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

867 pointsposted 4 days ago

483 Comments

Animats

4 days 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

4 days 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

4 days ago

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

_ph_

4 days 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

4 days ago

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

chasil

4 days 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

3 days 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

3 days 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

3 days 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

3 days ago

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

dijit

LorenPechtel

3 days 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.

xeonmc

3 days ago

kuschku

3 days 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

3 days 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

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

4 days ago

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

basementcat

4 days ago

So… great for certain colorblind individuals?

4 days ago

Diamond heat spreaders for ICs are available.[1] There are problems with coupling the heat to the diamond, and with the various materials having different rates of expansion. It hasn't really caught on.

Diamond layers within ICs to help get the heat out are being considered for future GPUs.[2] Again, it's not a magic bullet.

[1] https://www.diamond-materials.com/en/products/thermal-manage...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266638642...

adrian_b

3 days 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

3 days ago

> And a diamond kitchen knife.

Which shatters on contact with a small bone.

adrian_b

3 days ago

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.

chii

3 days ago

I heard the expansion of diamond is quite different to many materials, which could lead to splitting or shearing when heated up next to another material attached: https://byjus.com/physics/coefficient-of-linear-expansion/

but perhaps it's not that big of an issue, not sure.

trissylegs

3 days ago

agumonkey

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

trissylegs

3 days 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

3 days 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

3 days 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

2 days 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

4 days ago

The same way vinyl still sells.

trhway

4 days 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

4 days 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

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

alex_duf

3 days 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

3 days 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

3 days 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.

hammock

4 days ago

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

db48x

4 days 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_

4 days 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_

4 days 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

4 days 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_

4 days 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

4 days ago

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

IgorPartola

4 days 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_

3 days ago

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

4 days ago

Yes!

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

mmoskal

4 days ago

Literally The Diamond Age.

fennecbutt

4 days ago

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

dredmorbius

4 days 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

4 days 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

4 days 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

3 days 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

3 days ago

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

3 days 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

3 days 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.

pavel_lishin

3 days ago

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

dragontamer

3 days ago

That's what the steel is for.

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

TheRealPomax

3 days ago

4 days 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

4 days ago

> diamond files on Amazon for under $10

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

jdietrich

4 days 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

4 days 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

4 days 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

4 days 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

4 days 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

4 days 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.

ChrisMarshallNY

4 days ago

Both me mum and grandmum were British.

jamiek88

4 days ago

We don’t say grandmum btw!

But then you don’t say grandmom either and it’s just occurred to me that you were probably joking.

Sigh.

ChrisMarshallNY

4 days ago

It was a joke.

Here’s me mum: https://cmarshall.com/miscellaneous/SheilaMarshall.htm

jamiek88

4 days ago

Where was she from?

4 days 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

4 days 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.

myrmidon

3 days 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.

RandomLensman

4 days 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

4 days 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

4 days 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

4 days 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.

khazhoux

4 days ago

> They never had any value

The Crown Jewels disagree with you

https://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/history-and-stories/t...

thehappypm

4 days 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

4 days ago

They can be burned up in a house fire though.

modderation

4 days 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

4 days ago

>>They never had any value

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

darby_nine

4 days 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.

4 days 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.

avhon1

4 days ago

Diamond turning is used to produce optical surfaces with lathes. Here's a recent example on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPTFFPLOzCw

folmar

4 days 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

4 days 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.

Joker_vD

4 days 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

4 days 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

4 days 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

4 days 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

4 days 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

4 days 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

4 days 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.

HeyLaughingBoy

4 days ago

Jewelry store wanted to anchor the price?

asdff

4 days 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

4 days 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

4 days 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

4 days ago

A good example of how marketing can produce cultural values

takinola

4 days ago

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

foobarchu

2 days ago

Tulips!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

dredmorbius

4 days ago

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

Mechanical watches, perhaps.

chronogram

3 days ago

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

dredmorbius

3 days 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

4 days ago

>> They want to spend money on it.

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

Smaug123

4 days 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

4 days 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

4 days ago

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

slt2021

4 days 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

3 days ago

Haven't you heard about goldbugs?

kaashif

4 days 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

4 days 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

4 days 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

4 days 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

4 days 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

3 days 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

3 days 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

4 days 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

4 days ago

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

I refuse to give up hope!

acchow

4 days 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

4 days 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

Nursie

4 days 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

4 days ago

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

rodgerd

4 days ago

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

bluefirebrand

4 days ago

olalonde

3 days 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

3 days ago

> Artificial diamonds, you mean.

Synthetic diamonds, you mean.

There is noting artificial about them! They are diamonds.

Joker_vD

2 days 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!

GJim

a day ago

artificial != manufactured

Joker_vD

a day ago

Artificial: made by people, often as a copy of something natural.

To manufacture: to produce goods in large numbers, usually in a factory using machines.

Seems pretty synonymous to me. Heck, Collins dictionary [0] straight up states they're synonyms.

[0] https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/artific...

rowanG077

4 days ago

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

crazygringo

4 days 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

4 days ago

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

notfed

4 days ago

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

fidotron

4 days 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

4 days ago

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

DoughnutHole

3 days 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

4 days 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

4 days ago

Sylvester McMonkey McBean at work.

satvikpendem

4 days ago

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

derriz

4 days 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.

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

4 days 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

4 days ago

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

A_D_E_P_T

4 days ago

zettabomb

4 days 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

4 days ago

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

thaumasiotes

3 days ago

Why would those need to be red?

spondylosaurus

4 days 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

4 days 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

4 days ago

4 days ago

How big can you get?

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

namibj

4 days 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.

iamgopal

4 days ago

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

Modified3019

4 days 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

3 days 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.

shepherdjerred

3 days ago

There's a similar story for the inventor of the blue LED!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuji_Nakamura#Careers

AStrangeMorrow

4 days 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

4 days ago

Veblen good.

djtango

4 days 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

4 days ago

4 days ago

The maybe overly terse parent comment is referring to this concept:

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

andrewflnr

4 days 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.

aidenn0

4 days ago

No, Veblen bad.

istrice

4 days 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

4 days 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

4 days 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

4 days ago

Women expect it. It's that simple.

GJim

3 days ago

4 days ago

> Hmm that sounds a bit shallow and materialistic tbh.

3 days 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

3 days 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

4 days 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

4 days 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

3 days ago

3 days ago

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

unusualmonkey

3 days ago

The Bellagio in Vegas is pretty awesome.

agtech_andy

3 days 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.

gruntledfangler

4 days 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

4 days ago

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

cyberax

CatWChainsaw

4 days 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.

red-iron-pine

3 days ago

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

4 days 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

4 days 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

4 days 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

3 days 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

3 days 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

4 days 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

4 days ago

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

stoolio

4 days 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

hungie

3 days 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

3 days ago

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

as someone else said, "Veblen goods"

dirtdobber

3 days 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

2 days 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

2 days 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 day 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

17 hours ago

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

hungie

3 days 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

3 days 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

3 days 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

dirtdobber

3 days ago

https://shop.fairphone.com/fairphone-5

3 days ago

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

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".

highfrequency

3 days ago

Nice article, and these links to other articles on the DeBeers monopoly / advertising campaign are great as well: “You can’t look at Jane and say she’s not worth 2 months’ salary.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/past/issues/82feb/8202diamond1.h...

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27371208

4 days ago

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

65

3 days 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

3 days 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.

mentalgear

4 days ago

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

slm_HN

4 days ago

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

flanked-evergl

3 days ago

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

kazinator

2 days ago

> Diamonds have high thermal conductivity

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

ckemere

4 days ago

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

4 days 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

4 days 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

4 days 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

4 days ago

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

A_D_E_P_T

4 days ago

BeetleB

4 days ago

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

lo_zamoyski

4 days 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

4 days 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

4 days ago

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

hammock

4 days 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

BeetleB

4 days 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

4 days ago

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

BeetleB

4 days ago

Sorry. I was referring to the US.

flanked-evergl

3 days ago

It's not an American phenomenon.

nathan_compton

4 days 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

4 days 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

3 days 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.

kelnos

4 days 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_

3 days ago

We aren't far from Diamondillium!

nojvek

4 days 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?