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Diamond Age Coming Soon
Roland Piquepaille writes "In 'The many facets of man-made diamonds,' Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN) writes that synthetic diamonds are getting bigger and cheaper. An example: for Valentine's Day, you can buy a yellow colored man-made diamond, visibly indistinguishable from a natural one, for $4,000 per carat. This is a 30% discount when compared with a natural diamond. This very long article also says that if synthetic diamond makers are targeting the jewelry market first, these new products will have an impact on many other industries. Not only is it now possible to grow bigger diamonds, you also can choose their color. 'Colored diamonds, which are valuable and very rare, can be created by introducing carefully controlled elemental impurities into the stone,' says C&EN. For instance, nitrogen produces a yellow stone. Infusing boron into the growing diamond produces a blue gem. This overview contains some details, references and photos of men-made diamonds, but read the original article for even more technical explanations if you have the time."
A very high quality one carat diamond can easily run upwards of $10,000. Try pricing one on bluenile.com.
Diamonds are graded on color. A is the clearest and the more yellow pigment there is the farther into the alphabet the color grade. The price falls significantly as you move down the scale. Then you get all the way to Z+ which becomes "fancy yellow" and then the price goes WAY up. The yellow is caused by nitrogen impurities. The diamond manufacturing people can make a lot more per carat if they intentionally put nitrogen into their diamonds.
-B
The gold industry is not a monopoly; it's a commodity metal available from dozens, if not hundreds, of sources. The vast majority of diamond production & distribution is controlled by a single company -- the DeBeers organization. Also, while the purity (and therefore value) of gold can be easily determined with a chemical test, diamond valuation is very difficult -- even experts can have very different opinions as to the value of a given stone.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
1952 was the year that man made diamonds made their debut. Despite all the innacurate blather from Wired, we can still tell man made from natural diamond.Spectroscopic examination of Chemical Vapour Deposition (CVD) created diamonds, which is the method Apollo uses, or the classic High Pressure/High temperature (HPHT) method, both have characteristic absorption spectra. Furthermore, there are some clues to be had with less esoteric equipment. CVD diamonds have a chararacteristic strain pattern in the crystal structure that is discernable. HPHT diamonds are more identifiable, as the gemmologist community has had more time to examine them... decades.
Man made emeralds and rubies have been made for decades, and in many cases are superior. Chatham offers a life time warranty on their emeralds for example. It hasn't destroyed the price of emeralds, as there are enough people who want the real thing, much like many people can paint a repica of the Mona Lisa, down to the brush strokes, but the real thing is still more expensive.
The real problem as far as the jewellery industry is concerned is that unscrupulous people try and sell these as real, and less knowledgeable jewellers pass them on to consumers. I have no problems selling man made stones as man made stones, but disclosure is the important part. I expect that this might even drive the price of diamonds that are certified as natural up, due to the difficulty but not impossibility of identification.
p.s. To those people who think that diamonds are overpriced due to DeBeers, why is it that now that DeBeers no longer controls the industry (less than half of worldwide production now goes through DeBeers), why have prices stayed stable? Could it be that the price of mining and cutting is reflected in the price of diamonds, and that the pricing actually is correct?
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
I think I would actually prefer a man made diamond, in places like Sierra Leone and Congo diamond mining is the cause huge amounts of criminal violence and suffering.
In group behavior: 'because they're evil/morons/sheep/crazy' is not 'insightful' it's 'oversimplified'
A few years ago, there was an exellent installment of NOVA that looked into the whole natural/synthetic diamond business. Everything from the early history of how DeBeers cornered the market to the (then) latest attempts at producing gem quality crystals.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
There is even a third type of diamond that has been developed at City University in Hong Kong. It differs from the one found in nature (a cubic form) and the one found in meteorites (a hexagonal form) by the way the carbon atoms bond to each other: rhombohedral form.
Restore America: Dr. Ron Paul for President!
Actually, no.
Blue diamonds are not that rare. Pale yellow diamonds as well as brownish colored diamonds in the K-M range are lower in value. However Fancy Yellow diamonds in the S and higher range are quite expensive.
Blue diamonds are expensive, but are not as rare as pink or red diamonds. Pinks and reds are orders of magnitude higher in price compared to yellows and blues. As well, do not buy from a vendor who claims they sell "blue/white" diamonds because this has been called a deceptive practice when diamond vendors would sell white diamonds that had blue flourescence that made them appear slightly bluish in hue when in sunlight. Many diamonds exhibit flourescence in many colors. They usually lower the asking price as well. Blue flourescence can be a good thing if it is moderate and does not cause a milky appearance because it can offset a light yellow tone and make it appear a whiter stone.