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."
The price would be a lot lower anyway. They've got tons of em, they just let out a select portion each year.
They're also sending hundreds people here to mine the diamonds for them.
...that I can't even afford the knock-off diamonds on this V-day, you insensitive clod!
-Valiss
$4,000 a karat sounds a bit higher than a natural diamond.
"Look...I got you this overpriced diamond...and its all nice and yellow"
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
The next girl who fakes an orgasm with me will get one of these. Then we'll see who's a fat jobless loser.
I also reply below your current threshold.
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.
I understand it is time to sell my bag of diamonds before they still have some value :)
M.
--
That would save me some bucks this Valentine's Day...
Way to go, slashdot! This is just what the few geeks who actually have significant others want to hear...ON VALENTINE'S DAY AFTERNOON!!!!!
Perhaps last week or before would have served us a bit better, eh?
"visibly indistinguishable from a natural one"..suuure buddy, let me introduce you to a new and sofisticated tool for certifying the authenticity of a diamond, the girlfriend. Somehow they always know...damn it
Tommy: What's got him creased?
Kev: It's a diamond
Tommy: The fuckin' thing's brown.
Paul: It's called champagne; it's a trend
Tommy: Oh right, they were calling it "piss", but they weren't moving any units
Dude, this is Slashdot.
Our imaginary girlfriends would be more than happy with a cubic zirconia. ;)
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
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]
isn't that offensive? perhaps they prefer to be called diamonds of color?
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
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.
My boss has been diamonds sythethically between his ass cheeks for years.
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.
Wired Magazine had a cover-story about synthetic diamonds a few months back with some pretty detailed information. Slashdot covered the story here.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
The bitter end will come in 2023, when Apollo Diamond's U.S. patents on chemical vapor deposition are scheduled to expire.
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.
There was a show on Gerogia Public Television last night about Australia's diamond mine called Argile and the rare pink diamond that it produces.
They don't even mention the prices because they go into private collections.
Actually Rubies and Saphires are a more rare gem.
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.
Here's something: Literally give your significant other the sun . . . A white dwarf diamond that is!
Scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the University of Cambridge, and UFSC Brazil have identified in the constellation Centaurus what is likely to be the fate of our own sun. With a rhythmically harmonious core and a 'suface' of hydrogen and helium this carbon-predominant cellestial body is known as BPM 37093. It is the largest diamond ever indentified in the wild at Twenty-five hundred miles across and weighing 5 million trillion trillion pounds!". Artistic Representainions and Videos are available here.
The Catto Diamond
A businessman boarded a plane to find, sitting next to him, an elegant woman wearing the largest, most stunning diamond ring he had ever seen.
He asked her about it.
"This is the Catto diamond," she said. "It is beautiful, but there is a terrible curse that goes with it."
"Oh - what's the curse?" the man asked.
"Mr. Catto."
Stuff that matters.
I say enough of this. I'm tired of diamond being the best at everything. Let's all surround diamond after posting, and set it straight. Maybe we can go all Orwell on this holier-than-thou tetrahedral structure, and erase it from history. Now who's the hardest, huh?
Diamond thinks is so tough....
A diamond ring needs to cost about twenty bucks.
Until then it's cubic zirconia and $3980 worth of food and heating oil for you, my sweet.
KFG
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
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
Scientists to DeBeers: FUCK YOU!!!
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
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.
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!
Somebody apparently didn't read the article. They aren't "phony" diamonds. They're _real_. Purer than the real thing in fact. On top of which, diamonds used in diamond tipped drill bits are _already_ industrial (read: artificially manufactured) diamonds. The only difference here is that traditional methods generate only diamond dust or a thin film.
Why?
Your post would have been valid seven years ago.
Kimberly Process. It is being taken very seriously in the trade, and for very selfish reasons, as well as ethical ones. The idea of children with their legs cut off does not sell diamonds. The diamond industry has made every effort to sort it out. Compare our attitude to that of the clothing industry while they continue to use third world slave labour.
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
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
Personally, I'm glad that the price of diamonds is so high... I don't care if it's a monopoly or not. If diamonds weren't worth so much, there wouldn't be as much R&D dollars spent towards developing synthetic diamonds... and without that technology, the "diamond age" of electronics would be much much farther in the future.
Not qute so. Melt-grown High pressure/high temeperature diamonds can have inclusions (tiny specs of the metal solvent) in them and a microscopic defect from the original seed crystal. Also the fancy yellow kind which Gemesis produces used to be extremely rare, so if you see one like this chances are that it is artificial. Then there is fluorescence (shine under UV) with most of these stones, although not with every one. (And a portion of natural diamonds have fluorescence also). The most reliable test is FT-infrared spedtroscopy, there are characteristic absorbtion bands in these artificial diamonds because of a different nitrogen atom distribution than in naturals.
Plasma-deposited diamonds (Apollo) are typicaly flawless, and they do not grow from a seed. So far, these tend to be small and very flat. If anything, they tend to appear "too perfect" upon inspection.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
The term for what the diamond structure is at room temperature is "metastable", which means it isn't stable, but may as well be since you don't care what is going to happen to the diamond in a few thousand years at room temperature.
As for the chemical vapour deposition machines, the technique is simple and the machines are relatively cheap (I used to work in the same room as one in a fairly poorly funded university), and there are quite a few now being used in industry to put diamond and other coatings on things. The trick is always getting the reaction to occur at the surface, and getting things to stick.
Industrial diamond coatings that just have to be hard is one thing, but things that have to be low in flaws or have carefully placed impurities (doped semicondutor junctions) are a bit trickier, or things with large thicknesses (a dirty great big rock to put on someones finger instead of a ten micron thick layer) are also tricky. The old way of producing artificial diamonds, used by DuPont, is to wrap explosives around some graphite and set it off. This produces lots of nice little diamonds, which are great if you don't care about optical properties (they look black) or size (average around 0.1 mm). This is of course completely useless for electronics or jewelry, and it's not that easy to stick little diamonds together to make a large solid object (you need to hit it really hard and really fast, and you can't hit it fast enough in a normal atmosphere).
"At a few hundred degrees the transformation [of diamond] would occur in seconds instead of thousands of years, and you would end up with very expensive bits of graphite."
In air (which is about 20% oxygen) diamonds will withstand heat to around 1560 degrees Fahrenheit. It is not necessary for jewelers to remove diamonds from jewelry prior to soldering it with a blowtorch. If you coat a diamond with boric acid, you can heat it to higher temperatures then that.
Diamonds Lasting Forever