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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.......
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