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

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

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

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

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

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

(1) https://e6-prd-cdn-01.azureedge.net/mediacontainer/medialibr…

(2) https://www.forbes.com/sites/amandakooser/2024/08/23/monster…

(3) https://ikcabstracts.com/index.php/ikc/article/download/4101…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unless the Pixel 7 has it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And, honestly, that would be really really cool.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who wants to know their engagement ring was half price?

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

    Vacuum volume           1.00        m^3
    Vacuum radius           0.62        m
    Air density             1.23        kg/m^3
    Displaced mass          1.23        kg
    Diamond density         3250        kg/m^3
    Diamond volume          3.77E-04    m^3
    Sphere surface area     4.84E+00    m^2
    (Thin shells can be approximated by ignoring curvature)
    Shell thickness         7.79E-05    m
    Shell thickness         77.94       μm (microns)
    Human hair thickness    17 to 181   μm (microns)

So the big vacuum-ball somehow needs to withstand crushing using only the strength of a diamond skin, and that skin is around as thick as (some) human hairs. It has to be thinner if you want it to float with a payload.

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

(0) https://xkcd.com/356/

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

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

(0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube_law

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

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

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

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

And arguably it was that character’s mother too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These are legit. I’ve bought some.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

> Artificial diamonds

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

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

80 is orders of magnitude lower than 250k.

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

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

Luxury products cost a lot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A lot of good use cases.

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

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

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

Man-made diamonds are just diamonds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ummmm no.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golconda_diamonds

(2) https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/16/koh-i-…

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

  > Who does not love diamonds? Where is there a mind in
  > which the bare mention of them does not excite a
  > pleasant emotion? Is there any one of rank too exalted
  > to care for such baubles? The highest potentates of the
  > earth esteem them as their choicest treasures, and
  > kingdoms have been at war for their possession

From “Diamonds” by William Pole, published in 1861 (1) (27 years before the formation of the De Beers company)

(1) https://www.google.com/books/edition/Diamonds/ENwOAAAAYAAJ?h…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is very much a bag holder problem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diamonds feel more like an NFT…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So yeah I probably just don’t ‘get it’ 🙂

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

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

It’s not a narrow experience. You just don’t see men wanting wedding rings from women. It doesn’t happen in the reverse and this is therefore a very real and general phenomenon exclusive to women.

Sexism usually means bias towards a single sex. I’m not like that at all. I can prove it. Here’s a statement negative to men but also true: Men can rape women but not the other way around. The statistics play out so negatively towards men that it’s a bit questionable when a grown man makes a statement that he has been raped by another woman.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Profound hubris in an otherwise interesting article.

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

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

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

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

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

> I’m genuinely curious why you bought a diamond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EDIT: changed real to natural when referring to diamonds

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

> Not because it’s a “better investment” but because they can.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

stigma is independent of any of those very reasonable metrics unfortunately

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

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

(1) https://frankdarling.com/

What a beautiful site.

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

Excellent execution!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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