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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."
The price would be a lot lower anyway. They've got tons of em, they just let out a select portion each year.
The diamond industry (mining, cutting, and selling) is quite large. Is it possible they can convince governments to regulate the man-made ones, and have them somehow marked to allow people to note the difference? It may seem a bit out-there, but there's a lot of money at stake for a lot of people.
You can bet that DeBeers will fight until the bitter end to preserve their diamond monopoly.
Let's hope they lose.
NO CARRIER
It's in electronics. Diamonds have plenty of intersiting properites that make them highly desirable for semiconducter applications, as well as heatsinks. See this article for some info. There's a problem, though, real diamonds simply don't come large enough, pure enough, and in the right kinds to make this practical on anything but a small scale. This will not be a problem with synthetics, they can cook up whatever kind they like, and Apollo at least makes them very, very pure. That's where the real money will be at. As big as jewelry is, it pales in comparison to eveltonics, espically given that we will eventually hit the limit of what silicon is capable of. The synthetic makers are basically just using jewelry as a means to an end, to finance their bussiness to get them to the state where they can start mass producing for other uses.
The bitter end will come in 2023, when Apollo Diamond's U.S. patents on chemical vapor deposition are scheduled to expire.
And what meaning would that be? "I'm willing to spend a few thousand dollars on you"? Buy her a nice car, it will have a purpose and cost way more than some piddling little ring. Buy a house, you're going to be making a family theoretically, you'll want a place to live, right?
There are plenty of better ways to show that you're willing to spend money on someone (how exactly does this relate to love again?) that are actually useful, or that could be just as, if not more, romantic (Paris for two for a week?)
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Any woman that ends up with me knows right from the start not to expect diamonds or gold from me. I have no problem buying jewlery, but I buy from independant artisans. Not only does it support the little guy but to me it means lot more to give a unique, one of a kind gift as opposed to some generic diamond/gold piece that you can buy in any mall in the country.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
Its amazing to me that we all know diamonds are NOT rare at all, yet we still pay a premium for them. Anyone who watched the discovery channel knows that there are in fact HUGE stores of diamonds held back to keep the price up. I would be willing to bet that colored diamonds are not that rare at all, but are kept back in all but tiny numbers to make them seem that way. We know that DeBeers is evil. We know that deal in blood diamonds so they are certainly not above this.
Heck ADM and its competitors were in a global plot to keep lycean (spelling) prices high for years and they weren't killing people, so just think how far DeBeers would go. \
Assuming that the diamonds are not rare at all as most of us know, what then is the point of making them? They are only cheaper then the inflated price but would most likely be more expensive if people knew the truth about diamonds. IMHO anyways.
Expect PR campaigns emphasizing "the natural flaws of diamonds".
I, for one, would pay a premium for a diamond's profits went to high-tech inventors instead of to slave owners.
The reason a $10,000 diamond is valuable is because it cost $10,000. If it cost $100, you just bought your girl -- the love of your life -- a symbol worth less than an XBox.
Rarity in fashion is a strange thing; the cost of the object becomes an inherent part of the value -- it's not that the object is worth some certain amount, it's that the acquisition of it was so horrifyingly expensive and difficult that only a very precious few could achieve it. To gift someone with the results of this effort -- that's a sign of significance.
This might seem difficult to comprehend, so let me jump domains for a moment. What's the value of a moon rock? I mean, it's just rock from the moon; we could probably synthesize something chemically identical trivially. Ah, lets say you got an award, and were given the moon rock as a prize. Tell me you wouldn't show it off to everyone.
Same sh*t -- only difference is, instead of the cost being that of a trip to the moon, the cost is an enormous amount of one's savings. The price of diamonds is set high enough to be interesting but low enough to be possible.
It has NOTHING AT ALL to do with the value of the rocks themselves.
--Dan