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De Beers To Sell Diamonds Made In a Lab (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: De Beers, which almost single-handedly created the allure of diamonds as rare, expensive and the symbol of eternal love, now wants to sell you some party jewelry that is anything but. The company announced today that it will start selling man-made diamond jewelry at a fraction of the price of mined gems, marking a historic shift for the world's biggest diamond miner, which vowed for years that it wouldn't sell stones created in laboratories. The strategy is designed to undercut rival lab-diamond makers, who having been trying to make inroads into the $80 billion gem industry. De Beers will target younger spenders with its new diamond brand and try to capture customers that have been resistant to splurging on expensive jewelry. The company is betting that it can split the market -- with mined gems in luxury settings and engagement rings at the top, and lab-made fashion jewelry aimed at millennials at the bottom. "Lab grown are not special, they're not real, they're not unique. You can make exactly the same one again and again," Bruce Cleaver, chief executive officer of De Beers, said in an interview Tuesday. De Beers says the man-made diamonds will not compete with mined stones. It's so adamant about this that it will not grade them in the traditional way. "We're not grading our lab-grown diamonds because we don't think they deserve to be graded," Cleaver said. "They're all the same."
As for pricing, "The lab diamonds from De Beers will sell for about $800 a carat," reports Bloomberg. "A 1-carat man-made diamond sells for about $4,000 and a similar natural diamond fetches roughly $8,000."
As for pricing, "The lab diamonds from De Beers will sell for about $800 a carat," reports Bloomberg. "A 1-carat man-made diamond sells for about $4,000 and a similar natural diamond fetches roughly $8,000."
There's even more to that story. In the 1950s, the diamond industry did research that showed that when the prospective bride was involved in the purchase of the engagement ring, they actually picked a smaller, less expensive diamond. So, the industry, led by De Beers, started a campaign pushing the idea that men were supposed to surprise their bride-to-be with an engagement ring, thus cutting the more frugal woman out of the picture. You know that iconic image of the man pulling out the little ring box, and the blushing bride squealing with delight? It's all some made up corporate horseshit like Santa Claus or Trump University.
It's bad enough that the De Beers family is covered in blood, but they've constructed a string of lies to sell their despicable merchandise.
You are welcome on my lawn.
No kidding. De Beers is like the worst caricatures of evil capitalists.
They are not "like" a caricature of evil. They are evil. The very essence of violent, monopolistic corruption. They do not tolerate competition. They invented the modern perception of diamonds as rare, valuable objects synonymous with "love" and they mean to guard that perception like a saber-tooth mother hen. It's a crystallized piece of carbon. DeBeers has huge warehouses filled with raw diamonds. They restrict the supply to keep prices high.
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OK, I found it. The first mention I could find of the story was in a Wall Street Journal article from 2009 (behind a paywall).
https://www.wsj.com/articles/S...
It was referenced again on the Mental Floss blog (written by some writers from This American Life and other places). It seems to be taken from the Wall Street Journal story.
http://mentalfloss.com/article...
You are welcome on my lawn.
moissanite is the mineral form of silicon carbide they listed
DeBeers already holds back the majority of the supply of diamonds to artificially inflate the cost. They do plenty of other things to do that as well.
The other lab grown diamond manufacturers have gotten in the business and sold so high because the costs of mined diamonds is so high it's like honey to a bear.
Yes, they are all just as real and special, and often the lab diamonds have less inclusions than the mined diamonds, which is considered a better diamond. Of course DeBeers is fighting that because they control the bulk of mined diamonds and don't want to lose their ultra premium profits.
Unless you have an imperfect mined diamond, or recognize the serial number markings, even a jeweler can't tell mined from lab diamonds because the only thing different from them is age and origin.
You know, having the consistency of lab diamonds is considered a big boon for anyone making jewelry needing matched stones.
DeBeers is just freaking out because they are slowly (maybe not so slowly now) losing control over a market they've had a near monopoly on for over a century.
[Insert laugh track and applause here]
Half right. The optical dispersion is equally important, a.k.a. the variation of the refractive index as a function of the wavelength, a.k.a. the material's ability to "pull the colors apart" when used as a prism. A hypothetical gemstone with a high refractive index but little optical dispersion would show the "black and white faces" of diamond when lit with a white spotlight, but none of the "rainbows" (which the gemstone lovers call "fire").
One of the measures for optical dispersion is the difference in refractive index between 686.7 nm and 430.8 nm. Values: diamond 0.044; cubic zirconia ~0.06; silicon carbide ~0.1; fused silica glass ~0.01; corundrum 0.018 (and the latter has a refractive index of 1.77).
To visually pass for a diamond in the eyes of an expert, a stone needs to have a refractive index not too far from diamond AND an optical dispersion not too far from diamond AND not too much birefringence. Slilicon carbide fails quite badly at the latter 2 criteria and visually is a worse substitute for diamond than cubic zirconia. Some people claim that the latter still has "too much flame", but I'm quite sceptical that many people would be able to visually tell the difference, even with good lightning and magnification. I believe I once read jewelers pick out cubic zirconia based on its material properties (density and/or thermal conductivity, which are both very different from diamond - more so than silicon carbide).
Of course, if you don't care that a gem passes for a diamond, only that it looks good, then one could argue "the more dispersion, the better". Though some would object that too much color would make it look tacky. There's no accounting for taste (and neither for BS people perpetuate to sound "refined").
I proposed with silicon carbide (moissanite). Indeed more brilliant than a diamond, and my wife loved both the fact that it was not a blood diamond and also that silicon carbide in nature is found in meteorites. So it is a lab grown alien gem basically, more spectacular than a diamond at around $500/carat.
The thing is, diamonds are quite common in nature, their scarcity is artificial. So you are paying through the nose for something that is abundant just because of the De Beers racket.
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It'd certainly be easy to add flawing to the process, and it certainly may have already happened (from De Beers new position, i'd say it has... this shift is fairly seismic), but natural diamonds are not all that scarce.
A few years back, the way De Beers was marketing their diamonds was due to the flaws that natural diamonds didn't have!
10 years ago, it was easy to make a diamond by submitting any form of carbon (plus a small seed diamond) to a very high pressure and temperature (graphite being the best one, since there's not a lot of impurities). This results in flawed diamonds. If the diamond grows slowly it tends to form an almost perfect crystalline structure. But if a diamond grows fast different parts of the diamond grow independently and you have lots of fractures where the different crystalline sections merge. A consequence of these different crystalline sections interacting is a different behavior, when exposed to UV light. Artificial colorless diamonds would shine under UV light, whereas the real ones wouldn't (owing to the single crystal form, which dissipated all the UV energy).
Then, some guys discovered the holy grail of diamond making, the exact conditions for chemical vapor deposition. You basically start with a seed diamond and a mixture of gases (typically methane and hydrogen). In this process, the artificial diamond is grown atom by atom, from the seed diamond. The process is slow (a growth of micrometers per hour), but you get perfect diamonds, because each added atom conforms to the structure of the existing diamond.
So, as De Beers as done in the past, they're changing their marketing strategy and saying that, after all, flaws are awesome. It's business as usual for them...
It's male genital mutilation. Don't try to pass it off as 'healthy'.
There are health advantages -- and disadvantages -- that are quite well-documented. Just saying that "it's wrong" doesn't make those go away, you know, and is not going to be a strong argument in convincing people that don't share your belief that it's wrong.
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