Slashdot Mirror
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."
wow, and insightful first post.
and you are so right. A few wars might stop as well if the price wasn't so artificially inflated.
A blog about stuff.
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.
G
I visited a friend's workplace last week, a machine shop.
He said that diamond tooling has made a big change in his workplace, allowing heat treated steel to be machined rather than ground.
Wired had a great article about this in September: The New Diamond Age
The diamond industry is scared. It's interesting.
(Check out the cover from this issue...Damn!)
A speech...
are likely mined in poor Africian countries with DeBeer's cartel has control of the government and will turn the other way when that government forces children into the state militias. Many of the natural diamonds floating around the market were born out of murder.
Trust us Brits to come up with this - we had a news article on TV a while back about getting the ashes of your cremated loved ones turned into yellow diamonds ! The coloration comes from the nitrogen content of the ashes apparently.
"I am not bound to please thee with my answers" [William Shakespeare]
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
DeBeers will still sell their own "natural" rocks based purely on marketing.
Likewise, Coca-Cola had a monopoly on cola soft drinks until Pepsi and RC came around. Some people will always prefer De Beers's conflict diamonds, but others will prefer Apollo brand cultured products, and competition will drive prices down until the bottom falls out of the market in 2023 when Apollo's patents run out.
For those of you who haven't followed diamonds for a while, De Beers is arguably the largest and most prolific monopoly in the world, having survived, among other incidents, an American anti-trust inquiry with its reputation, and vicariously that of diamonds, entirely unscathed.
There are several forms of producing synthetic diamonds, and the closer these synthetic diamonds are to real ones, the more likely the company will be bought and all its intellectual property dissolved.
One company is Apollo Diamond, I recall. From what I understand, their research is conducted in the back of a pharamacy in an undisclosed mall somewhere in the USA.
Apparently, threatening to undermine a multi-billion dollar industry is very risky. I seem to recall there have been numerous coincidental deaths related to diamonds, diamond mines, and synthetic diamonds. Like all things involving enormous economics, life, liberty, and security of person are hardly the most important.
The resorting of finding ways to distinguish crystalline properties, is just a stalling tactic on the part of the diamond industry. I doubt the public cares about minute differences in the crystalline structure if all other properties are identical (which is not the case for say cubic-zirconium).
Should the public care, then eventually technology will find a way to make the diamonds the same on even this level. More likely synthetic diamonds will exceed natural diamonds in purity and regularity of structure. The diamond cartel will try to convince the public (unsuccessfully) that they want inferior natural diamonds, and the whole thing will collapse.
For a while the two may exist side by side, much like the cultured pearl industry and natural pearls, but it will have a depressive effect on the price of natural diamonds.
The writing is on the wall my friend.
Letter To Iran
The interesting point about that Wired article is that the owner of one of the companies is not really interested in making money in diamonds via selling it as jewelry. Rather, he may be selling some as jewelry to bankroll more research in developing diamonds that are large enough to supplant silicon in creating new types of computer processors. The semiconductor business is where the money's at. In fact, that's how he originally made his fortune, as an engineer in Silicon Valley developing chips. When he dropped everything and pursued diamonds, many thought he was a kook. Both heads of the companies fear for their lives, I'd imagine, and rightly so -- you don't know how ruthless DeBeers can be.
Linux at home
FYI:
If you were to talk to your grandparents parents or grandparents, they would have no concept of giving a diamond to someone. For a very long time saphires were the wedding stone of choice, but DeBeers has crafted quite an amazing artificial scarcity, monopoly and hugely successful marketing campaign that just proves that people are f***ing stupid, period.
Debeers is one of the most cruel and devious corporations in the world. Their tactics are desicable, yet oh-so-creative. They've successfully stopped Australian and Russian diamonds from being so much as marketed in the United States with these tactics, and I'm sure it'll only take their executives a small amount of time to figure out how to keep these artificial diamonds out of the market.
You know their slogan, "a diamond is forever"? Yes, forever. Meaning you keep it forever. Meaning you don't sell it. Meaning there is no second-hand market. They really are good at eliminating markets, no?
Unfortunately, history suggests otherwise.
Synthetic rubies and sapphires go for less than a dollar per carat wholesale. Natural ones are still more expensive, even ugly, flawed, tiny ones. The high-quality stones still go for hundres per carat, rising into the thousands as the size increases.
The synthetics are used mostly for industrial use, class rings, and similar very cheap jewelry (except where it's passed off as the real thing).
I don't see anything indicating that this is going to change, unfortunately, not until consumers decide that the DeBeers syndicate is just too dirty, and either insist on stones from outside the syndicate (Canada is producing some very nice ones) or choose diamond alternatives.