some women would honestly prefer a 0.5-1.0ct natural vs a 2.5ct synthetic.

In any case, the ring is for her, so I'd recommend making sure she's on board with what you're thinking.

themaninthedark

a year ago

If you could find an independent jeweler(as opposed to chain jewelry store), I am sure they would.

dirtdobber

a year ago

Natural diamonds have value in terms of luxury. Synthetics do not, hence why they are cheap. If you want to buy a diamond because you think they're pretty, buy a synthetic one. If you want to buy a diamond as a luxury gift, buy a natural one.

Rolex doesn't put synthetic diamonds on watches. Cartier doesn't put synthetic diamonds on bracelets. Tiffany's won't put synthetic diamonds on rings.

If you think that natural diamonds are trending towards no longer being a luxury item, then don't buy them at all (why purchase a synthetic one if you think the diamond market is just a marketing ruse anyways?)

I've never met someone that bought a synthetic diamond that didn't immediately try to justify it. I think that says a lot.

hungie

a year ago

Why though. Like, genuinely, why bother with the mined ones?

"This diamond caused untold human suffering and exploitation to acquire, and that makes it rare and valuable." It's just a weird flex at this point. It marks you out as someone who doesn't care about the wellbeing of others.

But every time someone gets excited about natural diamonds they try to justify that synthetic ones just aren't the same. I think that also says a lot.

red-iron-pine

a year ago

> Why though. Like, genuinely, why bother with the mined ones?

as someone else said, "Veblen goods"

dirtdobber

a year ago

> "This diamond caused untold human suffering and exploitation to acquire."

Dude, the copper in your phone required untold human suffering and exploitation to acquire.

You want to profess some grand moral judgement about purchasing mined minerals, but I guarantee all of that moral judgment goes out the door when it comes to products that you can afford and want to buy.

viridian

a year ago

Are you arguing for a nihilistic worldview where one should abstain from caring about suffering and exploitation, or just calling OP a probable hypocrite? If the latter, what position do you take that isn't hypocritical?

dirtdobber

a year ago

It's pretty clear, no?

Are you asking me for a non-hypocritical position on the diamond market? My position is simply that natural diamonds are a luxury item. Claiming that there's suffering involved in obtaining natural diamonds and therefore you should only purchase synthetic (non-luxury) diamonds, is a view that is inconsistent with the way most people live. Otherwise, we'd all stop buying clothes, shoes, cell phones, coffee, etc. Essentially every product you use, unless you take extreme care, involves human trafficking at some point in the supply chain.

viridian

a year ago

Thanks for clarifying. I think this is a degenerate, self-defeating way to view your relationship to the purchases you make.

By stripping away any agency you may have and shifting both blame and responsibility onto the market, government, or other amoral greater power, you shrink yourself. You are capable of agency, even if some acts are harder than others.

In between the absolute poles of absolute moral asceticism and nihilistic indifference to suffering, is a massive spectrum. On that spectrum, blood diamonds are a very, very low hanging fruit for anyone seeking to demonstrate even the smallest shred of moral agency.

A few reasons this is so easy:

1) An alternative product exists, and is cheaper than the one produced by forced labor. You save money by not paying extra for suffering.

2) The purchase is infrequent. Unlike food or clothing, you aren't constantly required to buy more of it and thus have to research suppliers and production practices over and over.

3) The quality of the alternative is as high or higher. Unlike with any number of technology products where you are cajoled by unique feature sets and a higher level of polish that comes part and parcel with grinding through humans, lab diamonds do the main things a diamond does as well or better than the alternative. They reflect, refract, scratch, and cleave exactly as one wants them to.

dirtdobber

a year ago

Or, get this, I can buy a natural diamond that was ethically sourced.

hungie

a year ago

Just because we accept it in one place doesn't mean we should blanket accept it everywhere. This isn't some inductive proof of human suffering where we can just k+1 cases where people do bad things.

Whataboutism isn't a useful or helpful way to discuss an industry with unbelievable human suffering.

Start a post about copper mining if you want to discuss copper mining. We're talking diamonds here, which have a demonstrable human cost.

dirtdobber

a year ago

> Whataboutism isn't a useful or helpful way to discuss an industry with unbelievable human suffering.

I think you're misunderstanding my point. My point was not that there's not human suffering in the diamond industry, nor that it isn't bad. My point is that you, a person that cannot afford expensive natural diamonds (speaking statistically here, I don't know you personally), probably should not cast moral judgments on others that can and do purchase expensive natural diamonds. This is due to the fact that you, a person that can afford a cell phone, chooses to purchase a cell phone, despite that industry experiencing similar levels of human suffering. Therefore, I am forced to believe that in the counterfactual world where you can afford expensive diamonds, you would buy them.

plokiju

a year ago

In the case of diamonds, you have the choice of buying the exact same product with human suffering involved, or without. If there were a lab-grown iPhone on the market, of course I would choose it

hungie

a year ago

I make approximately 750k/year. I can afford diamonds. I choose not to buy them because they are a symbol of accepting human suffering for my luxury.

Workaccount2

a year ago

>I've never met someone that bought a synthetic diamond that didn't immediately try to justify it

What you likely to consider "trying to justify it" is more likely "trying to let someone know they are delusional."

"My synthetic diamond is functionally identical, if not even better than your mined one" is factually true and not a justification...

dirtdobber

a year ago

> "My synthetic diamond is functionally identical, if not even better than your mined one" is factually true and not a justification...

Except they're not functionally identical. Natural diamonds function in society as a luxury item. Synthetic diamonds have always functioned as a utility item (used in chainsaw blades, for example). Synthetic diamonds certainly do not function as a luxury item and they're not marketed to people with money.

Look, I have no problem with synthetic diamonds in the same way that I have no problem with reprints of Salvador Dali paintings. But, the market for original Salvador Dali paintings is very different than the market for reprints even though they might appear "functionally identical."

unusualmonkey

a year ago

I find it ironic that you decided to try to justify natural diamonds... just to say that synthetic diamond purchasers always try to justify it.

Pot, Kettle and all that. With probably a large helping of selection bias.

dirtdobber

a year ago

Wrong, read again. No justification for buying natural diamonds. Just stating the facts: current market dynamics make the distinction that natural diamonds are a luxury product while synthetic diamonds are not. I clearly stated that people should buy natural vs synthetic based on those market dynamics and their own personal preferences.

moralestapia

a year ago

(Not related to the content of the article)

What a beautiful site.

The subtle pink background, the choice of font, the minimal appearance (true to the spirit of being minimal, not just dead-ass simple), the way images are woven through, the footnotes, ...

Excellent execution!

Noumenon72

a year ago

I didn't click through the headline, so until you called this out I thought I was skipping a price chart from the AP or something. I almost missed all that history and diagrams. Thanks!

dirtdobber

a year ago

I don't see demand for natural diamonds going anywhere. There's a reason that Rolex, Cartier, and other luxury brands don't use cheap, synthetic diamonds in their products.

I know a jeweler personally that sells synthetic and natural diamonds. He can spot the difference from a mile away between a synthetic and a natural diamond (synthetics look extremely pure and have no flaws). His wealthy clients buy natural diamonds. Not because it's a "better investment" but because they can.

If you can buy a knockoff Louis Vuitton for 5% of the cost of the real one, great, go for it! Most people won't be able to tell the difference (I certainly can't). But the market for authentic Louis Vuitton isn't going anywhere, and the people that can afford it will buy the real ones, and the people that can't will buy the fake ones.

As long as there's a distinction between natural and synthetic, synthetic diamonds will drop to a dollar a carat while naturals only become more of a status symbol.

EDIT: changed real to natural when referring to diamonds

chmod775

a year ago

> I don't see demand for real diamonds going anywhere.

Calling one "real" and not the other is the wrong. Synthetic diamonds aren't an imitation. The distinction is "natural" and "synthetic".

> Not because it's a "better investment" but because they can.

From my experience it's to show off (that's the whole point of jewelry) and they'll be happy to tell you about their real diamond anytime the conversations ventures to anywhere near anything remotely related. I'd imagine the only people impressed are other suckers who happen to be poorer.

404mm

a year ago

Is it not possible to introduce impurities or flaws to synthetic diamonds, making them virtually indistinguishable?

dirtdobber

a year ago

I use "real" and "natural" interchangeably in this context, but sure if we want to be pedantic I'll use natural instead.

Regardless, I view natural diamonds as having "real" value in the luxury space and synthetics as... Not.

red-iron-pine

a year ago

that is because you are a marketing account that is 50 days old and has 23 karma

dirtdobber

a year ago

Well you got 2 out of 3 of those correct.

markus_zhang

a year ago

Not 100% sure but it shouldn't be too expensive too "add" a few flaws if customers wish...

dirtdobber

a year ago

Perhaps. But I see one of two things happening regardless: (1) the market maintains a distinction between real and synthetic or (2) the market doesn't, and diamonds become irrelevant as a luxury item.

If case 2 happens, it just means that diamonds get replaced with something else like gold, and gold luxury items become much more expensive. In any case, your future wife probably doesn't really want that massive synthetic diamond. It's a human thing, whether we (the HN crowd) think it's ridiculous or not.

markus_zhang

a year ago

Yeah that's true. Unfortunately HN folks in general are not in position to exploit it.

danielodievich

a year ago

Synthetic diamonds from "cremains" (ash from cremation) have been a thing for a while. That ash is mostly carbon with other elements. "Wear your grandma" is thankfully not a slogan. My teenager children's recent answers to "would you want this" were "ewww gross absolutely not".

physicsguy

a year ago

They're cheaper but they're not cheap and that's part of the issue...

I remember looking at engagement rings about 5 years ago, my now wife is quite environmentally conscious. At the time it was like ~£1200 for a diamond one and £800 for a synthetic one.

timerol

a year ago

5 years has made a large difference in prices, as shown in this graph quoted in TFA: https://www.paulzimnisky.com/Price-Evolution-of-Lab-grown-Di...

Assuming you mean "late 2018" by "about 5 years ago" (because that's where the graph has a 1.5:1 ratio), that $1200/$800 diamond was probably about 0.2 carat (obviously depends on the other Cs), and would likely be around $1200/$300 today.

vundercind

a year ago

I looked a few years back after reading a bunch about how synthetics were cheaper in discussions like this. I did not find it to be notably true then. There was barely a discount for synthetic at all, the places I checked.

Ended up with moissanite, which was significantly cheaper than diamond, but still not, like, cheap if you care about it looking as diamond-like as possible, though I probably could have done as well with diamond buying “used” if I’d had the patience for it and more knowledge to be more confident I wasn’t getting scammed.

user

a year ago

[deleted]

mholt

a year ago

Howard Tracy Hall's descendant is my sister-in-law. They have lots of his stories in their family history, and she wrote a book for children about the process of inventing his process for the artificial diamond [0]. An uplifting and inspiring story that simplifies things for a child to understand.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Diamond-Boy-Creation-Diamonds-Tracy/d...

littleweep

a year ago

Tangentially related: Does anyone in the HN community have a recommendation for a reputable place for obtaining a lab-grown diamond for an engagement ring?

brunoTbear

a year ago

If you’re in San Francisco stop in at Derco. They’re underneath the Airbnb building.

Glyptodon

a year ago

Ritani or Loose Grown Diamonds.

jiveturkey

a year ago

How long until synthetics are passed off as natural? Or maybe there's already a lot of that going on. Conflict diamonds are already "laundered" so why not synthetic.

> Because it’s so difficult to distinguish between mined and lab diamonds (even for jewelers), diamond grading institutions inscribe LG or Laboratory-Grown on the rim of lab-grown diamonds, visible at 20-times magnification.

moab_desert1

a year ago

A friend recently mentioned an online jewelry retailer called Frank Darling [1], which sells both natural and lab-grown diamonds.

They have a pretty interesting business model: they're mostly online, but also offer in-person appointments with a designer and offer to 3D print pieces in resin before producing them.

[1] https://frankdarling.com/

garfieldnate

a year ago

I bought our wedding rings back in 2011, and I was very annoyed to find that the synthetic diamonds were better quality but always came with some sort of laser engraving to mark them as "fake," essentially as a way to protect the natural diamond market.

slm_HN

a year ago

"Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and vastly cheaper than mined diamonds. Beating nature took decades of hard graft and millions of pounds of pressure."

What does graft mean in this context? Is there a process where you graft diamonds, like plants? Does it refer to the diamond seed crystals mentioned in the article?

ycombinete

a year ago

Hard graft is an idiom. It means hard work.

berniedurfee

a year ago

Ah! Thanks, I misread that as “grift” and thought it was another jab at De Beers.

user

a year ago

[deleted]

aidenn0

a year ago

When TFA talks about semiconductors it really only directly compares it to silicon, when GaN is probably the nearest competitor to diamond, both in cost and performance. I believe diamond is "only" about 20x the cost of GaN; anyone know what the economics would be for substituting diamond for GaN in e.g. HVDC?

namibj

a year ago

They just GaN there? I thought they where just using SiC and legacy Si for high voltage high power fixed infrastructure?

mentalgear

a year ago

Not even to mention much more ethical than the blood diamonds that are artificially kept on "short supply".

seydor

a year ago

But why pay a lot of money for something that hasn't been mined with illegal or child labor?

robertritz

a year ago

My wife runs a jewelry business (in Asia not the USA). Natural diamonds are still in high demand and it's usually younger people getting the lab diamonds. Mostly beacuse of price.

Most people want the nicest thing they can afford in the moment, whatever that is.

65

a year ago

I expect natural diamonds to go down in demand in the coming years not because they're more expensive, but more because of the horrible working conditions of miners. Perhaps they might be taboo in the future, "Oh you have a natural diamond, what did a child slave mine that?"

_fat_santa

a year ago

Earlier this year I bought an engagement ring for my now wife. I ended up getting a lab diamond on Rare Carat for way less than what jewelry stores charge. IIRC the ring cost about $1.8k and if I were to get a natural diamond that price would have been closer to $4k.

Flatcircle

a year ago

Will be interesting to see if diamonds with natural flaws end up becoming more desirable as a consequence. Like film grain in cinema, the flaws of the old process become romanticized.

dgellow

a year ago

You can introduce impurity in artificial diamonds

Havoc

a year ago

I thought that had been the case for many years already?

stigma is independent of any of those very reasonable metrics unfortunately

You need to pay someone to go dig stuff up apparently for love to be true love

flanked-evergl

a year ago

Odd that an article about aesthetics does not include one photo/picture of an actual, supposedly more beautiful, synthetic diamond.

kazinator

a year ago

> Diamonds have high thermal conductivity

In fact, incredibly high. Five times higher than copper.

ckemere

a year ago

High end watches have had sapphire crystal faces for a while. Why not diamond??

cortesoft

a year ago

How do you determine that the diamonds are 'more beautiful'?

Zekio

a year ago

This must be why Ruby 3D printer nozzles are getting below 100 bucks

martyvis

a year ago

> Lab diamonds are a testament to the principle that what nature can do, man is capable of doing better.

A lot of unfounded hubris there. Come back when you have perfected a man-made forest with all its diversity of plants and animals.

exabrial

a year ago

Except they're stupid expensive for no reason

pc86

a year ago

Yeah, cartels gonna cartel. When I bought an engagement ring you'd find a natural stone for $x and the lab-grown version was, at best, $0.9x - I came across several instances where you'd choose between lab-grown and natural and the price was the same regardless.

They've been cheaper for a while but it doesn't matter that it's cheaper to make lab-grown diamonds than it is to mine natural diamonds if the consumer is going to pay the same regardless.

pton_xd

a year ago

I mean, this has been true for the better part of a decade. The difference now is that jewelers caved and many offer a selection of lab diamonds. There's still a high markup on lab diamonds in most retailers though. Loose lab diamonds are incredibly cheap, only $600 per carat!

hadlock

a year ago

I was surprised by this, but the top three results for lab grown diamonds, all of them had good cut, color clarity 3+ carat (loose) diamonds for ~$1200-1400. That's very impressive given that's what a mid grade 0.75-1.0ct mined diamond cost 5-6 years ago

renewiltord

a year ago

Where does one get these wholesale prices? And I assume that cutting happens at some cost over this?

pton_xd

a year ago

Wholesale I'm not sure. Retail you can use sites like stonealgo.com to search inventory. And no that's the final cut and graded price.

stoolio

a year ago

The trade uses a variety of sites for "wholesale" prices. Rapnet is the standard, and they publish the Rapaport Price List. However, it only covers natural diamonds, and rapnet only lists natural. Diamonds generally go for a % discount off the Rap Price List.

Polygon (.net) is the other major listing platform. They include lab diamonds, and most everyone uses them. There are other platforms, but those are the two majors IMHO.

You need to be a member of the trade to sign up AFAIK.

However, I have seen one retail site, Ritani, actually post "wholesale" prices and they seemed to be pretty accurate. They seem to have good prices too. They list their wholesale/markup/etc. Of course, you should buy from a nice local jewelry store, but if you want to buy lab online they are at least great for checking prices.

renewiltord

a year ago

This is great. Thank you! Ritani is the one I was looking for.

hadlock

a year ago

LMGTFY

gemsny.com friendlydiamonds.com lightboxjewelry.com

I found a wide variety of 2-3ct diamonds for $1200-1400 there (round, brillant cut, the "classic" type), which is what a 0.75-1.0ct used to cost

A_D_E_P_T

a year ago

Go direct to the source and you can get 2ct colorless diamonds at less than $600 shipped. e.g., https://detail.1688.com/offer/751071300271.html

There are literally hundreds of suppliers like that in China/India. Do not pay more than $1000 for a diamond of any size.

mhuffman

a year ago

This looks too good to be true. I am interested in this (because of all the terrible stuff related to diamond mines), but how do you protect yourself from scams on this site? $500-$1,000 is a lot to "test the waters" and see if they are real or even if they will arrive. What is the chance the just swap it out with Moissanite or who knows what?

hammock

a year ago

Link is not working, can you tell me what to search?

A_D_E_P_T

a year ago

Go to 1688.com and search "实验室钻石" -- "lab diamond"

You may need to have an account. But there's a ton of interesting and esoteric stuff on 1688.com, so, if you can figure it out, it's worth it.

Tepix

a year ago

Works for me.

folmar

a year ago

I get infinite captcha hell.

hinkley

a year ago

When can I have a diamond GPU?

hinkley

a year ago

Have we forgotten already that diamond replacing silicon was a big idea for dealing with heat dissipation in high density chips?

kylehotchkiss

a year ago

Approaching the end of De Beer's awful diamond scam is wonderful. Too many injustices perpetuated in Africa, too many lies to Americans about what matters in relationships. I'll never forget a college acquaintance a decade ago who spent $10,000 on a ring to woo his rich girlfriend. The engagement failed just a few weeks later. Good riddance. Long live synthetic diamonds.

BeetleB

a year ago

Mostly irrelevant when it comes to the value, sadly. Especially for engagements.

lo_zamoyski

a year ago

This seems to be an American phenomenon. Americans--women in demanding it, and men in acquiescing to it--are keeping this commercially confected "tradition" alive through a vanity bred and reinforced by corporate greed and consumerism. It's not that a diamond ring is bad per se. It's the artificial and frankly socially destructive stipulations around them. It's almost as if the marriage and future spouse were an afterthought, secondary to the actual ring! It is utterly deranged.

Similar things can be said about lavish weddings couples can't afford and go into debt for. It's a culture of spectacle and pretense. If you're not a rich aristocrat, don't pretend to be one. You're not "temporarily embarrassed millionaires".

xhevahir

a year ago

If you think lavish spending on weddings and engagements is an "American phenomenon," you're badly mistaken. Read up on weddings in India, Armenia, Cambodia, Afghanistan...

rowanG077

a year ago

There is a difference in going all out for an event vs spending all that money on essentially a useless rock.

hammock

a year ago

When diamonds held their value they were a useful vehicle for dowry (and showing off your dowry). Now that they don't...an Instagram account with 100K followers might be a suitable modern replacement

user

a year ago

[deleted]

BeetleB

a year ago

While I agree with your point, I also agree with GP's point. The difference between you and him is what you consider "lavish".

For many, spending $20K on a wedding is "lavish".

acchow

a year ago

Measuring across countries in a $ figure doesn't quite capture it. I'd use something like percentage of annual disposable income

BeetleB

a year ago

Sorry. I was referring to the US.

nathan_compton

a year ago

Eh, people are going to people. My wife and I are American and we did not do a diamond ring (we just exchanged simple hard wood rings).

In any case, what I really object to is your assertion that women "demand" it and men "acquiesce" to their demands. In most cases people just figure its the tradition and its fun and frankly, if I were a woman, I wouldn't say no to a costly sign of commitment if the dude wanted to do it. But most of the women I know have no deep commitment to the practice.

BeetleB

a year ago

> In any case, what I really object to is your assertion that women "demand" it and men "acquiesce" to their demands.

You may not be in the target audience of his comment.

Of course, he is stereotyping and generalizing, but my anecdote matches his comment. I still know plenty of people who go by the N months rule: https://www.theknot.com/content/spending-three-months-salary...

nathan_compton

a year ago

Even going by the nth month rule doesn't indicate that the woman _demands_ it. It is a cultural practice, no doubt one spurred on by the diamond business. But that doesn't mean every woman out there is screeching that their paramour buy them a diamond. I'd actually be willing to bet that a significant portion of women are ambivalent about the practice.

limaoscarjuliet

a year ago

But but but.... the mined ones have SOUL!

Diamonds are such a racket! Forever!

southernplaces7

a year ago

A part of this article misses a part of the point. Imagine saying: AI art is now purer, cleaner and cheaper than man-made. Sometimes the opposite is exactly the point. One wants a bit of raw history and imperfection.

kelnos

a year ago

And yet natural diamonds are still as expensive as ever. There's still enough of a market for "the real thing", and even if demand were to drop somewhat, the cartel can still artificially keep prices high.

kaon_

a year ago

We aren't far from Diamondillium!

nojvek

a year ago

> Defense Department were more sympathetic to high-risk proposals, ‘especially if they included, “The Russians are doing it”’.

It’s amazing how much science and technology has progressed due to adversarial competitive pressure.

With Putin running Russia to the ground, that pressure is much lower.

Would US have ever gone to space if there wasn’t a race, or got into nuclear if the Nazis weren’t doing it?

user

a year ago

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