The diamond industry got into this mess by insisting that the best diamonds were "flawless". This put them into competition with the semiconductor materials industry, which routinely manufactures crystals with lattice defect levels well below anything seen in natural diamonds. The best synthetic diamonds now have below 1 part per billion atoms in the wrong place.[1] Those are for radiation detectors, quantum electronics, and such. Nobody needs a jewel that flawless.
De Beers tried to squelch the first US startup to turn out gemstones in production by
intimidating the founder. The founder was a retired US Army brigadier general (2 silver stars earned in combat) and wasn't intimidated. That was back in 2011, and since then it's been all downhill for natural diamonds.
De Beers later tried building synthetic diamond detectors. There are simple detectors for detecting cubic zirconia and such, but separating synthetic and natural diamonds is tough. The current approach is to hit the diamond with a burst of UV, turn off the UV and then capture an image. The spectrum of the afterglow indicates impurities in the diamond. The latest De Beers testing machine [2] is looking for nitrogen atoms embedded in the diamond, which is seen more in natural diamonds than synthetics. The synthetics are better than the naturals. Presumably synthetic manufacturers could add some nitrogen if they wanted to bother.
This is the latest De Beers machine in their losing battle against synthetics. They've had DiamondScan, DiamondView, DiamondSure, SynthDetect, and now DiamondProof. Even the most elaborate devices have a false alarm rate of about 5%.[3]
I don't know anything about the industry, but I thought it would be a good test for the state of AI. I put Animats' comment and your question into DeepSeek R1 and it said (I think correctly) that the company was Gemesis and the retiree was Carter Clarke Jr: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemesis.
My wife is in the retail side of this market and I’ve had a lot of second hand familiarity with the transition to lab grown.
What I find most interesting is the weight put on the ethical side. I think it’s overstated. When the issue became big, the Blood Diamond movie, sales of lab grown did not markedly increase. It took another decade or so to become more prevalent. What changed over that time is the price, IIRC the price was comparable to natural at the time the movie came out. Ethics were not compelling enough for most people at that price. When prices got about 50% of natural, it became much more compelling. Now that it’s around 10%, it’s practically so compelling that buying natural isn’t even a real consideration for many people.
Anyways, I think people use the Blood Diamond talking point as a socially acceptable reason- it’s what they tell their parents and grandparents who might judge them- but in reality it’s almost completely a financial decision. If the tables were turned and natural diamonds became 1/10th the cost of lab grown, the market would completely flip back practically overnight.
It’s also worth noting that diamonds for jewelry have very little to no used market value or appreciation. Natural diamonds might be worth the premium if they could be a store of value like gold, but that isn’t the case. I think that is a clue to the absence of a fair market dynamic.
But one big reason lab-grown diamonds are so much less expensive now is economy of scale. Something had to start increasing the demand to enable that. Especially considering the large marketing investment against lab-grown gems by established players, trying to make them seem “tacky.” The ethical issues have been a very capable counter-message to that.
> Something had to start increasing the demand to enable that.
Yes — industry. From Wikipedia:
> Eighty percent of mined diamonds (equal to about 135,000,000 carats (27,000 kg) annually) are unsuitable for use as gemstones and are used industrially.[131] In addition to mined diamonds, synthetic diamonds found industrial applications almost immediately after their invention in the 1950s; in 2014, 4,500,000,000 carats (900,000 kg) of synthetic diamonds were produced, 90% of which were produced in China. Approximately 90% of diamond grinding grit is currently of synthetic origin.[132]
> ...
> Industrial use of diamonds has historically been associated with their hardness, which makes diamond the ideal material for cutting and grinding tools. As the hardest known naturally occurring material, diamond can be used to polish, cut, or wear away any material, including other diamonds. Common industrial applications of this property include diamond-tipped drill bits and saws, and the use of diamond powder as an abrasive.
The process to produce industrial diamonds (essentially, very hard dust) does not meaningfully help scale the process to produce first-quality synthetic diamond gems for jewelry.
As your quote points out, synthetic industrial diamonds have been available for many decades. But it is only recently that synthetic diamond gems have achieved popularity and price advantage for jewelry.
Diamond dust used to be the main industrial product. But as diamond synthesis has improved, cutting tools are now using larger diamonds.[1] This has been a big win for the well-drilling industry. Newer bits cut rock, and with diamond, they last long enough to get the job done. The classic Hughes tricone bit, the thing that looks like a set of bevel gears, is not a cutter. It's a rock crusher.[2] It cracks by compressive force.
(Patents were really strong back then. Howard Hughes, Sr. became the richest man in the world by buying the patent for the drill bit. He then manufactured bits and rented them out for a fraction of the profits from the oil well.)
> What I find most interesting is the weight put on the ethical side. I think it’s overstated. When the issue became big, the Blood Diamond movie, sales of lab grown did not markedly increase.
It was not a switch that was pushed the moment the movie went out. In the grand scheme of things, the movie was not even that popular. But there definitely was a realisation that diamond prices were completely artificially inflated by an oligopoly, and that there were many issues with how they were sourced.
Just because demand did not follow a step function when the file was released does not imply that ethics are not relevant.
"When a thing becomes affordable more people have access to it."
nods nods
So is our conclusion "People talk a big game but their morality clearly fails based on how the market has played out" or "People want things but the market has competing forces and sometimes takes a long time to find ways to provide people what they want?"
My rephrasing to your statement is "It took the mass market decades to figure out how to deliver consumers the solar/electric cars they wanted at a price they could afford."
Also, points in the general direction of the established energy providers I think these assholes had some incentive not to let the market get out from under them and make sure they were the ones who continued to profit from it.
> My rephrasing to your statement is "It took the mass market decades to figure out how to deliver consumers the solar/electric cars they wanted at a price they could afford."
Nicely stated. I like your style of debate / deliberation.
Um, I'm going to go ahead and point out this, probably not super relevant data point
"While trailing Gen Xers for the beginning of their adult lives, younger American households’ average wealth began to exceed that of Gen Xers at about age 30, reflecting historically high wealth levels following the COVID-19 pandemic." I have a feeling that average wealth adjustment falls very heavily on the home owners, which is only just above half of all the cohort. Had a similar thing happened to boomers in 89, almost 70% would have benefitted.
I think it's also worth pointing out: The share of wealth held by boomers in 89 (why 89? Because they didn't have data before that. It's why the graphs start in a weird spot and why it's not a great study unless you're trying to pull out a "gotcha" stat) represented almost 20% of the total wealth in the country. "Millenials/GenZ" has a hold on only HALF that percentage.
Doctors may hate your one weird statistic, but socio-demographists probably don't...
If that was true, you'd expect the younger professionals of today would have comparative amounts of wealth to the boomers when they were young professionals. It's absolutely not the case. Each generation is getting poorer and poorer as they hit the same benchmarks.
This tracks with broad trends of wealth inequality increasing as well.
So no, it's not just "they haven't accumulated yet", because it's not clear they will have the opportunity to do so.
It’s not generations, it’s age ;) Younger generations are still idealists. With age, you get betrayed in your ideals. You discover scientific studies weren’t so scientific as they get turned over one by one. It’s something like: Ice caps will still melt, and everything you did for the better, bad luck, they’ll have increased the warming. Same when we tried to eat better against cancer or raised or fists to defend gay people. I don’t want you to believe you’re generation won’t suffer the same fate ;)
Some of us old-heads got pushed much farther left as a result of this. I used to be a Democrat, blue and blue. These days I'm much more like, "The Dems will sell me out to make a buck, I gotta go out and actually be the change I want to see in the world."
Young folks who are experiencing disillusion -- don't give in to despair. You can make a meaningful difference in lives. Build communities, engage in mutual aid, whatever.
Why would finding out that some scientific studies weren't done correctly change any person's views when this is always the case and no one has ever said otherwise?
Years and years of “diamonds suck” make a mark. It’s an evergreen topic online for a long time, and the people looking at engagement rings in 2025 have been aware of the shittiness of the diamond business for years.
The mining, corrupt trade practices, etc are all well known and sometimes subject to enforcement action.
Natural diamonds are more expensive, and they therefore have a conspicuous consumption element to them. That could be valuable as a means to gain social cachet. Except you'd have to speak loudly about how they were natural.
And in doing so you are loudly proclaiming you don't care about human suffering it took to get the diamonds. That's probably fine in very wealthy circles, but in upper middle class/upper-upper middle class circles, it's likely quite gauche.
If the natural ones didn't have this faux pas attached to them by default, then they might carry more interest as a "I saved up for these" class indicator.
I think it reached a tipping point. It used to be that there wasn't much of a cost advantage, so people assumed you bought the real thing. Now that the lab-made diamonds are super cheap, many people will assume you bought one of those. When that's the case, people feel like they might as well buy the cheaper ones. It's like people buying natural mined diamonds are chumps. No one will know you spent more unless you talk about how it's natural (and that makes you annoying).
More people have caught on to the many terrible things about natural diamonds over time and now we are finally at the tipping point for lab grown to dismantle the unethical natural diamond trade. The idea of lab grown needed time to gestate with the public, which has been manipulated for decades about the “value” of natural diamonds. Even when lab grown became a thing, the natural diamond trade did its damnedest to manipulate the public on the quality of lab grown vs natural. Coincidentally, natural diamonds are overvalued due to decades of market manipulation by a monopoly.
My then-gf (now wife) and I watched a movie together about an African man whose village got raided, him put into slavery to search for diamonds and his son becoming a child soldier by the same people and their struggles to get free, and finally pawn off a pink diamond to one of the largest diamond companies in London. At the end of it, she finally came to realise that the diamond trade was really quite shitty. And we had a long discussion about the whole thing, as well as the growth of the synthetic diamonds industry and how they’re much better on the supposed 4C properties as well as on price.
Yet in the end she still wanted to get a ring from one of the big names because that’s what she grew up with and what she had always dreamt of since young.
People love to claim the moral high ground, believing themselves so much better. So much more noble. So much smarter.
But at the end of the day, they always do the exact same thing - buy whatever is cheaper. Doesn't matter if it's produced with slave labor, or child labor, or the product of corporate government coups.
They put all that out of their mind, and just buy the product. They rationalize it or conveniently forget it or just pretend it doesn't apply to them. Whatever will get them past it.
A similar topic: Does anyone think things like solar and wind are being used out of the goodness of anyone's heart? Concern for the next generations? A desire to give clean air to our youth? Sympathy for sufferers of all of the horrible diseases and respiratory problems? Concern about lands lost to rising seas?
No. It's because they got cheaper than fossil fuels. Anything else is fantasy.
What you're seeing in the drop of value of diamonds also reflects the general shift in tastes of different generations with income. I'm a person that likes to go to flea markets and antique stores on the rare occasion and the value of the same items on the market has drastically shifted in the last 10 years as boomers are no longer in the collectible age bracket. Younger people don't really care about Tiffany jewelry
Depends a lot on the demographic. It's still popular with young people who express status and success through culturally relevant jewelry styles (often influenced by hip-hop and sports culture).
It's more status-forward than authenticity-forward consumption, and many jewelers can assure you that it's very much still in vogue in some areas.
> When the issue became big, the Blood Diamond movie, sales of lab grown did not markedly increase
Other people would still assume you might have bought a blood diamond, so instead of buying a lab diamond, I would expect these people to have bought another gem if they bought a gemstone at all.
I actually predict in a few years it will become more fashionable to wear other jewels over diamonds given the rate the prices are crashing at. When diamonds are competitive with all the other gemstones, people start looking at those the same way too
You're a few years too late, as this trend has been been happening for a decade at this point. You can find many articles online about how millenialls and now gen-z are ditching diamonds.
Lab rubies, sapphires, emeralds and basically anything you can think of with a known chemical makeup is being produced en masse by factories all over India and China.
As someone who doesn’t care about the authenticity of the gems provenance and only about having consistent physical properties for rock tumbling and gem faceting, it’s been very nice for the budget
Diamonds are quite possibly the only stone that isn't yet essentially 100% artificial. Rubies, the next hardest stone, is trivial to make artificially:
What about the size of the market as a whole? Was there a drawdown during the period in question?
Is it possible that people decreased purchases of diamonds altogether in response to ethical qualms (in favor of other jewels or precious items), and then were later motivated by price to go with lab-grown diamonds?
i think you overlooked a general revulsion towards monopoly and therefore DeBeers, their laughable (though long effective) marketing, though agree it's mainly economic.
When prices are equal, I'd wager the decision is: "if prices are equal why wouldn't I buy the "real" thing? I'll just try and justify to myself that it's sourced correctly".
When the price of the grown diamonds falls, the decision might be: "Ok, so grown diamonds are cheaper AND more ethical? Ok, I'm definitely buying grown".
If the ethics factor didn't exist, "real" diamonds would still retain the kudos and still be valued highly over "nice but fake" diamonds.
It's the ethics factor that pushes the decision over the line.
As an n=1 economic animal, that's what my behaviour would have been anyway.
Why would someone with ethical concerns still buy a diamond and not just choose another gemstone if somehow synthetic was more expensive?
And it's all marketing anyway: slap a "condensed from pure carbon" campaign out there and suddenly natural diamonds are fake rich and not as pure or precise or something.
When I was a kid in the 80s my mother worked at a jewelry store and CZ diamonds were already considered cheap fakes at the time. The price was not comparable to the real deal because nobody was buying them at diamond prices.
They were simply dismissed as more trash belonging in the gold-plated case. It's hard to appreciate how much less informed people were back then - we're talking pre-internet. The adults around me couldn't explain scientifically what the actual difference was between a CZ and natural diamond. Just one was a fake, held little value, and was a sure way to lose your fiance.
How do CZ gemstones compare to diamond gemstones visually/in person? It looks like CZ has a lower refraction index but higher color dispersion vs. diamond, so that seems like it would still result in an attractive gemstone. The main disadvantages seem to be slightly lower refractive index (so less internal reflection and brilliance?), lower hardness (disadvantage for the gem getting scratches - possible advantage for not scratching your sapphire glass watch or smartphone camera lens?!) and higher weight.
edit: seems that moissanite (silicon carbide, perhaps unsurprisingly) is another diamond-like (though hexagonal crystals vs. cubic for diamond or CZ) gemstone that is actually harder than sapphire and less prone to fracture than diamond.
To everyone except those with a trained eye, they're virtually indistinguishable; however, because CZ isn't as hard, they tend to scratch and dull over time and thus lose their luster.
If we're talking about 'quality', CZ just doesn't compare for longevity. That said, unless you're talking about a daily-wearing-for-many-years piece of jewelry (i.e., an engagement ring), CZ is just fine for most folks, especially considering the cost difference.
My company buys a lot of diamonds - for industrial use, not jewelry related :) The falling price of synthetic diamonds has been a huge boon. Several processes I do right now would be impractical without the use of "low-cost" diamonds - air quotes because they are still not exactly cheap. So it is obviously in my interest for consumers to switch to lab-grown diamonds and thus drive volume up and prices down.
At the same time, I do understand the sentiment around wanting a mined diamond. The whole idea behind a diamond engagement ring is a marketing exercise backed up by a cartel, so if you're gonna participate in the ritual you might as well do it right. There are silly backstories buried in every part of human society today, from "some king did it and everyone copied him" to "this piece of land got special status a thousand years ago which accidentally let it become its own country" to "my grandmother was too poor to do XYZ the right way so we still do it her way." That's just part and parcel of being human.
My wife wanted a sapphire and we met during Ph D research. It's straight up not possible to pay more then like, a dollar for a synthetic sapphire so that's what's in her ring.
> Calling them "lab-grown" is part of the propaganda against them.
Indeed: Even the article perpetuates this:
"Whereas a two-carat real diamond engagement ring might cost $35,000, Oymakas says a two-carat lab-grown diamond with the same clarity and colour could only be about $3,500."
Synthetic diamonds definitely need a marketing glow up. Current names are man-made, lab grown, and synthetic diamonds. Instead we could lean into how cool the HPHT and CVD processes are and have - giga forged diamonds (gigapascal pressure of HPHT), plasma coalesced diamonds (CVD process), or even human forged diamonds (highlighting technological triumph required to achieve these).
Again, I'm all for lab grown diamonds for both consumer and industrial use.
I think "lab-grown" is a pretty neutral term, and it is also scientifically accurate in the case of CVD and other diamonds where the process really is "growing" the diamonds. There are certainly other terms for them that sound more derogatory such as "synthetic" or "artificial" diamond.
I thought the process used to grow them in a lab was somewhat different than the process used in nature. Labs use Chemical Vapor Deposition while nature uses high pressure and high temperature. The lab grows the diamond crystal while nature squeezes a lump of carbon into one.
Also part and parcel of being a human being is logic and empathy. Anyone who possesses one of these traits, never mind both of them, should find it easy to choose the product that isn't literally the product of human suffering an exploitation.
Blood diamonds are terrible, but the overwhelming majority of diamonds produced these days are not blood diamonds relying on slave labor, they're mass-mined products relying on colossal-scale industrial machinery. That's why Russia is #1 and Canada is #3 in worldwide diamond production today: even the world's largest diamond mines have 1-3k employees vs. massive production.
That's not to paper over the issues with the industry (environmental, poor working conditions, poor pay etc) - but those are more generally applied to any mined product. I'd be willing to bet that your average set of modern electronics cause far more suffering than your average diamond: see conflict resources such as tantalum, tin, tungsten, gold.
Is your company in abrasives or machining? I'm curious because I assume that lab-grown is actually preferred over mined because the crystalline structure may be more homogenous.
I can't go into too much detail, but there are actually a few things: our main use is machining and one of our other uses is for the extreme thermal conductivity. Diamond is an incredible material period.
I am not an expert so take this with a grain of salt, but for what I do I have seen no difference between flawless natural diamond and flawless lab grown diamond, the difference is that the flawless natural diamonds are almost always far more expensive.
If I was shopping for a near flawless diamond engagement ring and someone was offering me the lab-made version.
I think I’d be quite swayed towards the lab ones knowing that there were engineers who used them for industrial use and found them exactly the same.
Also being much cheaper, I’d likely spend money towards getting a better grade lab-grown diamond than I could afford with a mined diamond.
If I was the lab-grown industry I’d also be actively attempting to shift the narrative around the term real, and say ones mined one is lab made, both are real. But that’s its own fight I’m sure.
As it should, diamonds were made artificially scarce and controlled by monopoly:
“The major investors in the diamond mines realized that they had no alternative but to merge their interests into a single entity that would be powerful enough to control production and perpetuate the illusion of scarcity of diamonds. The instrument they created, in 1888, was called De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd., incorporated in South Africa…”
From the classic 80s article “Have you ever tried to sell a diamond” - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-yo...
> But some experts stress there is still a difference.
> Graham Pearson, professor with the University of Alberta's department of earth and atmospheric sciences, says that the natural formation of diamonds deep underground results in a "complexity" you can't get with the lab-grown variety.
For decades, the marketing message was that less defects = better = more expensive. Apparently, when lab-grown diamonds came along, that had to be inverted: now, lab-grown = less defects = "less character"
The whole thing is such an obvious marketing exercise with very little to back it up (as evidenced by the extremely low resale value of diamonds)
If they did, it would be possible to detect the difference with perfect accuracy. Instead, the detectors made by those interested in pushing the concept of "real, natural" diamonds have a false positive rate of 5% looking for the inclusion of things labs could easily add if they cared to
You can make some plausible arguments against glass. It scratches more easily and doesn't shimmer as much. But synthetic sapphire is the same league and costs a lot less.
The modern-day aesthetic of diamonds is just that they are expensive. They're not distinguished by utility, quality, or appearance from cheaper products. The ultimate status symbol, but also obviously a bit of an issue...
I need a geologist to explain this one. Moissanite has a Mohs hardness of 9.5. I guess it is easier to scratch than a diamond, but the scratability should be indistinguishable between the two for all practical purposes.
Not a geologist but Mohs hardness is an ordinal scale so the distance between 10 and 9 isn't well-defined. The numbers are defined as being specific minerals.
Diamond (10) is 4x as hard as corundum (9) which is 2x as hard as topaz (8).
OK, but there's a real difference. My wedding band has small diamonds in it, and occasionally I'll be sitting inside where the sun falls on my hand and casts a million pretty blue and white and red sparkles on the walls and ceiling of the room I'm in.
Diamonds (and other gems) really are beautifula to look at in ways that glass just isn't. And manmade ones, sparklier still out of the forge of our own cleverness, are much nicer in my opinion.
Two points just FYI in thinking about the sudden shift to synthetic diamonds from natural stones:
• Scale: I'm aware of one company that operates over 700 CVD systems that each make 25 stones/run - there are at least 3 others of similar volume;
• Cost: the variable cost of making a 1ct finished brilliant (D-E,F-VVSI) is <$30US. Obviously, that cost is for ex-US production. See, for example, the recent demise of de Beers' Lightbox growth center in Oregon.
Naturals simply can't compete. They are forming a completely separate market involving a much smaller, extremely wealthy clientele.
The business case for synthetics is deteriorating as production costs bottom out and margins decline in an ongoing race to the bottom.
> I'd say it's like AI music or art - something made by a machine, for some reason, just doesn't have any "soul" to it.
Diamonds are a product of natural geological processes. (Or, are grown in a lab, by recreating similar conditions.)
Music and art are products of human talent, skill, and labor - that ML companies have used (without a license, permission, or even credit) to build datasets that are now being used to make money, at the expense of these artists.
Indeed. The oldest things on earth are the hydrogen atoms. Literally all of them were formed in the first 3 minutes after the big bang. So all of them have the same age, billions of years old, down to a few seconds difference at most.
> The oldest things on earth are the hydrogen atoms. Literally all of them were formed in the first 3 minutes after the big bang.
Stable hydrogen wasn't able to form until several hundreds of thousands of years after the Big Bang when the universe cooled sufficiently for electrons to bind to protons.
Even assuming you're counting lone protons as hydrogen atoms, it's still absolutely false. I don't know if that's true for the majority of protons in the universe, but there are mechanisms by which new protons are made all the time. Neutrons can turn into protons through beta decay, and high energy particle interactions like those involving cosmic rays can produce brand new protons. These processes can and do happen terrestrially.
> the amount of non-big-bang hydrogen is not even a trillionth of a trillionth of the total.
I didn't say it was a huge fraction of the total. You said "literally all of them" were from the Big Bang, which is just wrong. Plenty of other processes produce protons/hydrogen
The difference is instantly apparent under UV - most lab grown diamonds will not fluoresce unless they have a bad growth process that leaves flux and other impurities in the crystal.
Natural diamonds won't always fluoresce but the ones that do will do so in a variety of colors, and sometimes change depending on what wavelength is irradiating them.
Lab-grown diamonds can be tailored to exhibit the same impurities internal stresses, etc. that cause a minority of natural diamonds to fluoresce. This has not been a goal to date for synthetics because the highest price point is for diamonds that are most pure with least internal strain. If the economics of fluorescent diamonds suddenly become more attractive, I guarantee fluorescent synthetics will be on the market immediately thereafter, and will be indistinguishable from naturals without $100K worth of characterization tools.
The difference is not instantly apparent under UV.
Only about 30% of natural diamonds have fluorescence --- which is *caused* by impurities and imperfections in the material.
Manmade diamonds tend to lack this because they have fewer impurities and imperfections. Equating increased perfection and purity with inferiority is highly debatable and smacks of marketing BS.
I wanna only drink natural creek water with its natural biology and other "flaws" because, well, its natural and has a truly unique mix of critters and metals in it. Why would I want the same purified drinking water everyone else has. Natural creek water, unique and special, if unique and special were spelled g.i.a.r.d.i.a.
The difference is that there's a detectable difference between AI and human made art, at least today. The only detectable difference between a correctly-made lab diamond and one clawed out of the ground by children is that the latter will have flaws. I'm sure you could engineer similar flaws into the lab version if became fashionable.
> We exchange diamond rings as part of the engagement process because the
diamond company De Beers decided in 1938 that it would like us to. Prior to a
stunningly successful marketing campaign, Americans occasionally
exchanged engagement rings, but it wasn’t pervasive. Not only is the demand
for diamonds a marketing invention, but diamonds aren’t actually that rare.
Only by carefully restricting the supply has De Beers kept the price of a
diamond high.
Imho, that "soul" you describe is an artifact of human sentimentality and a very successful marketing campaign by a bunch of Afrikaner colonialists.
I agree. Kind of like factory vases vs hand thrown or glass blown vases. They’re practically the same but some people will pay lots more for certain hand made ones.
I’m not sure diamonds are popular because of what they are but what they represent.
Every gem out there is “the crystalline form” of something. Diamonds are (were?) the expensive crystalline form. And plenty of people equate “expensive” with love, or care, or respect. Even if the same people would never be able to tell the difference between diamond and cubic zirconium, knowing it’s the cheap one makes it less valuable in other ways. This depends on the person, of course.
If it’s not diamonds it will have to be something else that shows “I put my money where my mouth is”. A simple metal wedding band is the same wherever it’s made but a famous jeweler will charge an arm and a leg more than your local shop for the same amount of precious metal, same effort, and same result. And yet Tiffany’s isn’t going out of business for the same reason. It’s what it represents.
I am curious to see if tastes or fashion shift towards other rarer or more expensive gems not yet manufactured cheaply en masse.
The entire point of using diamonds in wedding rings is for the male to signal how committed he is to the marriage by expending a large amount of money on both the ring and the wedding itself. It then acts as a way for the wife to signal her status to other women by showing off how much her husband was willing and able to spend on the ring.
It is a hold-out from the tradition that the male is a provider and the female is a caregiver. If you reject traditional gender roles, you should also reject expensive diamond rings regardless whether they are mined or grown. Otherwise, embrace the shiny, but make no mistake: the cost is entirely the point.
>The entire point of using diamonds in wedding rings is for the male to signal how committed he is to the marriage by expending a large amount of money on both the ring and the wedding itself. It then acts as a way for the wife to signal her status to other women by showing off how much her husband was willing and able to spend on the ring.
That's some nice historical background (which could be post-hoc contextualization that fits certain agenda), but traditions have this weird habit of outliving their actual purpose and still having the form without the role.
So no, you don't have to commit to traditional gender roles to have diamond rings and don't have to make them expensive as otherwise it's not doing the thing it's supposed to do. The could just not do the thing at all and you can still have them.
The more rational decision, IMO, assuming you still want to signal wealth, is to buy neither, collude with your supposed life partner, buy a gigantic, flawless moissanite that you both agree to say is a natural diamond that cost 50k. Then secretly put the money you didn't spend on sparkling carbon into some appreciating asset. Rivals are still sick with envy, you have a fun joint venture bamboozle to laugh about, and the mortgage gets paid off a few years early.
"would tend to reconsider any long term relationship with such a person"
Are you arguing that anyone who would accept and display a precious gem is ineligible for marriage? More so if it is larger, but not if more expensive? The post you are replying to presents a plausible social economy of the tradition. What is your point?
For anyone appreciating expensive things, giving diamonds represent the willingness to fulfill that desire. It’s easy to conflate that with love, at least for a while, even when you aren’t a materialistic person.
Jewelry is the pinnacle of “just monetary value”. Unlike almost any other possession, a car, a house, clothes, etc. jewelry serves no practical purpose, only shows the willingness or ability to spend for it. The more you spend, the more valuable the gesture, the more you cared to please the recipient.
Materialistic people have the same feelings you have. Those just happened to be triggered by different values than yours.
The other purpose of jewerly is looking nice. That's difficult to comprehend, but it's the actual important thing for people who's most expensive piece of everyday wear isn't their phone.
As people quit believing in God, they stop thinking in terms of "God brought us together/we were made for each other" (though they stop thinking that a generation or two later than they stop believing in God).
If you think that we made this relationship, then maybe a lab-grown (human made) diamond fits? (Though it may take an advertising campaign before people see it that way.)
Disclaimer: I'm not a sociologist. This is just my speculation about how the dynamic could change.
The entire point of a diamond is that it’s expensive. People buy them for status. Otherwise there are lots of gems that are much more prettier, but they are not as expensive. It’s like saying people will stop buying branded clothes because unbranded clothes have the same or even a higher quality for a fraction of the price. Kinda misses the point.
You miss the point. The only reason to buy a diamond is that it is expensive. It doesn’t matter if you could buy the same thing cheaper. It doesn’t matter that there are better gems that are cheaper. You buy the diamond to show that you can afford it. You buy someone a diamond to prove how much they are worth to you.
Yes, you can buy a man-made diamond the same you can buy counterfeit branded clothes. That only shows that you’re tasteless and that you can’t afford the real thing.
If you like, I will sell you a personally autographed photo of me. All for $1m cash. That's much more expensive than a diamond. Anyone who buys this for their new wife will prove that he REALLY loves her. $1m>>$35000.
If it is strictly about the money, a larger man made diamond can easily cost just as much as a smaller natural one --- while instantly conveying to the untrained eye the appearance of being more expensive.
I think this is true, manmade diamonds are valuable in a way that counterfeit currency is not. But "most people" may not be as important as people who know the story of, and the person wearing, the gem, and provenance is always a meaningful point of reference for expensive luxury items.
My screenshots of NFTs are pixel accurate, but not exactly as valuable as the real thing.
Apparently there's a big issue in Antwerp now that they're not allowed to import diamonds from Russia. Maybe they should stop fighting the synthetic diamonds and embrace them instead, as something guaranteed free of human suffering and war profiteering. But the whole industry hinges on manufactured demand, so they'd rather see the trade move to other countries I guess.
Extraction of natural diamonds can fund development of some of the poorest communities in the world. [0]
As the jewelry industry repositions around the uniqueness of natural diamonds I would expect to see more promotion of this kind of socially responsible production.
Like most good things happening in the world now days this is also because of China they were not under the same de beers marketing magic rest of the world was once the Chinese abandoned mined diamonds prices have catered.
Btw Blood diamonds was also a successful marketing ploy of De beers to keep out the competition. It was weird to me how western countries only cared about the exploitation of diamonds.
Ive been seeing this same type of article for decades now. I bought a 2 karrat flawless lab grown diamond in 2005 for around $2k, and according to this article that size sells for $3,500. Prices have increased it seems. I assumed they would drop as more were made.
You shouldn't have gotten a 2 carat diamond that cheap at that time. Either you got a really great deal for some idiosyncratic reason or your recollection is off.
Inflation is probably why the number is higher now.
A year ago I picked up a 1ct hearts and arrows (D/E. VVS1/2, IGI certificate) from AliExpress for $360. I can see the hearts and arrows and it tests as diamond. A few months later an article came out about how lab diamonds stack up against mined, and the author had also bought one with similar characteristics from AliExpress for even less.
I just checked the same store and they're (not H&A but same other stats) running around $125 plus a $14 tariff.
According to the inflation calculator at bls.gov, $2000 in June 2005 has the same buying power as $3,317 in June 2025. So in real terms the price is about the same.
Diamonds are simply NFTs of the real life: worthless coupons that only prove that you've wasted a few tens of thousand dollars. They prove your social status. The battle for purity or the origin is a distraction. For the same reason, diamonds as a gift make sense only if they are expensive.
Agree, though it should be noted that diamonds are far from the only things like this - other questionably useful social status symbols include "luxury" fashion (low quality made in low wage countries...), or even just having the latest iPhone
I have a visceral hatred for the diamond industry, and its based on nothing except my shock at how expensive a shiny rock is and the effectiveness of the advertising campaign around them. I remember going to buy my wife an engagement ring and just being incredulous at the price. I completely understand supply and demand but a lot of the supply limitation is artificial. Its one of the few things I am emotional about, I simply loath the diamond industry and the entire sham that you have to spend x number of months salary on a rock to prove to the world that you love someone. They built such an incredible narrative where people would judge each other based on the size of a rock or that it had to be of X clarity or you had to spend so much to prove whatever.
To this day I change the channel when I hear a commercial for a diamond store on the radio and its been 20+ years. I am so excited about lab grown diamonds.
Personally felt this too, though I think I hate dishonest marketers and adversarial business-customer relations more broadly.
For some reason my ideal vision of capitalism is where a company simply makes a product that solves customers' problem and makes them happy, receiving a fair amount of money in return for their efforts. No corporate propaganda campaigns or anti-consumer shenanigans needed, just a solid [thing] for people who need [thing].
Interested to hear potential problems with this approach in the replies.
Diamonds need to become even cheaper. I want phone screens and glasses made out of single sheets of diamond. I want heatsinks and kitchen knives made out of the stuff.
If you pulled a diamond from the diamond rains on Neptune and brought it to Earth, you’re telling me it should be worth the same as a shitty lab grown?
I'm still conflicted about this. I understand the cost and blood diamond debate and largely agree. But there is something about diamonds that makes them divine: carbon atoms crystallizing and bonding over millions to billions of years to form structures, rated on a scale of color, clarity, cut, and weight. It's like gold, primarily forged in cosmic events like supernova explosions. Naaaaah let's just make it in a lab it looks the same.
People are being priced out of art and beauty and it's a shame economics and corruption make real diamonds dirty.
> But there is something about diamonds that makes them divine: carbon atoms crystallizing and bonding over millions to billions of years to form structures
It does not take millions of years to form a diamond. It takes hours. The million years are atoms sitting around doing nothing before that, and then diamonds sitting around doing nothing while some of them are eventually pushed to the surface.
You can say the same thing about any mineral. There is nothing special about carbon or the diamond structure. If anything, zircons are much more significant, being the oldest minerals we can find.
> rated on a scale of color, clarity, cut, and weight.
This is nothing special. The colour of lab-grown stones can be varied almost at will, and the rest is still an issue with synthetic stones.
> Naaaaah let's just make it in a lab it looks the same.
That’s the thing, though: it does (yes, some synthetic stones have specific defects related to how they were made and they tent to be too perfect if anything, but they still have the exact same property). It’s like complaining that the meat you are eating comes from a farm instead of being hunted.
> People are being priced out of art and beauty and it's a shame economics and corruption make real diamonds dirty.
Quite the contrary. Gemstones become more accessible to more people. The diamond industry made its bed, being completely corrupted from extraction to distribution. When stones are cheap we can have discussion about their beauty instead of their prices.
I'm all in for finding beauty in our daily lives, but I'm not sure diamonds are more special than other things we take for granted. Oil and helium have also taken millions of years to form, and yet no one spends a second before buying a plastic duck or inflating a balloon. And if the point is that diamonds are shiny and pretty (which is a fair reason for liking them) there are other types of stones around just as good.
It’s not just that, the economics of diamonds is completely fabricated. Idk about these days, but debeers used to buy up the vast majority of mined diamond, not to sell but to hoard or destroy them to maintain scarcity.
I’m not even sure that all of these recent stories about lab created diamonds to come out aren’t actually a PR pitch to advertise “natural” diamonds, an effort to emphasise the difference in the public psyche.
Anything public facing that positions diamonds as expensive, desirable, or valuable can usually be traced back to the cartel. It’s super common in movies and other media.
I'm not excusing nor rationalizing prices and the economics, obviously they hoard and manupulate the rates. Can't argue with how dark that crap must be. All I'm saying is real diamonds are 'better' and everyone knows it. Humans are emotional and that's a good thing. The manipulation of it is the bad thing. Trying to deny yourself of your emotions like a monk and yet still wishing for the iconic symbolic significance having 3month salary storybook ring, what are we doing here. Pay more for the real thing because life is real.
100percent on board. A marriage is only as meaningful as the vows and the integrity of the people that made them. The guests are there to witness and to celebrate. Trying to make it about anything else only cheapens it.
If you can, put enough gold on her to get her out of a jam and have some runway. Other than that it’s just the promises you keep.
No, that’s what the subcutaneous tracking chip is for. lol.
But seriously, for us it matters, since she is much younger than I am. We make an effort to signal that we are a committed couple so that people don’t make crass assumptions.
Still, my ring is tungsten carbide and hers is a family wedding band handed down in my family for generations. Our engagement ring was also a family heirloom. In that way the rings have meaning.
She likes to wear her ring because she feels like it is a symbol of belonging, and I wear mine to honor our relationship.
To us, the rings are symbolic of our vows, a gentle reminder that our lives are in service of one another.
> real diamonds are 'better' and everyone knows it.
Personally disagree. That whole "3 months' salary that will last forever" thing? A lab diamond will last just as forever as a mined one. I'd personally rather have one from a lab than one dug out of the earth by some African dude who spends his days sweating underground.
Yeah, idk. I’m not against the idea of a 3 month value reserve as a financial security token to de-risk a marriage proposal, but it should be something that can be liquidated for a similar value. Just setting 3 months of your work on fire is a really stupid and irresponsible move for most people, and their kids are ultimately the ones that suffer.
Not only that, imagine this scenario: something terrible happens. Your wife has to sell her jewelry to take care of herself and your child. Would you rather have bought her a $20000 ring that can maybe be sold for $3000? Or a ring with actual intrinsic value that might actually be worth more than what you paid, but at least fetch 80%.
When I think of how that would feel for her to know that I paid a foolish amount for something of inflated symbolic bling rather than a something of value, I get embarrassed just imagining it. To me that is an abdication of duty.
That’s the difference between diamonds and actual precious stones, or at lower price points a nice heavy gold ring with an inexpensive, lab grown gem.
For beauty, silicon carbide beats diamond hands down. If you want value and natural origins, a quality ruby or emerald is spectacular and actually rare and rationally market-priced. Gold is nice.
Until you get into very large and actually rare stones, diamonds are a scam, pure and simple. The value of a near flawless 1 carat stone at the mine is about two hundred dollars. Cutting costs about half that. To buy it, that stone might fetch $7000. To sell it, you might get $1000 if you’re lucky. That is not a store of value. It’s a symbol of gullibility or a boast that I have so much money that I can burn it without being irresponsible. The kind of boast that if you can’t back it up IRl makes you impossible to take seriously.
If you just really, really like diamonds, knock yourself out. But don’t delude yourself into believing they are valuable. Better yet, go get one yourself, smuggled out of a mine or otherwise at the source. Get it cut and polished, or better yet do it yourself. That I totally respect and has character, integrity, and value baked in.
As for status or something like that, I suppose there is a case to be made that it symbolizes a burnt offering. So that makes sense, but only against a backdrop of demonstrative excess. If you have a diamond ring and a loan of any kind that is anything other than strategic tax planning, that means your kids are worse off for your vanity. If you’ve got more money than god and you want to show that you can waste cash and it doesn’t matter, wear that ring studded with sub-museum grade diamonds a all day long, you’re making your point. It’s vulgar, but you’re making your point. I can see it. It’s like the track suit.
Otherwise, you may as well lace up your clown shoes.
But, that’s just my opinion. In all reality it’s a useful social signal, like certain religious expression.
If the value is in perfection. Why would I not pick one that is bigger, has less flaws and less impurities. It is like would I prefer natural rain water or artificially purified water without microplastics and pfas and so on... My pick should be clear.
The article emphasizes financial pressures on new couples due to rising living costs making lab-grown diamonds more appealing, and that's sad in my mind, it's sad that the cost of living prices people out from nice things, it's sad that people here are coping saying lab made are the same, which to me is like saying a veggie patty is the same as a beef and I'm a bad person for eating meat, that a knockoff purse is the same as the brand name because they are both leather; dematerialize and dissasociate from the world more why dont you, oh are you above consumerism and so romantic you could wear a string as a wedding band because its more about meaning. What's the point of any fashion then. Of any art if any paint will do. Gold is just metal too then.
there are many naturally occuring objects that have a similarly dramatic timeline
the point is that westerners are completely drunk on the marketing from de beers and its cost lives, not to mention the disgusting machiavellian exploitation of what was once an innocent courtship gesture into an aggressive commercial enterprise, chiefly profiteering the hopelessly young and naive.
The diamond industry got into this mess by insisting that the best diamonds were "flawless". This put them into competition with the semiconductor materials industry, which routinely manufactures crystals with lattice defect levels well below anything seen in natural diamonds. The best synthetic diamonds now have below 1 part per billion atoms in the wrong place.[1] Those are for radiation detectors, quantum electronics, and such. Nobody needs a jewel that flawless.
De Beers tried to squelch the first US startup to turn out gemstones in production by intimidating the founder. The founder was a retired US Army brigadier general (2 silver stars earned in combat) and wasn't intimidated. That was back in 2011, and since then it's been all downhill for natural diamonds.
De Beers later tried building synthetic diamond detectors. There are simple detectors for detecting cubic zirconia and such, but separating synthetic and natural diamonds is tough. The current approach is to hit the diamond with a burst of UV, turn off the UV and then capture an image. The spectrum of the afterglow indicates impurities in the diamond. The latest De Beers testing machine [2] is looking for nitrogen atoms embedded in the diamond, which is seen more in natural diamonds than synthetics. The synthetics are better than the naturals. Presumably synthetic manufacturers could add some nitrogen if they wanted to bother. This is the latest De Beers machine in their losing battle against synthetics. They've had DiamondScan, DiamondView, DiamondSure, SynthDetect, and now DiamondProof. Even the most elaborate devices have a false alarm rate of about 5%.[3]
[1] https://e6-prd-cdn-01.azureedge.net/mediacontainer/medialibr...
[2] https://verification.debeersgroup.com/instrument/diamondproo...
[3] https://www.naturaldiamonds.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/A...
who was the retired US Army brigadier general?
I don't know anything about the industry, but I thought it would be a good test for the state of AI. I put Animats' comment and your question into DeepSeek R1 and it said (I think correctly) that the company was Gemesis and the retiree was Carter Clarke Jr: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemesis.
I just found my new AI startup idea.
My wife is in the retail side of this market and I’ve had a lot of second hand familiarity with the transition to lab grown.
What I find most interesting is the weight put on the ethical side. I think it’s overstated. When the issue became big, the Blood Diamond movie, sales of lab grown did not markedly increase. It took another decade or so to become more prevalent. What changed over that time is the price, IIRC the price was comparable to natural at the time the movie came out. Ethics were not compelling enough for most people at that price. When prices got about 50% of natural, it became much more compelling. Now that it’s around 10%, it’s practically so compelling that buying natural isn’t even a real consideration for many people.
Anyways, I think people use the Blood Diamond talking point as a socially acceptable reason- it’s what they tell their parents and grandparents who might judge them- but in reality it’s almost completely a financial decision. If the tables were turned and natural diamonds became 1/10th the cost of lab grown, the market would completely flip back practically overnight.
It’s also worth noting that diamonds for jewelry have very little to no used market value or appreciation. Natural diamonds might be worth the premium if they could be a store of value like gold, but that isn’t the case. I think that is a clue to the absence of a fair market dynamic.
So if I wanted to get a used diamond on the cheap, where would I go? Estate sale? Pawn shop?
Perhaps to have a jeweller set it in a different setting?
Yes to all your questions. Be wary though, especially at pawn shops. Those places are not bastions of integrity.
You can just order brand new ones from China for even cheaper I imagine. https://www.npr.org/2019/03/14/703472647/saying-i-do-to-lab-...
But one big reason lab-grown diamonds are so much less expensive now is economy of scale. Something had to start increasing the demand to enable that. Especially considering the large marketing investment against lab-grown gems by established players, trying to make them seem “tacky.” The ethical issues have been a very capable counter-message to that.
> Something had to start increasing the demand to enable that.
Yes — industry. From Wikipedia:
> Eighty percent of mined diamonds (equal to about 135,000,000 carats (27,000 kg) annually) are unsuitable for use as gemstones and are used industrially.[131] In addition to mined diamonds, synthetic diamonds found industrial applications almost immediately after their invention in the 1950s; in 2014, 4,500,000,000 carats (900,000 kg) of synthetic diamonds were produced, 90% of which were produced in China. Approximately 90% of diamond grinding grit is currently of synthetic origin.[132]
> ...
> Industrial use of diamonds has historically been associated with their hardness, which makes diamond the ideal material for cutting and grinding tools. As the hardest known naturally occurring material, diamond can be used to polish, cut, or wear away any material, including other diamonds. Common industrial applications of this property include diamond-tipped drill bits and saws, and the use of diamond powder as an abrasive.
The process to produce industrial diamonds (essentially, very hard dust) does not meaningfully help scale the process to produce first-quality synthetic diamond gems for jewelry.
As your quote points out, synthetic industrial diamonds have been available for many decades. But it is only recently that synthetic diamond gems have achieved popularity and price advantage for jewelry.
Diamond dust used to be the main industrial product. But as diamond synthesis has improved, cutting tools are now using larger diamonds.[1] This has been a big win for the well-drilling industry. Newer bits cut rock, and with diamond, they last long enough to get the job done. The classic Hughes tricone bit, the thing that looks like a set of bevel gears, is not a cutter. It's a rock crusher.[2] It cracks by compressive force.
(Patents were really strong back then. Howard Hughes, Sr. became the richest man in the world by buying the patent for the drill bit. He then manufactured bits and rented them out for a fraction of the profits from the oil well.)
[1] https://www.slb.com/products-and-services/innovating-in-oil-...
[2] https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/texas-primer-the-hu...
> Something had to start increasing the demand to enable that.
Diamonds are used in all kinds of things besides jewelry. Industry needs that economy of scale.
True but industrial grade natural diamonds are very inexpensive in comparison to jewelry quality ones.
> What I find most interesting is the weight put on the ethical side. I think it’s overstated. When the issue became big, the Blood Diamond movie, sales of lab grown did not markedly increase.
It was not a switch that was pushed the moment the movie went out. In the grand scheme of things, the movie was not even that popular. But there definitely was a realisation that diamond prices were completely artificially inflated by an oligopoly, and that there were many issues with how they were sourced.
Just because demand did not follow a step function when the file was released does not imply that ethics are not relevant.
I think it's a generational thing. Younger generations genuinely cared about the implicit exploitation and violence in the industry, older didn't.
See also: views on climate change, adoption of renewable energy, etc.
It’s an interesting comparison though because equally solar / electric cars only really went mass market when they became economically a good deal
"When a thing becomes affordable more people have access to it." nods nods
So is our conclusion "People talk a big game but their morality clearly fails based on how the market has played out" or "People want things but the market has competing forces and sometimes takes a long time to find ways to provide people what they want?"
My rephrasing to your statement is "It took the mass market decades to figure out how to deliver consumers the solar/electric cars they wanted at a price they could afford."
Also, points in the general direction of the established energy providers I think these assholes had some incentive not to let the market get out from under them and make sure they were the ones who continued to profit from it.
> My rephrasing to your statement is "It took the mass market decades to figure out how to deliver consumers the solar/electric cars they wanted at a price they could afford."
Nicely stated. I like your style of debate / deliberation.
Younger generations have none percent of the wealth to make these decisions compared to the boomers.
> Younger Americans (millennials and Gen Zers) owned $1.35 for every $1 of wealth owned by baby boomers at the same age.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/community-development/publication...
>At the same age
Boomers have had significantly longer and better sustained market conditions to grow their wealth.
Um, I'm going to go ahead and point out this, probably not super relevant data point
"While trailing Gen Xers for the beginning of their adult lives, younger American households’ average wealth began to exceed that of Gen Xers at about age 30, reflecting historically high wealth levels following the COVID-19 pandemic." I have a feeling that average wealth adjustment falls very heavily on the home owners, which is only just above half of all the cohort. Had a similar thing happened to boomers in 89, almost 70% would have benefitted.
I think it's also worth pointing out: The share of wealth held by boomers in 89 (why 89? Because they didn't have data before that. It's why the graphs start in a weird spot and why it's not a great study unless you're trying to pull out a "gotcha" stat) represented almost 20% of the total wealth in the country. "Millenials/GenZ" has a hold on only HALF that percentage.
Doctors may hate your one weird statistic, but socio-demographists probably don't...
That seems like an obvious observation?
People accumulate wealth over a life time of work. It would be entirely expect that younger generations have less wealth than older generations.
If that was true, you'd expect the younger professionals of today would have comparative amounts of wealth to the boomers when they were young professionals. It's absolutely not the case. Each generation is getting poorer and poorer as they hit the same benchmarks.
This tracks with broad trends of wealth inequality increasing as well.
So no, it's not just "they haven't accumulated yet", because it's not clear they will have the opportunity to do so.
It’s not generations, it’s age ;) Younger generations are still idealists. With age, you get betrayed in your ideals. You discover scientific studies weren’t so scientific as they get turned over one by one. It’s something like: Ice caps will still melt, and everything you did for the better, bad luck, they’ll have increased the warming. Same when we tried to eat better against cancer or raised or fists to defend gay people. I don’t want you to believe you’re generation won’t suffer the same fate ;)
> With age, you get betrayed in your ideals.
Some of us old-heads got pushed much farther left as a result of this. I used to be a Democrat, blue and blue. These days I'm much more like, "The Dems will sell me out to make a buck, I gotta go out and actually be the change I want to see in the world."
Young folks who are experiencing disillusion -- don't give in to despair. You can make a meaningful difference in lives. Build communities, engage in mutual aid, whatever.
Both racism against Blacks and homophobia has been significantly reduced when comparing previous decades to today.
Doesn't that show younger generations have a markable improvement in "being good"?
Why would finding out that some scientific studies weren't done correctly change any person's views when this is always the case and no one has ever said otherwise?
I have to say, sample size of 2, but as we get older my wife and I get further and further entrenched in our idealism.
I was a center-left socialist as a kid and I'm a full blown anarchist in my 40's so, idk, "people aren't a monolith"?
Years and years of “diamonds suck” make a mark. It’s an evergreen topic online for a long time, and the people looking at engagement rings in 2025 have been aware of the shittiness of the diamond business for years.
The mining, corrupt trade practices, etc are all well known and sometimes subject to enforcement action.
Seems to be the opposite ...
I don't think those are orthogonal.
Natural diamonds are more expensive, and they therefore have a conspicuous consumption element to them. That could be valuable as a means to gain social cachet. Except you'd have to speak loudly about how they were natural.
And in doing so you are loudly proclaiming you don't care about human suffering it took to get the diamonds. That's probably fine in very wealthy circles, but in upper middle class/upper-upper middle class circles, it's likely quite gauche.
If the natural ones didn't have this faux pas attached to them by default, then they might carry more interest as a "I saved up for these" class indicator.
I think it reached a tipping point. It used to be that there wasn't much of a cost advantage, so people assumed you bought the real thing. Now that the lab-made diamonds are super cheap, many people will assume you bought one of those. When that's the case, people feel like they might as well buy the cheaper ones. It's like people buying natural mined diamonds are chumps. No one will know you spent more unless you talk about how it's natural (and that makes you annoying).
More people have caught on to the many terrible things about natural diamonds over time and now we are finally at the tipping point for lab grown to dismantle the unethical natural diamond trade. The idea of lab grown needed time to gestate with the public, which has been manipulated for decades about the “value” of natural diamonds. Even when lab grown became a thing, the natural diamond trade did its damnedest to manipulate the public on the quality of lab grown vs natural. Coincidentally, natural diamonds are overvalued due to decades of market manipulation by a monopoly.
My then-gf (now wife) and I watched a movie together about an African man whose village got raided, him put into slavery to search for diamonds and his son becoming a child soldier by the same people and their struggles to get free, and finally pawn off a pink diamond to one of the largest diamond companies in London. At the end of it, she finally came to realise that the diamond trade was really quite shitty. And we had a long discussion about the whole thing, as well as the growth of the synthetic diamonds industry and how they’re much better on the supposed 4C properties as well as on price.
Yet in the end she still wanted to get a ring from one of the big names because that’s what she grew up with and what she had always dreamt of since young.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What I find most interesting is the weight put on the ethical side. I think it’s overstated.
Virtue-signaling has always been a thing, and apparently quite useful for marketing to certain segments of the population.
Nah it’s also environmentally, mining is bad. And if there is an alternative with no mining, people will opt for that.
People love to claim the moral high ground, believing themselves so much better. So much more noble. So much smarter.
But at the end of the day, they always do the exact same thing - buy whatever is cheaper. Doesn't matter if it's produced with slave labor, or child labor, or the product of corporate government coups.
They put all that out of their mind, and just buy the product. They rationalize it or conveniently forget it or just pretend it doesn't apply to them. Whatever will get them past it.
A similar topic: Does anyone think things like solar and wind are being used out of the goodness of anyone's heart? Concern for the next generations? A desire to give clean air to our youth? Sympathy for sufferers of all of the horrible diseases and respiratory problems? Concern about lands lost to rising seas?
No. It's because they got cheaper than fossil fuels. Anything else is fantasy.
What you're seeing in the drop of value of diamonds also reflects the general shift in tastes of different generations with income. I'm a person that likes to go to flea markets and antique stores on the rare occasion and the value of the same items on the market has drastically shifted in the last 10 years as boomers are no longer in the collectible age bracket. Younger people don't really care about Tiffany jewelry
Depends a lot on the demographic. It's still popular with young people who express status and success through culturally relevant jewelry styles (often influenced by hip-hop and sports culture).
It's more status-forward than authenticity-forward consumption, and many jewelers can assure you that it's very much still in vogue in some areas.
> When the issue became big, the Blood Diamond movie, sales of lab grown did not markedly increase
Other people would still assume you might have bought a blood diamond, so instead of buying a lab diamond, I would expect these people to have bought another gem if they bought a gemstone at all.
I actually predict in a few years it will become more fashionable to wear other jewels over diamonds given the rate the prices are crashing at. When diamonds are competitive with all the other gemstones, people start looking at those the same way too
You're a few years too late, as this trend has been been happening for a decade at this point. You can find many articles online about how millenialls and now gen-z are ditching diamonds.
Lab rubies, sapphires, emeralds and basically anything you can think of with a known chemical makeup is being produced en masse by factories all over India and China.
Here’s just one sellers assortment of various “roughs” https://www.gemsngems.com/product-category/rough-stones/lab-...
As someone who doesn’t care about the authenticity of the gems provenance and only about having consistent physical properties for rock tumbling and gem faceting, it’s been very nice for the budget
But as soon as that happens, other gemstones will come in cheaper artificial varieties as well.
The biggest diamond alternative today, moissanite, is always artificial - ironically because its natural form is so rare that it's not obtainable.
Diamonds are quite possibly the only stone that isn't yet essentially 100% artificial. Rubies, the next hardest stone, is trivial to make artificially:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybcdRQmQcHQ
moissanite is harder than ruby afaik. Also more beautiful than diamond imo.
What about the size of the market as a whole? Was there a drawdown during the period in question?
Is it possible that people decreased purchases of diamonds altogether in response to ethical qualms (in favor of other jewels or precious items), and then were later motivated by price to go with lab-grown diamonds?
i think you overlooked a general revulsion towards monopoly and therefore DeBeers, their laughable (though long effective) marketing, though agree it's mainly economic.
Not necessarily.
When prices are equal, I'd wager the decision is: "if prices are equal why wouldn't I buy the "real" thing? I'll just try and justify to myself that it's sourced correctly".
When the price of the grown diamonds falls, the decision might be: "Ok, so grown diamonds are cheaper AND more ethical? Ok, I'm definitely buying grown".
If the ethics factor didn't exist, "real" diamonds would still retain the kudos and still be valued highly over "nice but fake" diamonds.
It's the ethics factor that pushes the decision over the line.
As an n=1 economic animal, that's what my behaviour would have been anyway.
Why would someone with ethical concerns still buy a diamond and not just choose another gemstone if somehow synthetic was more expensive?
And it's all marketing anyway: slap a "condensed from pure carbon" campaign out there and suddenly natural diamonds are fake rich and not as pure or precise or something.
When I was a kid in the 80s my mother worked at a jewelry store and CZ diamonds were already considered cheap fakes at the time. The price was not comparable to the real deal because nobody was buying them at diamond prices.
They were simply dismissed as more trash belonging in the gold-plated case. It's hard to appreciate how much less informed people were back then - we're talking pre-internet. The adults around me couldn't explain scientifically what the actual difference was between a CZ and natural diamond. Just one was a fake, held little value, and was a sure way to lose your fiance.
You got good responses to the rest but
> The adults around me couldn't explain scientifically what the actual difference was between a CZ and natural diamond.
I was told growing up you can just check with window glass. If the gem scratches it's CZ and if the glass scratches it's diamond.
CZ is very cheap costume jewelry and won't last as it scratches and dulls so easily
Cubic zirconia isn't synthetic diamond at all.
They were marketed as synthetic diamond alternatives in the layman sense, even if they are not composed of actual diamonds.
You sound just like the adults he was talking about.
They literally aren't diamond. They contain no carbon. Because they're zirconia, not diamond. They're marketed as an alternative to diamond.
How do CZ gemstones compare to diamond gemstones visually/in person? It looks like CZ has a lower refraction index but higher color dispersion vs. diamond, so that seems like it would still result in an attractive gemstone. The main disadvantages seem to be slightly lower refractive index (so less internal reflection and brilliance?), lower hardness (disadvantage for the gem getting scratches - possible advantage for not scratching your sapphire glass watch or smartphone camera lens?!) and higher weight.
edit: seems that moissanite (silicon carbide, perhaps unsurprisingly) is another diamond-like (though hexagonal crystals vs. cubic for diamond or CZ) gemstone that is actually harder than sapphire and less prone to fracture than diamond.
To everyone except those with a trained eye, they're virtually indistinguishable; however, because CZ isn't as hard, they tend to scratch and dull over time and thus lose their luster.
If we're talking about 'quality', CZ just doesn't compare for longevity. That said, unless you're talking about a daily-wearing-for-many-years piece of jewelry (i.e., an engagement ring), CZ is just fine for most folks, especially considering the cost difference.
My company buys a lot of diamonds - for industrial use, not jewelry related :) The falling price of synthetic diamonds has been a huge boon. Several processes I do right now would be impractical without the use of "low-cost" diamonds - air quotes because they are still not exactly cheap. So it is obviously in my interest for consumers to switch to lab-grown diamonds and thus drive volume up and prices down.
At the same time, I do understand the sentiment around wanting a mined diamond. The whole idea behind a diamond engagement ring is a marketing exercise backed up by a cartel, so if you're gonna participate in the ritual you might as well do it right. There are silly backstories buried in every part of human society today, from "some king did it and everyone copied him" to "this piece of land got special status a thousand years ago which accidentally let it become its own country" to "my grandmother was too poor to do XYZ the right way so we still do it her way." That's just part and parcel of being human.
Calling them "lab-grown" is part of the propaganda against them.
Like they're alive or there's some weird chemicals involved.
It's not silly stories when evil corporations with deep pockets are outright lying, like ads with doctors smoking.
Maybe it's my engineer-brain talking, but "lab-grown" actually biases me towards the diamonds. Feels precise and futuristic.
My wife wanted a sapphire and we met during Ph D research. It's straight up not possible to pay more then like, a dollar for a synthetic sapphire so that's what's in her ring.
> Calling them "lab-grown" is part of the propaganda against them.
Indeed: Even the article perpetuates this:
"Whereas a two-carat real diamond engagement ring might cost $35,000, Oymakas says a two-carat lab-grown diamond with the same clarity and colour could only be about $3,500."
Sorry - they're both real diamonds.
Synthetic diamonds definitely need a marketing glow up. Current names are man-made, lab grown, and synthetic diamonds. Instead we could lean into how cool the HPHT and CVD processes are and have - giga forged diamonds (gigapascal pressure of HPHT), plasma coalesced diamonds (CVD process), or even human forged diamonds (highlighting technological triumph required to achieve these).
Who wouldn’t want artisanal diamonds rather than found diamonds?
I think they should just call them natural diamonds because they’re indistinguishable from any other diamond.
Call them vegan diamonds. :D
This would sell. Vegan leather lol
Again, I'm all for lab grown diamonds for both consumer and industrial use.
I think "lab-grown" is a pretty neutral term, and it is also scientifically accurate in the case of CVD and other diamonds where the process really is "growing" the diamonds. There are certainly other terms for them that sound more derogatory such as "synthetic" or "artificial" diamond.
On the radio, they advertise them as artisan-crafted diamonds.
I thought the process used to grow them in a lab was somewhat different than the process used in nature. Labs use Chemical Vapor Deposition while nature uses high pressure and high temperature. The lab grows the diamond crystal while nature squeezes a lump of carbon into one.
Jewelry diamonds are made in a press.
>That's just part and parcel of being human.
Also part and parcel of being a human being is logic and empathy. Anyone who possesses one of these traits, never mind both of them, should find it easy to choose the product that isn't literally the product of human suffering an exploitation.
Blood diamonds are terrible, but the overwhelming majority of diamonds produced these days are not blood diamonds relying on slave labor, they're mass-mined products relying on colossal-scale industrial machinery. That's why Russia is #1 and Canada is #3 in worldwide diamond production today: even the world's largest diamond mines have 1-3k employees vs. massive production.
That's not to paper over the issues with the industry (environmental, poor working conditions, poor pay etc) - but those are more generally applied to any mined product. I'd be willing to bet that your average set of modern electronics cause far more suffering than your average diamond: see conflict resources such as tantalum, tin, tungsten, gold.
Is your company in abrasives or machining? I'm curious because I assume that lab-grown is actually preferred over mined because the crystalline structure may be more homogenous.
I can't go into too much detail, but there are actually a few things: our main use is machining and one of our other uses is for the extreme thermal conductivity. Diamond is an incredible material period.
I am not an expert so take this with a grain of salt, but for what I do I have seen no difference between flawless natural diamond and flawless lab grown diamond, the difference is that the flawless natural diamonds are almost always far more expensive.
If I was shopping for a near flawless diamond engagement ring and someone was offering me the lab-made version.
I think I’d be quite swayed towards the lab ones knowing that there were engineers who used them for industrial use and found them exactly the same.
Also being much cheaper, I’d likely spend money towards getting a better grade lab-grown diamond than I could afford with a mined diamond.
If I was the lab-grown industry I’d also be actively attempting to shift the narrative around the term real, and say ones mined one is lab made, both are real. But that’s its own fight I’m sure.
As it should, diamonds were made artificially scarce and controlled by monopoly:
“The major investors in the diamond mines realized that they had no alternative but to merge their interests into a single entity that would be powerful enough to control production and perpetuate the illusion of scarcity of diamonds. The instrument they created, in 1888, was called De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd., incorporated in South Africa…” From the classic 80s article “Have you ever tried to sell a diamond” - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-yo...
> But some experts stress there is still a difference.
> Graham Pearson, professor with the University of Alberta's department of earth and atmospheric sciences, says that the natural formation of diamonds deep underground results in a "complexity" you can't get with the lab-grown variety.
Okay; but why should I aesthetically prefer this?
A chip of concrete has more "complexity" than any diamond. But somehow I bet Graham's wife isn't wearing a piece of Blue Circle's finest.
Though it can look pretty neat of you polish it up and acid stain it.
Yep. In the context of what should be a very simple crystal structure, "complexity" is another word for "defect".
For decades, the marketing message was that less defects = better = more expensive. Apparently, when lab-grown diamonds came along, that had to be inverted: now, lab-grown = less defects = "less character"
The whole thing is such an obvious marketing exercise with very little to back it up (as evidenced by the extremely low resale value of diamonds)
Exactly, at the same price yes the natural stone will have more 'complexity' and be lower-graded than the lab one as a result.
I have an outdoor fireplace filled with shattered tempered glass. It's like, rough, chunky glass pebbles.
It's much much more complex that a solid sheet of tempered glass, and it catches the light and reflects it in sparkling ways.
Maybe these so called "complex" diamonds create more interesting light interfaces?
They don't.
If they did, it would be possible to detect the difference with perfect accuracy. Instead, the detectors made by those interested in pushing the concept of "real, natural" diamonds have a false positive rate of 5% looking for the inclusion of things labs could easily add if they cared to
He's an earth sciences geek, so he prefers natural diamonds' relationship with the earth. This aesthetic is irrelevant for most people.
Better question: Why should you aesthetically prefer a diamond to cheap glass?
You can make some plausible arguments against glass. It scratches more easily and doesn't shimmer as much. But synthetic sapphire is the same league and costs a lot less.
The modern-day aesthetic of diamonds is just that they are expensive. They're not distinguished by utility, quality, or appearance from cheaper products. The ultimate status symbol, but also obviously a bit of an issue...
Diamonds sparkle a lot more brilliantly due to their high refractive index.
(Moissanite is even better, so it should be preferred over diamonds unless I’m overlooking some other difference in their attributes?)
But plain glass gems look comparatively bland when used as jewelry.
Moissanite scratchers much easier.
I need a geologist to explain this one. Moissanite has a Mohs hardness of 9.5. I guess it is easier to scratch than a diamond, but the scratability should be indistinguishable between the two for all practical purposes.
Not a geologist but Mohs hardness is an ordinal scale so the distance between 10 and 9 isn't well-defined. The numbers are defined as being specific minerals.
Diamond (10) is 4x as hard as corundum (9) which is 2x as hard as topaz (8).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohs_scale#Reference_minerals
Oh duh. I was so focused on optical qualities I didn’t even think about material ones.
Everything scratches easier than diamond. Moissanite is still very hard to scratch.
Because they don't look the same. Not even a little bit.
Glass doesn't sparkle.
If that's what makes real diamonds special, these shoes should we worth at least $100M
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Miluxas-Women-s-Glitter-Tennis-Sn...
OK, but there's a real difference. My wedding band has small diamonds in it, and occasionally I'll be sitting inside where the sun falls on my hand and casts a million pretty blue and white and red sparkles on the walls and ceiling of the room I'm in.
Diamonds (and other gems) really are beautifula to look at in ways that glass just isn't. And manmade ones, sparklier still out of the forge of our own cleverness, are much nicer in my opinion.
Because the refractive index of diamond is higher than that of glass, which makes it look prettier and "sparkle".
It can result in interesting color centers.
Which can be replicated cheaply in a lab, and will be the moment they become desirable.
Two points just FYI in thinking about the sudden shift to synthetic diamonds from natural stones:
• Scale: I'm aware of one company that operates over 700 CVD systems that each make 25 stones/run - there are at least 3 others of similar volume;
• Cost: the variable cost of making a 1ct finished brilliant (D-E,F-VVSI) is <$30US. Obviously, that cost is for ex-US production. See, for example, the recent demise of de Beers' Lightbox growth center in Oregon.
Naturals simply can't compete. They are forming a completely separate market involving a much smaller, extremely wealthy clientele.
The business case for synthetics is deteriorating as production costs bottom out and margins decline in an ongoing race to the bottom.
It's all just a crystalline form of carbon.
Regardless of how it was made, one is just as much "forever" as the other. The real major difference is in the labor practices being used.
De Beers had a good run as a cartel but as they say, "the jig is up"
Like all other forms of carbon, diamonds will combust in the presence of oxygen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bfa-cKDzYSg
You can also use the resulting CO2 to do CO2 things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0wvDwSnzcw
I'd disagree with that. The prospect of a natural diamond is that it's unique (I mean, not visibly I suppose) and millions of years old.
I'd say it's like AI music or art - something made by a machine, for some reason, just doesn't have any "soul" to it.
I'm not actually entirely convinced in my argument, but there is something there...
> I'd say it's like AI music or art - something made by a machine, for some reason, just doesn't have any "soul" to it.
Diamonds are a product of natural geological processes. (Or, are grown in a lab, by recreating similar conditions.)
Music and art are products of human talent, skill, and labor - that ML companies have used (without a license, permission, or even credit) to build datasets that are now being used to make money, at the expense of these artists.
These are not the same things.
Agree, though I think he meant one is real and the other's fake.
Every piece of gravel is unique and millions of years old, too.
But not rare.
Diamonds aren't rare. Natural diamonds are artificially constrained to raise the price.
Large intact diamonds are rare. Diamond dust is not.
Indeed. The oldest things on earth are the hydrogen atoms. Literally all of them were formed in the first 3 minutes after the big bang. So all of them have the same age, billions of years old, down to a few seconds difference at most.
> The oldest things on earth are the hydrogen atoms. Literally all of them were formed in the first 3 minutes after the big bang.
Stable hydrogen wasn't able to form until several hundreds of thousands of years after the Big Bang when the universe cooled sufficiently for electrons to bind to protons.
Even assuming you're counting lone protons as hydrogen atoms, it's still absolutely false. I don't know if that's true for the majority of protons in the universe, but there are mechanisms by which new protons are made all the time. Neutrons can turn into protons through beta decay, and high energy particle interactions like those involving cosmic rays can produce brand new protons. These processes can and do happen terrestrially.
> These processes can and do happen terrestrially.
... and at rates that mean that the amount of non-big-bang hydrogen is not even a trillionth of a trillionth of the total.
> the amount of non-big-bang hydrogen is not even a trillionth of a trillionth of the total.
I didn't say it was a huge fraction of the total. You said "literally all of them" were from the Big Bang, which is just wrong. Plenty of other processes produce protons/hydrogen
If you can't tell the difference by either looking or listening, I'd argue they both have a similar amount of "soul".
And thus, any distinction between them exists mainly in your head.
The difference is instantly apparent under UV - most lab grown diamonds will not fluoresce unless they have a bad growth process that leaves flux and other impurities in the crystal.
Natural diamonds won't always fluoresce but the ones that do will do so in a variety of colors, and sometimes change depending on what wavelength is irradiating them.
Lab-grown diamonds can be tailored to exhibit the same impurities internal stresses, etc. that cause a minority of natural diamonds to fluoresce. This has not been a goal to date for synthetics because the highest price point is for diamonds that are most pure with least internal strain. If the economics of fluorescent diamonds suddenly become more attractive, I guarantee fluorescent synthetics will be on the market immediately thereafter, and will be indistinguishable from naturals without $100K worth of characterization tools.
Upside down and backwards.
The difference is not instantly apparent under UV.
Only about 30% of natural diamonds have fluorescence --- which is *caused* by impurities and imperfections in the material.
Manmade diamonds tend to lack this because they have fewer impurities and imperfections. Equating increased perfection and purity with inferiority is highly debatable and smacks of marketing BS.
Reminds me of the "vinyl is superior for its warmer sound" discussion, with a similar argument…
I wanna only drink natural creek water with its natural biology and other "flaws" because, well, its natural and has a truly unique mix of critters and metals in it. Why would I want the same purified drinking water everyone else has. Natural creek water, unique and special, if unique and special were spelled g.i.a.r.d.i.a.
I get your point, but on the other hand you don’t want to drink osmosis purified 100% h2o, or it’ll start leeching minerals from your bones.
There is no "soul" in either pieces of rock.
Tired: rocks don't have souls
Wired: we will put a soul in this rock for $10,000
The difference is that there's a detectable difference between AI and human made art, at least today. The only detectable difference between a correctly-made lab diamond and one clawed out of the ground by children is that the latter will have flaws. I'm sure you could engineer similar flaws into the lab version if became fashionable.
You sure about that?
https://ai-art-turing-test.com/
No, I'm not. I'm sure there's some overlap between the smartest AIs and the worst artists.
https://ia801604.us.archive.org/27/items/everything-is-bulls...
> We exchange diamond rings as part of the engagement process because the diamond company De Beers decided in 1938 that it would like us to. Prior to a stunningly successful marketing campaign, Americans occasionally exchanged engagement rings, but it wasn’t pervasive. Not only is the demand for diamonds a marketing invention, but diamonds aren’t actually that rare. Only by carefully restricting the supply has De Beers kept the price of a diamond high.
Imho, that "soul" you describe is an artifact of human sentimentality and a very successful marketing campaign by a bunch of Afrikaner colonialists.
There's no such thing as "soul".
There is something to a rock being millions of years old, you’re not wrong.
Most rocks are millions of years old, some billions
The atoms in the synthetic diamond are billions of years old as well.
No one in the target audience cared about the age or the uniqueness as much as the size and the status it supposedly signals.
LMAO diamonds have no soul...
I agree. Kind of like factory vases vs hand thrown or glass blown vases. They’re practically the same but some people will pay lots more for certain hand made ones.
I've bought some lab created diamonds made with CVD. THey're great. If anything, they're too clear.
I recommend to all newly engaged couples to buy them and save the money for more important things like raising children or buying a home.
And if you look on eBay, you can get CVD diamonds for even less. (At a bit of a risk, of course.)
Any reputable places to get them that you know of?
I’m not sure diamonds are popular because of what they are but what they represent.
Every gem out there is “the crystalline form” of something. Diamonds are (were?) the expensive crystalline form. And plenty of people equate “expensive” with love, or care, or respect. Even if the same people would never be able to tell the difference between diamond and cubic zirconium, knowing it’s the cheap one makes it less valuable in other ways. This depends on the person, of course.
If it’s not diamonds it will have to be something else that shows “I put my money where my mouth is”. A simple metal wedding band is the same wherever it’s made but a famous jeweler will charge an arm and a leg more than your local shop for the same amount of precious metal, same effort, and same result. And yet Tiffany’s isn’t going out of business for the same reason. It’s what it represents.
I am curious to see if tastes or fashion shift towards other rarer or more expensive gems not yet manufactured cheaply en masse.
I'd argue that a person obsessed with cost really isn't focused on what it represents.
For those obsessed with materialism, real satisfaction is out of reach. There is always bigger, better and more expensive.
Personally, I would tend to reconsider any long term relationship with such a person.
The cost is exactly what it represents.
The entire point of using diamonds in wedding rings is for the male to signal how committed he is to the marriage by expending a large amount of money on both the ring and the wedding itself. It then acts as a way for the wife to signal her status to other women by showing off how much her husband was willing and able to spend on the ring.
It is a hold-out from the tradition that the male is a provider and the female is a caregiver. If you reject traditional gender roles, you should also reject expensive diamond rings regardless whether they are mined or grown. Otherwise, embrace the shiny, but make no mistake: the cost is entirely the point.
>The entire point of using diamonds in wedding rings is for the male to signal how committed he is to the marriage by expending a large amount of money on both the ring and the wedding itself. It then acts as a way for the wife to signal her status to other women by showing off how much her husband was willing and able to spend on the ring.
That's some nice historical background (which could be post-hoc contextualization that fits certain agenda), but traditions have this weird habit of outliving their actual purpose and still having the form without the role.
So no, you don't have to commit to traditional gender roles to have diamond rings and don't have to make them expensive as otherwise it's not doing the thing it's supposed to do. The could just not do the thing at all and you can still have them.
the cost is entirely the point.
Assume you have 2 diamonds that cost the same.
One is natural, the other is larger and man made.
Which one is more likely to convey your point to the average person?
The more rational decision, IMO, assuming you still want to signal wealth, is to buy neither, collude with your supposed life partner, buy a gigantic, flawless moissanite that you both agree to say is a natural diamond that cost 50k. Then secretly put the money you didn't spend on sparkling carbon into some appreciating asset. Rivals are still sick with envy, you have a fun joint venture bamboozle to laugh about, and the mortgage gets paid off a few years early.
The larger one, because people will think it costs more.
"would tend to reconsider any long term relationship with such a person"
Are you arguing that anyone who would accept and display a precious gem is ineligible for marriage? More so if it is larger, but not if more expensive? The post you are replying to presents a plausible social economy of the tradition. What is your point?
One nit: In the US at least, the man pays for the diamond ring, but traditionally it is the woman's family that pays for the wedding.
For anyone appreciating expensive things, giving diamonds represent the willingness to fulfill that desire. It’s easy to conflate that with love, at least for a while, even when you aren’t a materialistic person.
Jewelry is the pinnacle of “just monetary value”. Unlike almost any other possession, a car, a house, clothes, etc. jewelry serves no practical purpose, only shows the willingness or ability to spend for it. The more you spend, the more valuable the gesture, the more you cared to please the recipient.
Materialistic people have the same feelings you have. Those just happened to be triggered by different values than yours.
The other purpose of jewerly is looking nice. That's difficult to comprehend, but it's the actual important thing for people who's most expensive piece of everyday wear isn't their phone.
I could see thinking about this differently.
As people quit believing in God, they stop thinking in terms of "God brought us together/we were made for each other" (though they stop thinking that a generation or two later than they stop believing in God).
If you think that we made this relationship, then maybe a lab-grown (human made) diamond fits? (Though it may take an advertising campaign before people see it that way.)
Disclaimer: I'm not a sociologist. This is just my speculation about how the dynamic could change.
The entire point of a diamond is that it’s expensive. People buy them for status. Otherwise there are lots of gems that are much more prettier, but they are not as expensive. It’s like saying people will stop buying branded clothes because unbranded clothes have the same or even a higher quality for a fraction of the price. Kinda misses the point.
It’s like saying people will stop buying branded clothes because unbranded clothes have the same or even a higher quality for a fraction of the price.
People buy inferior, counterfeit merchandise all the time because they can't tell the difference.
But there is nothing inferior or counterfeit about a manmade diamond. It is *exactly* the same material as a natural one.
You miss the point. The only reason to buy a diamond is that it is expensive. It doesn’t matter if you could buy the same thing cheaper. It doesn’t matter that there are better gems that are cheaper. You buy the diamond to show that you can afford it. You buy someone a diamond to prove how much they are worth to you.
Yes, you can buy a man-made diamond the same you can buy counterfeit branded clothes. That only shows that you’re tasteless and that you can’t afford the real thing.
If you like, I will sell you a personally autographed photo of me. All for $1m cash. That's much more expensive than a diamond. Anyone who buys this for their new wife will prove that he REALLY loves her. $1m>>$35000.
You miss the point.
If it is strictly about the money, a larger man made diamond can easily cost just as much as a smaller natural one --- while instantly conveying to the untrained eye the appearance of being more expensive.
It was never about the rocks. Like nearly everything else in the economy it's really about attention.
The attention from a man made diamond is indistinguishable from a natural one to most people.
I think this is true, manmade diamonds are valuable in a way that counterfeit currency is not. But "most people" may not be as important as people who know the story of, and the person wearing, the gem, and provenance is always a meaningful point of reference for expensive luxury items.
My screenshots of NFTs are pixel accurate, but not exactly as valuable as the real thing.
Apparently there's a big issue in Antwerp now that they're not allowed to import diamonds from Russia. Maybe they should stop fighting the synthetic diamonds and embrace them instead, as something guaranteed free of human suffering and war profiteering. But the whole industry hinges on manufactured demand, so they'd rather see the trade move to other countries I guess.
https://eutoday.net/antwerps-diamond-industry-facing-an-exis...
Synthetic diamonds are so cheap now that even de Beers closed their online store.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonydemarco/2025/05/09/de-be...
Extraction of natural diamonds can fund development of some of the poorest communities in the world. [0]
As the jewelry industry repositions around the uniqueness of natural diamonds I would expect to see more promotion of this kind of socially responsible production.
[0]: https://peacediamond.com/
So can many other dangerous and environmentally exploited industries. Doesn’t mean it’s a good thing
Like most good things happening in the world now days this is also because of China they were not under the same de beers marketing magic rest of the world was once the Chinese abandoned mined diamonds prices have catered.
Btw Blood diamonds was also a successful marketing ploy of De beers to keep out the competition. It was weird to me how western countries only cared about the exploitation of diamonds.
Ive been seeing this same type of article for decades now. I bought a 2 karrat flawless lab grown diamond in 2005 for around $2k, and according to this article that size sells for $3,500. Prices have increased it seems. I assumed they would drop as more were made.
You shouldn't have gotten a 2 carat diamond that cheap at that time. Either you got a really great deal for some idiosyncratic reason or your recollection is off.
Here's an example article from the era: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/2004/02/14/y...
I second this. There was no way to get a real, flawless, 2 carat lab grown diamond at the time for $2K.
I hope the parent commenter wasn’t duped by someone selling fake diamonds.
Inflation is probably why the number is higher now.
A year ago I picked up a 1ct hearts and arrows (D/E. VVS1/2, IGI certificate) from AliExpress for $360. I can see the hearts and arrows and it tests as diamond. A few months later an article came out about how lab diamonds stack up against mined, and the author had also bought one with similar characteristics from AliExpress for even less.
I just checked the same store and they're (not H&A but same other stats) running around $125 plus a $14 tariff.
According to the inflation calculator at bls.gov, $2000 in June 2005 has the same buying power as $3,317 in June 2025. So in real terms the price is about the same.
The _new_ price has doubtless gone up, as inflationary valuation benefits to the manufacturer / vendors.
The resale value of your item has gone down.
A price appreciation of about 75% over roughly 20 years.
Diamonds are simply NFTs of the real life: worthless coupons that only prove that you've wasted a few tens of thousand dollars. They prove your social status. The battle for purity or the origin is a distraction. For the same reason, diamonds as a gift make sense only if they are expensive.
Agree, though it should be noted that diamonds are far from the only things like this - other questionably useful social status symbols include "luxury" fashion (low quality made in low wage countries...), or even just having the latest iPhone
I have a visceral hatred for the diamond industry, and its based on nothing except my shock at how expensive a shiny rock is and the effectiveness of the advertising campaign around them. I remember going to buy my wife an engagement ring and just being incredulous at the price. I completely understand supply and demand but a lot of the supply limitation is artificial. Its one of the few things I am emotional about, I simply loath the diamond industry and the entire sham that you have to spend x number of months salary on a rock to prove to the world that you love someone. They built such an incredible narrative where people would judge each other based on the size of a rock or that it had to be of X clarity or you had to spend so much to prove whatever.
To this day I change the channel when I hear a commercial for a diamond store on the radio and its been 20+ years. I am so excited about lab grown diamonds.
Personally felt this too, though I think I hate dishonest marketers and adversarial business-customer relations more broadly.
For some reason my ideal vision of capitalism is where a company simply makes a product that solves customers' problem and makes them happy, receiving a fair amount of money in return for their efforts. No corporate propaganda campaigns or anti-consumer shenanigans needed, just a solid [thing] for people who need [thing].
Interested to hear potential problems with this approach in the replies.
Obligatory:
“Have you ever tried to sell a diamond” https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/archives/1982/02/249-2/132...
This story - Diamonds are Bullshit - comes up regularly, and I bookmarked it back in 2013 because it's so good.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5403988
There is nothing to miss about the impending death of the 'diamond industry'.
(Oh, the link is broken on the HN 2013 story -- try this one: https://priceonomics.com/diamonds-are-bullshit/ )
When I saw the headline I immediately thought: "couldn't have happened to nicer guys /s"
Why is it that everyone seems to have a soft spot for industries that have some kind of monopoly, suddenly losing that monopoly.
Diamonds need to become even cheaper. I want phone screens and glasses made out of single sheets of diamond. I want heatsinks and kitchen knives made out of the stuff.
Isn't diamond too brittle for all these applications?
No. Less brittle than normal glass, but not as good as certain ceramics.
Glass is very brittle, ceramics are also quite brittle. So the "no" isn't obvious.
When can we have diamond windows ?
Diamond threads are forever!
Natural Diamonds Had a Rough Year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42592424 - Jan 2025 (6 comments)
See how a lab-grown diamond is made - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42257245 - Nov 2024 (49 comments)
Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41488353 - Sept 2024 (490 comments)
Diamond industry 'in trouble' as lab-grown gemstones tank prices further - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40585594 - June 2024 (39 comments)
UK mining giant to offload De Beers diamond business - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40359867 - May 2024 (7 comments)
Forget billions of years: Researchers have grown diamonds in just 150 minutes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40172784 - April 2024 (61 comments)
Lab Grown Diamonds Are Too Perfect for Their Own Good - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39298644 - Feb 2024 (1 comment)
Diamonds Suck - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38247300 - Nov 2023 (163 comments)
The diamond world takes radical steps to stop a pricing plunge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38245762 - Nov 2023 (588 comments)
Diamonds are losing their allure - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37508058 - Sept 2023 (128 comments)
Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? (1982) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37396372 - Sept 2023 (11 comments)
What's the case for naturally mined diamonds anymore? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37275308 - Aug 2023 (49 comments)
Man-made diamonds are falling in price and appealing to more people - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35748205 - April 2023 (9 comments)
Diamonds Suck (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26698511 - April 2021 (53 comments)
Diamonds aren’t special and neither is love - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25978139 - Jan 2021 (90 comments)
Artificial diamonds creation process generating lonsdaleite - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25158428 - Nov 2020 (61 comments)
Diamonds Are Bullshit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25059605 - Nov 2020 (27 comments)
Billions of dollars of unsold diamonds are piling up around the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23502201 - June 2020 (104 comments)
Shaking Up the Diamond Industry - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22209364 - Feb 2020 (120 comments)
Diamonds Keep Getting Cheaper - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21522898 - Nov 2019 (389 comments)
Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? (1982) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20818618 - Aug 2019 (237 comments)
The Elite Club That Rules the Diamond World Is Starting to Crack - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20555503 - July 2019 (200 comments)
Would You Pay $32,709 for a Lab-Grown Diamond? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19287565 - March 2019 (34 comments)
Diamonds Suck (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17186457 - May 2018 (215 comments)
Diamonds Are Bullshit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17184539 - May 2018 (45 comments)
De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17183603 - May 2018 (439 comments)
Lab-grown diamonds threaten viability of the real gems - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16551147 - March 2018 (301 comments)
Lab-Grown Diamonds Come into Their Own - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13085273 - Dec 2016 (103 comments)
Diamonds Suck (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12944464 - Nov 2016 (576 comments)
A Lab-Grown Diamond Is Forever - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11903409 - June 2016 (106 comments)
What the diamond industry is really selling - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11099809 - Feb 2016 (83 comments)
Diamonds Suck (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10834567 - Jan 2016 (2 comments)
Diamonds are Bullshit (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9251952 - March 2015 (75 comments)
A Diamond Market No Longer Controlled By De Beers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7793386 - May 2014 (111 comments)
When Diamonds Are Dirt Cheap, Will They Still Dazzle? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7615712 - April 2014 (70 comments)
Diamonds Suck - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6868968 - Dec 2013 (3 comments)
Diamonds Are Bullshit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6331565 - Sept 2013 (8 comments)
Diamonds Are Bullshit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5403988 - March 2013 (734 comments)
Ask HN: How have HN readers bought diamond engagement rings? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4971735 - Dec 2012 (25 comments)
Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? (1982) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4535611 - Sept 2012 (225 comments)
Have you ever tried to sell a diamond? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1405698 - June 2010 (85 comments)
Have you ever tried to sell a diamond? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1110283 - Feb 2010 (76 comments)
The Facts About Diamonds (and why I don’t like De Beers) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1109318 - Feb 2010 (41 comments)
De Beers profits fall 92% - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=722115 - July 2009 (25 comments)
Diamonds on Demand - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=330749 - Oct 2008 (16 comments)
If you pulled a diamond from the diamond rains on Neptune and brought it to Earth, you’re telling me it should be worth the same as a shitty lab grown?
If the chemical composition is the same, yes.
I'm still conflicted about this. I understand the cost and blood diamond debate and largely agree. But there is something about diamonds that makes them divine: carbon atoms crystallizing and bonding over millions to billions of years to form structures, rated on a scale of color, clarity, cut, and weight. It's like gold, primarily forged in cosmic events like supernova explosions. Naaaaah let's just make it in a lab it looks the same.
People are being priced out of art and beauty and it's a shame economics and corruption make real diamonds dirty.
> But there is something about diamonds that makes them divine: carbon atoms crystallizing and bonding over millions to billions of years to form structures
It does not take millions of years to form a diamond. It takes hours. The million years are atoms sitting around doing nothing before that, and then diamonds sitting around doing nothing while some of them are eventually pushed to the surface.
You can say the same thing about any mineral. There is nothing special about carbon or the diamond structure. If anything, zircons are much more significant, being the oldest minerals we can find.
> rated on a scale of color, clarity, cut, and weight.
This is nothing special. The colour of lab-grown stones can be varied almost at will, and the rest is still an issue with synthetic stones.
> Naaaaah let's just make it in a lab it looks the same.
That’s the thing, though: it does (yes, some synthetic stones have specific defects related to how they were made and they tent to be too perfect if anything, but they still have the exact same property). It’s like complaining that the meat you are eating comes from a farm instead of being hunted.
> People are being priced out of art and beauty and it's a shame economics and corruption make real diamonds dirty.
Quite the contrary. Gemstones become more accessible to more people. The diamond industry made its bed, being completely corrupted from extraction to distribution. When stones are cheap we can have discussion about their beauty instead of their prices.
I'm all in for finding beauty in our daily lives, but I'm not sure diamonds are more special than other things we take for granted. Oil and helium have also taken millions of years to form, and yet no one spends a second before buying a plastic duck or inflating a balloon. And if the point is that diamonds are shiny and pretty (which is a fair reason for liking them) there are other types of stones around just as good.
Unfortunately, De Beers controls the natural diamond supply, and they leave much to be desired in corporate ethics.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Beers#Legal_issues
And the US holds 50-70% of the total world market capitalization, and yet here we are.
Believe 15A and 19A as much as you can believe De Beers' 'Building Forever 2030 Goal's
It’s not just that, the economics of diamonds is completely fabricated. Idk about these days, but debeers used to buy up the vast majority of mined diamond, not to sell but to hoard or destroy them to maintain scarcity.
I’m not even sure that all of these recent stories about lab created diamonds to come out aren’t actually a PR pitch to advertise “natural” diamonds, an effort to emphasise the difference in the public psyche.
Anything public facing that positions diamonds as expensive, desirable, or valuable can usually be traced back to the cartel. It’s super common in movies and other media.
I'm not excusing nor rationalizing prices and the economics, obviously they hoard and manupulate the rates. Can't argue with how dark that crap must be. All I'm saying is real diamonds are 'better' and everyone knows it. Humans are emotional and that's a good thing. The manipulation of it is the bad thing. Trying to deny yourself of your emotions like a monk and yet still wishing for the iconic symbolic significance having 3month salary storybook ring, what are we doing here. Pay more for the real thing because life is real.
I wear a £20 titanium wedding ring from Amazon. The symbolic significance is what we imbue in it, not what it itself is.
100percent on board. A marriage is only as meaningful as the vows and the integrity of the people that made them. The guests are there to witness and to celebrate. Trying to make it about anything else only cheapens it.
If you can, put enough gold on her to get her out of a jam and have some runway. Other than that it’s just the promises you keep.
Titanium is cool, nothing wrong with it. It’s not as shiny as the noble metals but it’s just as interesting.
We did not even get anything. For what is a ring even meant to be? To mark your partner, that he is yours?
It can also be a reminder of that person, when they are not physically present. Similar to keeping a photograph of a loved one in your wallet.
No, that’s what the subcutaneous tracking chip is for. lol.
But seriously, for us it matters, since she is much younger than I am. We make an effort to signal that we are a committed couple so that people don’t make crass assumptions.
Still, my ring is tungsten carbide and hers is a family wedding band handed down in my family for generations. Our engagement ring was also a family heirloom. In that way the rings have meaning.
She likes to wear her ring because she feels like it is a symbol of belonging, and I wear mine to honor our relationship.
To us, the rings are symbolic of our vows, a gentle reminder that our lives are in service of one another.
> real diamonds are 'better' and everyone knows it.
Personally disagree. That whole "3 months' salary that will last forever" thing? A lab diamond will last just as forever as a mined one. I'd personally rather have one from a lab than one dug out of the earth by some African dude who spends his days sweating underground.
Yeah, idk. I’m not against the idea of a 3 month value reserve as a financial security token to de-risk a marriage proposal, but it should be something that can be liquidated for a similar value. Just setting 3 months of your work on fire is a really stupid and irresponsible move for most people, and their kids are ultimately the ones that suffer.
Not only that, imagine this scenario: something terrible happens. Your wife has to sell her jewelry to take care of herself and your child. Would you rather have bought her a $20000 ring that can maybe be sold for $3000? Or a ring with actual intrinsic value that might actually be worth more than what you paid, but at least fetch 80%.
When I think of how that would feel for her to know that I paid a foolish amount for something of inflated symbolic bling rather than a something of value, I get embarrassed just imagining it. To me that is an abdication of duty.
That’s the difference between diamonds and actual precious stones, or at lower price points a nice heavy gold ring with an inexpensive, lab grown gem.
For beauty, silicon carbide beats diamond hands down. If you want value and natural origins, a quality ruby or emerald is spectacular and actually rare and rationally market-priced. Gold is nice.
Until you get into very large and actually rare stones, diamonds are a scam, pure and simple. The value of a near flawless 1 carat stone at the mine is about two hundred dollars. Cutting costs about half that. To buy it, that stone might fetch $7000. To sell it, you might get $1000 if you’re lucky. That is not a store of value. It’s a symbol of gullibility or a boast that I have so much money that I can burn it without being irresponsible. The kind of boast that if you can’t back it up IRl makes you impossible to take seriously.
If you just really, really like diamonds, knock yourself out. But don’t delude yourself into believing they are valuable. Better yet, go get one yourself, smuggled out of a mine or otherwise at the source. Get it cut and polished, or better yet do it yourself. That I totally respect and has character, integrity, and value baked in.
As for status or something like that, I suppose there is a case to be made that it symbolizes a burnt offering. So that makes sense, but only against a backdrop of demonstrative excess. If you have a diamond ring and a loan of any kind that is anything other than strategic tax planning, that means your kids are worse off for your vanity. If you’ve got more money than god and you want to show that you can waste cash and it doesn’t matter, wear that ring studded with sub-museum grade diamonds a all day long, you’re making your point. It’s vulgar, but you’re making your point. I can see it. It’s like the track suit.
Otherwise, you may as well lace up your clown shoes.
But, that’s just my opinion. In all reality it’s a useful social signal, like certain religious expression.
If the value is in perfection. Why would I not pick one that is bigger, has less flaws and less impurities. It is like would I prefer natural rain water or artificially purified water without microplastics and pfas and so on... My pick should be clear.
I’m curious, how old are you? Age range works.
The article emphasizes that this is a generational thing and I’m wondering which generation you fall into.
The article emphasizes financial pressures on new couples due to rising living costs making lab-grown diamonds more appealing, and that's sad in my mind, it's sad that the cost of living prices people out from nice things, it's sad that people here are coping saying lab made are the same, which to me is like saying a veggie patty is the same as a beef and I'm a bad person for eating meat, that a knockoff purse is the same as the brand name because they are both leather; dematerialize and dissasociate from the world more why dont you, oh are you above consumerism and so romantic you could wear a string as a wedding band because its more about meaning. What's the point of any fashion then. Of any art if any paint will do. Gold is just metal too then.
[Born during Clinton's first term]
there are many naturally occuring objects that have a similarly dramatic timeline
the point is that westerners are completely drunk on the marketing from de beers and its cost lives, not to mention the disgusting machiavellian exploitation of what was once an innocent courtship gesture into an aggressive commercial enterprise, chiefly profiteering the hopelessly young and naive.