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

Re:mountains of diamonds

[thesupraman]

Nice shilling, but very much not true.
They have some competition, yes.
You if you read, just above, ' a headache for mine owners, who are under pressure to cut supply and lower prices'
cutting supply is almost exactly how the prices have been kept at the stupid level they are these days.
Diamonds are among the MOST common of the gemstones, and about the only reason for their pricing was cunning marketing and supply control..

Re:mountains of diamonds

[glenebob]

It should be possible to introduce impurities into a lab grown diamond to create patterns based on DNA, or a fingerprint, or hell, an RSA public key. Then they'd be unique in a more meaningful way than natural imperfections.