Scientists at De Beers Fight the Growing Threat of Man-Made Diamonds (wsj.com)

"In the past few years, lab-grown diamonds have become indistinguishable from natural diamonds to the naked eye..." reports the Wall Street Journal. This creates a problem for diamond-mining company De Beers. HughPickens.com writes: While synthetics make up just a fraction of the market, they have growing appeal to younger buyers -- a headache for mine owners, who are under pressure to cut supply and lower prices, because traders, cutters and polishers are struggling to profit amid a credit squeeze and languishing jewelry sales... "Martin Roscheisen, chief executive of Diamond Foundry Inc., a San Francisco synthetic-diamond producer with a capacity of 24,000 carats, says he believes nearly all diamonds consumers purchase will be man-made in a few decades," reports the Journal. "To counter the threat, last year De Beers helped launch a trade association with other producers to market the attraction of natural diamonds. It also started marketing a new, cheap detector called PhosView, that uses ultraviolet light to detect lab-grown stones that quickly screens tiny synthetic diamonds.
It always seemed like a waste of money to me. After all, it's literally raining diamonds on Saturn.

Comments

Very good

[Brett Buck]

Diamonds aren't particularly rare, the only thing that makes them valuable is that DeBeers has been holding a very tight near-monopoly, so there's no free market.

      Their operation is a reality version of the cartoon view of capitalism promoted by leftists for years. Every bad thing you can think of, they do, from the monopoly, exploitation of workers, callous disregard for humanity, and on and on. Capitalism and western society left this sort of bullcrap behind 100 years ago, but not these bastards. Anything that breaks their hold will be welcome from all sides of the spectrum,

Re:mountains of diamonds

[haruchai]

And have what are essentially slaves to dig up new ones.

Perhaps synthetic diamonds should be marketed as "cruelty-free diamonds". As far as synthetic vs. natural -- if it's made up of carbon atoms arranged in a face-centered cubic crystal structure called a diamond lattice (to paraphrase Wikipedia), it's a fucking diamond. All the work of digging up "natural" stones, etc ... doesn't make them better, just more expensive. Of course, I'm sure The Diamond Industry will disagree (and have me killed). :-)

The De Beers cartel has certainly put a lot of effort into controlling the diamond market so you may want to keep a low profile.
The Atlantic magazine's excellent article from 1982 enlightened my younger self as to the utter scam that is the diamond industry
http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...

Re:mountains of diamonds

[mark-t]

Diamonds are certainly not the "most common of the gemstones". They average something like a fraction of a carat per tonne of rock even in a diamond mine, which are themselves pretty rare geological occurrences around the world

All gem grade materials are rare, composing just a tiny fraction of the earth. Diamonds are no exception to this, but among gems, diamonds are actually the most common.

Re:mountains of diamonds

[Lonewolf666]

I'm just curious, would diamond wafers offer any serious advantages over current silicon? Heat conduction, maybe?

Long version: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369702107703498

Short version:
Diamond promises to be superior in most properties that are important for electronic components.