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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."
The diamond industry for wedding rings is bullshit -- it was created in by US advertisers in the 1930s to prop up South Africa's failing economy. Don't buy into the hype. Real or synthetic, it's still BS.
Give a nice wedding ring, but not expensive. Maybe something that's been in the family for a few generations. Doesn't have to be diamond either -- non-diamond engagement rings are quite common outside the US.
Open your minds.
I love watching nonsense industries die because my generation couldn't care less.
This clown won't grade them because they are superior - but the reality is there is no shortage of mined ones either.
He's desperately trying to gaslight everyone and it's...not....workiiiiing.......
...but DeBeers has literally trillions of carats of diamonds in their vaults. They've been stockpiling them for over a century to maintain the illusion that diamonds are rare.
Most likely they will simply start liquidating their massive stocks of real diamonds as "lab grown" because they're running out of vault space.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
It would be ironic if the non-carbon impurities in monkeyshit actually made diamonds of a brilliant and exotic color, otherwise unattainable. Think of Kopi Luwak -- maybe they'd be equally valuable.
Diamond is so spectacular because of its high refractive index. If you want a fake diamond, cubic zirconia or silicon carbide are the favoured ways to go. Refractive indices: diamond 2.42; cubic zirconia 2.15; silicon carbide 2.65; fused silica glass 1.46.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
So as long as they're making synthetic diamonds, I wonder if they'll make Carbon 14 diamond batteries.
And once you've got a radioactive diamond inside a layer of non-radioactive diamond acting as a semiconductor and collecting power, how about using that power to run semiconductor circuitry in the surrounding diamond?
Blinky-light diamond jewelry. Little computerized devices networking with a protocol like Bluetooth Low Energy (which gets by on miniscule amounts of power by mostly sleeping at microwatt levels until it's time to listen or talk.)
The possibiliies are endless. Also tacky.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Lab grown are not special, they're not real, they're not unique.
That's a complete crock of shit. Digging a rock out of the ground doesn't make it special. I don't even get the "not real" comment aside from being a bunch of marketing bullshit. It's a diamond chemically no different from any other diamond in any way that actually matters. And they are every bit as unique as a diamond you dig out of the ground and in fact can be made to have specific desired properties.
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."
This is basically an admission that the lab made stones are every bit as good as the ones they dig up so they need to pretend that they are different somehow. Making diamonds in a lab is functionally identical to opening a new diamond mine. It increases supply. DeBeers has had a monopoly on distribution for ages because they controlled the supply of diamonds. They literally keep huge numbers of them out of circulation to prop up prices. The problem for them is that they cannot control supply if anyone can make a diamond so they are trying to create an artificial distinction between dug up diamonds versus lab made ones. If you actually buy this malarkey you are an idiot.
If someone is smart what they will do is label lab made diamonds as "conflict free lab grade pure diamond" as opposed to dirty dug up diamonds so you can be sure that they aren't supporting terrorism, oppression, etc.
I wonder if it helps prop up the price of smaller natural diamonds.
If good and big man-made diamonds become relatively cheap, it seems like they would become a natural alternative for the type of person who judges quality by quantity. So now you have "low class" people sporting large diamonds, creating the social association of big diamonds with the trailer park crowd.
Your high-class moneyed crowd who previously might have liked making a statement with a 2 carat ring now finds themselves unable to impress anyone with a large diamond, or worse, gets mistaken for the wrong social class.
So they revert to small natural diamonds -- since nobody would buy a small man-made diamond when you could buy a big one, now expensive and small diamonds are seen as a statement of wealth.
Not the only reason - diamonds aren't just sparkly decorations, they have utilitarian value. Just like gold, the industrial applications are where diamonds really shine.
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]
Exactly +1
For those interested, Adam Ruins Everything make an episode about it
Elok