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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."
"Lab grown are not special, they're not real,"
They're as special and real as any other diamond (ie not special but equally real). The diamond business is a scam and they know it. There's a reason this product is deliberately targeted at women...
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.
"This product sucks. It's garbage. You don't want it. It's for losers. Embarrassingly bad. Don't be caught dead with one. Come get 'em, half off everybody! We got lots!"
Lab grown are not special, they're not real, they're not unique. You can make exactly the same one again and again
He means that the ones they dig out of the ground are flawed in different ways, but the manufactured diamonds are perfect.
Not special maybe, though more special and rare than the abundant but artificially limited supply of mined ones. As for not real? WTF? they are as real as any other diamond, what makes a diamond is its chemical makeup and structure not whether it was lab created or mined.
...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.
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Seriously, you can make diamonds out of any carbon source. So if the goal is to debase lab grown diamonds as low cost and therefore low value, make them out of literal monkey poop. Here you go honey, a 1 carat diamond, I got it cheap because it's made from monkey poop.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
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and at least have children working at these new labs.
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"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...". So, a lab diamond is $800 a carat and a man-made diamond is $4000 a carat? What's the difference between a lab diamond and a man-made diamond?
I thought Bloomberg was rich enough to hire copy editors.
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.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
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.
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moissanite is the mineral form of silicon carbide they listed
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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(1) Have manufacturing costs declined enough to flood the market?
They are much more cheaper to produce in a lab than extract from the ground.
But they haven't been flooding the market, because marking/PR has managed to make the target audience think that even if the same carbon atoms(*) are in the same place, somehow it's only "the real deal" if some child slave did dig it from the ground, not if some white lab coat put them together.
You can buy them, for a lower price than "real" diamond. But interest is lower. Some girls insist in having child slavery-produced lumps of carbon on their engagement ring, for whatever reason...
On the other hand industry simply LOVES them : you get the exact same properties as "real" diamond, but you get them much cheaper and you have better control on the impurities and flaws.
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(*) : As opposed to say diamond simulant - gems that look supperficially alike but have completely different composition (Zirkon, etc.)
(2) Are they deliberately flawing these synthetic diamonds
Yes, technique has evolved to let you control the impurities that get inside the lab grown diamond, because some have interesting properties that are desirable...
to pass them for the natural thing,
...diamond are very heavily tracked (they are micro etched, they come with certificates) in order to enable tracking of the origin (e.g.: to try to avoid "blood" diamonds)
Of course conterfeits *are* a thing also in diamond land.
But that means somebody is going to find out that more diamond are tracked back to a given mine that said mine is producing.
since natural diamonds are truly scarce?
Actually, even the "real" diamond aren't *that* scares. It's simply DeBeers trying to release them into the market in a controlled fashison to keep them even more scare and keep their price higher.
As they still have a sizeable chunk of the diamond market, they can still manage to pull some influence this way.
If the answer to either question is "Yes", then the value of the diamond market will collapse soon.
Currently no, the market doesn't collapse (outside of the industry), because marketing/PR has managed to put a spin that the child slave labor is a necessity to make it "real" even if the same carbon atoms are in the same position as when a white lab coat does it.
The industry doesn't give a fuck, and there, the market for De Beers has evaporated as better techniques have evolved to progressively produce more of what the industry craves for.
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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.