People are being priced out of art and beauty and it's a shame economics and corruption make real diamonds dirty.
Believe 15A and 19A as much as you can believe De Beers' 'Building Forever 2030 Goal's
I’m not even sure that all of these recent stories about lab created diamonds to come out aren’t actually a PR pitch to advertise “natural” diamonds, an effort to emphasise the difference in the public psyche.
Anything public facing that positions diamonds as expensive, desirable, or valuable can usually be traced back to the cartel. It’s super common in movies and other media.
If you can, put enough gold on her to get her out of a jam and have some runway. Other than that it’s just the promises you keep.
But seriously, for us it matters, since she is much younger than I am. We make an effort to signal that we are a committed couple so that people don’t make crass assumptions.
Still, my ring is tungsten carbide and hers is a family wedding band handed down in my family for generations. Our engagement ring was also a family heirloom. In that way the rings have meaning.
She likes to wear her ring because she feels like it is a symbol of belonging, and I wear mine to honor our relationship.
To us, the rings are symbolic of our vows, a gentle reminder that our lives are in service of one another.
Not only that, imagine this scenario: something terrible happens. Your wife has to sell her jewelry to take care of herself and your child. Would you rather have bought her a $20000 ring that can maybe be sold for $3000? Or a ring with actual intrinsic value that might actually be worth more than what you paid, but at least fetch 80%.
When I think of how that would feel for her to know that I paid a foolish amount for something of inflated symbolic bling rather than a something of value, I get embarrassed just imagining it. To me that is an abdication of duty.
That’s the difference between diamonds and actual precious stones, or at lower price points a nice heavy gold ring with an inexpensive, lab grown gem.
For beauty, silicon carbide beats diamond hands down. If you want value and natural origins, a quality ruby or emerald is spectacular and actually rare and rationally market-priced. Gold is nice.
Until you get into very large and actually rare stones, diamonds are a scam, pure and simple. The value of a near flawless 1 carat stone at the mine is about two hundred dollars. Cutting costs about half that. To buy it, that stone might fetch $7000. To sell it, you might get $1000 if you’re lucky. That is not a store of value. It’s a symbol of gullibility or a boast that I have so much money that I can burn it without being irresponsible. The kind of boast that if you can’t back it up IRl makes you impossible to take seriously.
If you just really, really like diamonds, knock yourself out. But don’t delude yourself into believing they are valuable. Better yet, go get one yourself, smuggled out of a mine or otherwise at the source. Get it cut and polished, or better yet do it yourself. That I totally respect and has character, integrity, and value baked in.
As for status or something like that, I suppose there is a case to be made that it symbolizes a burnt offering. So that makes sense, but only against a backdrop of demonstrative excess. If you have a diamond ring and a loan of any kind that is anything other than strategic tax planning, that means your kids are worse off for your vanity. If you’ve got more money than god and you want to show that you can waste cash and it doesn’t matter, wear that ring studded with sub-museum grade diamonds a all day long, you’re making your point. It’s vulgar, but you’re making your point. I can see it. It’s like the track suit.
Otherwise, you may as well lace up your clown shoes.
But, that’s just my opinion. In all reality it’s a useful social signal, like certain religious expression.
Personally disagree. That whole "3 months' salary that will last forever" thing? A lab diamond will last just as forever as a mined one. I'd personally rather have one from a lab than one dug out of the earth by some African dude who spends his days sweating underground.
the point is that westerners are completely drunk on the marketing from de beers and its cost lives, not to mention the disgusting machiavellian exploitation of what was once an innocent courtship gesture into an aggressive commercial enterprise, chiefly profiteering the hopelessly young and naive.
The article emphasizes that this is a generational thing and I’m wondering which generation you fall into.
[Born during Clinton's first term]
Cost of living can only go up if people are willing to pay more. People are paying more for what we deem living expenses because what they consider "nice" has changed.
In the past people would spend more on a diamond and less on a house because they were out and about all day and wanted others to see the diamond. Now, they stay home to scroll through TikTok (or post on HN), so they would rather spend more on a house instead.
If diamonds, or something like it, became more interesting to people again, they'll soon start turning their sending in that direction — away from where they are currently directing it.
, is the worst economic take i've heard in a while and I read the FT. CoL is primarily driven by supply and demand, not willingness to pay, not to mention inflation, supply chain issues, inelastcity...
Fake diamonds are for vegans.
Right. Supply and demand. Not supply alone. And demand is characterized by the willingness to pay.
> not to mention inflation, supply chain issues, inelastcity...
These are already encompassed in supply and demand. Why mention them twice?
>[...] is the worst economic take i've heard in a while
Maybe so, but given that, it is curious that, in the end, you decided to repeat the exact same thing in your own words. A "worst take" is usually taken to mean that you see things differently, not see things exactly the same.
It does not take millions of years to form a diamond. It takes hours. The million years are atoms sitting around doing nothing before that, and then diamonds sitting around doing nothing while some of them are eventually pushed to the surface.
You can say the same thing about any mineral. There is nothing special about carbon or the diamond structure. If anything, zircons are much more significant, being the oldest minerals we can find.
> rated on a scale of color, clarity, cut, and weight.
This is nothing special. The colour of lab-grown stones can be varied almost at will, and the rest is still an issue with synthetic stones.
> Naaaaah let's just make it in a lab it looks the same.
That’s the thing, though: it does (yes, some synthetic stones have specific defects related to how they were made and they tent to be too perfect if anything, but they still have the exact same property). It’s like complaining that the meat you are eating comes from a farm instead of being hunted.
> People are being priced out of art and beauty and it's a shame economics and corruption make real diamonds dirty.
Quite the contrary. Gemstones become more accessible to more people. The diamond industry made its bed, being completely corrupted from extraction to distribution. When stones are cheap we can have discussion about their beauty instead of their prices.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5403988
There is nothing to miss about the impending death of the 'diamond industry'.
(Oh, the link is broken on the HN 2013 story -- try this one: https://priceonomics.com/diamonds-are-bullshit/ )
Why is it that everyone seems to have a soft spot for industries that have some kind of monopoly, suddenly losing that monopoly.
https://eutoday.net/antwerps-diamond-industry-facing-an-exis...
The resale value of your item has gone down.
Here's an example article from the era: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/2004/02/14/y...
I hope the parent commenter wasn’t duped by someone selling fake diamonds.
A year ago I picked up a 1ct hearts and arrows (D/E. VVS1/2, IGI certificate) from AliExpress for $360. I can see the hearts and arrows and it tests as diamond. A few months later an article came out about how lab diamonds stack up against mined, and the author had also bought one with similar characteristics from AliExpress for even less.
I just checked the same store and they're (not H&A but same other stats) running around $125 plus a $14 tariff.
What I find most interesting is the weight put on the ethical side. I think it’s overstated. When the issue became big, the Blood Diamond movie, sales of lab grown did not markedly increase. It took another decade or so to become more prevalent. What changed over that time is the price, IIRC the price was comparable to natural at the time the movie came out. Ethics were not compelling enough for most people at that price. When prices got about 50% of natural, it became much more compelling. Now that it’s around 10%, it’s practically so compelling that buying natural isn’t even a real consideration for many people.
Anyways, I think people use the Blood Diamond talking point as a socially acceptable reason- it’s what they tell their parents and grandparents who might judge them- but in reality it’s almost completely a financial decision. If the tables were turned and natural diamonds became 1/10th the cost of lab grown, the market would completely flip back practically overnight.
Here’s just one sellers assortment of various “roughs” https://www.gemsngems.com/product-category/rough-stones/lab-...
As someone who doesn’t care about the authenticity of the gems provenance and only about having consistent physical properties for rock tumbling and gem faceting, it’s been very nice for the budget
The mining, corrupt trade practices, etc are all well known and sometimes subject to enforcement action.
The thing about today is many pale aren’t seater horse beliefs and preferences (“trends”) can be manufactured.
Social media is a different kind of amplifier the past few years.
It was not a switch that was pushed the moment the movie went out. In the grand scheme of things, the movie was not even that popular. But there definitely was a realisation that diamond prices were completely artificially inflated by an oligopoly, and that there were many issues with how they were sourced.
Just because demand did not follow a step function when the file was released does not imply that ethics are not relevant.
That is popular by any reasonable definition.
The movie exposed an opportunity - what if we could have diamonds without the oppression? Oppression is very high cost.
When prices are equal, I'd wager the decision is: "if prices are equal why wouldn't I buy the "real" thing? I'll just try and justify to myself that it's sourced correctly".
When the price of the grown diamonds falls, the decision might be: "Ok, so grown diamonds are cheaper AND more ethical? Ok, I'm definitely buying grown".
If the ethics factor didn't exist, "real" diamonds would still retain the kudos and still be valued highly over "nice but fake" diamonds.
It's the ethics factor that pushes the decision over the line.
As an n=1 economic animal, that's what my behaviour would have been anyway.
And it's all marketing anyway: slap a "condensed from pure carbon" campaign out there and suddenly natural diamonds are fake rich and not as pure or precise or something.
Now sure, this concept was manufactured to a great extent through marketing, and it can be replaced or just fall out of favor. But established culture changes very slowly, and there's no "other gemstones cartel" to throw money at this the way DeBeers did to establish the diamond engagement ring in the first place.
Diamonds are used in all kinds of things besides jewelry. Industry needs that economy of scale.
But there are also applications for larger flawless crystals in things like diamond windows, semiconductor substrate and microtomes. Recently you can even buy a diamond 3D printer nozzle for extruding abrasive materials like carbon fibre. These require better processes than the ones that churn out abrasive diamonds.
Yes — industry. From Wikipedia:
> Eighty percent of mined diamonds (equal to about 135,000,000 carats (27,000 kg) annually) are unsuitable for use as gemstones and are used industrially.[131] In addition to mined diamonds, synthetic diamonds found industrial applications almost immediately after their invention in the 1950s; in 2014, 4,500,000,000 carats (900,000 kg) of synthetic diamonds were produced, 90% of which were produced in China. Approximately 90% of diamond grinding grit is currently of synthetic origin.[132]
> ...
> Industrial use of diamonds has historically been associated with their hardness, which makes diamond the ideal material for cutting and grinding tools. As the hardest known naturally occurring material, diamond can be used to polish, cut, or wear away any material, including other diamonds. Common industrial applications of this property include diamond-tipped drill bits and saws, and the use of diamond powder as an abrasive.
As your quote points out, synthetic industrial diamonds have been available for many decades. But it is only recently that synthetic diamond gems have achieved popularity and price advantage for jewelry.
(Patents were really strong back then. Howard Hughes, Sr. became the richest man in the world by buying the patent for the drill bit. He then manufactured bits and rented them out for a fraction of the profits from the oil well.)
[1] https://www.slb.com/products-and-services/innovating-in-oil-...
[2] https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/texas-primer-the-hu...
They were simply dismissed as more trash belonging in the gold-plated case. It's hard to appreciate how much less informed people were back then - we're talking pre-internet. The adults around me couldn't explain scientifically what the actual difference was between a CZ and natural diamond. Just one was a fake, held little value, and was a sure way to lose your fiance.
edit: seems that moissanite (silicon carbide, perhaps unsurprisingly) is another diamond-like (though hexagonal crystals vs. cubic for diamond or CZ) gemstone that is actually harder than sapphire and less prone to fracture than diamond.
If we're talking about 'quality', CZ just doesn't compare for longevity. That said, unless you're talking about a daily-wearing-for-many-years piece of jewelry (i.e., an engagement ring), CZ is just fine for most folks, especially considering the cost difference.
> The adults around me couldn't explain scientifically what the actual difference was between a CZ and natural diamond.
I was told growing up you can just check with window glass. If the gem scratches it's CZ and if the glass scratches it's diamond.
CZ is very cheap costume jewelry and won't last as it scratches and dulls so easily
one of the victims said she had doubted the ring he gave her was real, but he just scratched a mirror with it to prove it was real. Then she said "it was only later after he left that I found cz can also scratch glass"
It's more status-forward than authenticity-forward consumption, and many jewelers can assure you that it's very much still in vogue in some areas.
Getting married is less common which in of itself is a huge reduction to diamond jewelry demand. Of course there’s probably some town that marriage is at an all time high.
See also: views on climate change, adoption of renewable energy, etc.
So is our conclusion "People talk a big game but their morality clearly fails based on how the market has played out" or "People want things but the market has competing forces and sometimes takes a long time to find ways to provide people what they want?"
My rephrasing to your statement is "It took the mass market decades to figure out how to deliver consumers the solar/electric cars they wanted at a price they could afford."
Also, points in the general direction of the established energy providers I think these assholes had some incentive not to let the market get out from under them and make sure they were the ones who continued to profit from it.
Nicely stated. I like your style of debate / deliberation.
Doesn't that show younger generations have a markable improvement in "being good"?
... or so populist messaging from the Right would have you believe.
I was a center-left socialist as a kid and I'm a full blown anarchist in my 40's so, idk, "people aren't a monolith"?
Some of us old-heads got pushed much farther left as a result of this. I used to be a Democrat, blue and blue. These days I'm much more like, "The Dems will sell me out to make a buck, I gotta go out and actually be the change I want to see in the world."
Young folks who are experiencing disillusion -- don't give in to despair. You can make a meaningful difference in lives. Build communities, engage in mutual aid, whatever.
Where people are waiting for change and the movement, they don’t realize they are the change and the movement.
Now would be a terrible time to become disillusioned and despairing, after winning all those important battles. It proves that idealism works, and we really need it for current and future battles! It's the nihilistic disillusioned people who are CAUSING all the problems.
In so many aspects of life, I've noticed how there's always something devastatingly discouraging that happens right before any major successful breakthrough.
It's as if God's being a dick, and always throws something profoundly disheartening at you right on the precipice of success, just so he can laugh at you for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
I now recognize that as a sign I'm just about to succeed, and shouldn't give up no matter what.
We are living through that kind of historic transition right now, watching MAGA finally turn on Trump. Don't fuck it up by giving up now!
https://www.stlouisfed.org/community-development/publication...
Boomers have had significantly longer and better sustained market conditions to grow their wealth.
"While trailing Gen Xers for the beginning of their adult lives, younger American households’ average wealth began to exceed that of Gen Xers at about age 30, reflecting historically high wealth levels following the COVID-19 pandemic." I have a feeling that average wealth adjustment falls very heavily on the home owners, which is only just above half of all the cohort. Had a similar thing happened to boomers in 89, almost 70% would have benefitted.
I think it's also worth pointing out: The share of wealth held by boomers in 89 (why 89? Because they didn't have data before that. It's why the graphs start in a weird spot and why it's not a great study unless you're trying to pull out a "gotcha" stat) represented almost 20% of the total wealth in the country. "Millenials/GenZ" has a hold on only HALF that percentage.
Doctors may hate your one weird statistic, but socio-demographists probably don't...
This is also true for other generations.
People accumulate wealth over a life time of work. It would be entirely expect that younger generations have less wealth than older generations.
This tracks with broad trends of wealth inequality increasing as well.
So no, it's not just "they haven't accumulated yet", because it's not clear they will have the opportunity to do so.
You are right in a sense. But it's still a very bad prognosis.
Source? The data I’ve seen indicate the median millennial is wealthier than the median boomer was at their age.
Boomers held significantly higher percentages of capital than millenials or genx holding age steady.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w27123
Studies have shown wealth declining for millenials while increasing for boomers.
https://www.self.inc/info/generational-wealth-gap/
And it's across multiple forms of wealth.
Most of it is earned over time.
If ethical mining were an issue today would they lay down their devices that use critical minerals?
Solar energy was quite expensive until recently to improve adoption.
Virtue-signaling has always been a thing, and apparently quite useful for marketing to certain segments of the population.
Perhaps to have a jeweller set it in a different setting?
Check with the recipient beforehand, of course. You're not the one who has to wear it, and no amount of logic is going to change a mind that wants a brand new, natural diamond.
It's so weird a product marketet like this even got any popularity within "normal" people.
Also probably due in part to what's been called the best advertising slogan of the 20th century: "A Diamond is Forever" [0]. The implication being that you're not supposed to sell (or buy) a used diamond.
Buying diamonds has always been expensive, but selling them, is another matter, entirely.
Also, deBeers invented the diamond wedding ring fairly recently. My mother’s wedding ring was a big-ass sapphire. If you look at classical wedding rings, they are often non-diamond stones.
The DeBeers campaign that boosted the already significant popularity of diamond engagement rings was in 1947. I don't think diamonds or other gemstones on wedding (as opposed to engagement) rings have ever been a major thing (though I'm sure some people do that.)
Tiffany, I think, did a big push a few decades before that did a lot for the popularity of diamond engagement rings among the middle class, and diamond engagement rings had been popular among the upper class since something like the Victorian era.
As far as I know, diamonds have been a big deal as engagement stones for a long time, but their role as exclusive stones, is pretty recent.
you typically buy jewelry with a diamond in it. the jewler could gave bought it new or pried it out of an old ring. How would you know ? (and why would anyone care?)
No one wants to buy used diamonds.
> No one wants to buy used diamonds.
Precisely.
And on top of that some jewelry stores are worried that customers would consider a below wholesale offer to be insulting, so they often refuse to buy piece back at all.
But at the end of the day, they always do the exact same thing - buy whatever is cheaper. Doesn't matter if it's produced with slave labor, or child labor, or the product of corporate government coups.
They put all that out of their mind, and just buy the product. They rationalize it or conveniently forget it or just pretend it doesn't apply to them. Whatever will get them past it.
A similar topic: Does anyone think things like solar and wind are being used out of the goodness of anyone's heart? Concern for the next generations? A desire to give clean air to our youth? Sympathy for sufferers of all of the horrible diseases and respiratory problems? Concern about lands lost to rising seas?
No. It's because they got cheaper than fossil fuels. Anything else is fantasy.
Solar PV: https://research.chalmers.se/publication/520553/file/520553_...
EVs: https://ia600108.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/24...
Renewable energy premiums: https://research-hub.nrel.gov/en/publications/will-consumers...
Fair Trade: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Shared%20Documents/conferences/2...
Is it possible that people decreased purchases of diamonds altogether in response to ethical qualms (in favor of other jewels or precious items), and then were later motivated by price to go with lab-grown diamonds?
I wonder if my spreadsheet still exists.
Also recent synthetic diamonds adding some kind of a marker to the synthetic diamond.
Today it makes one think there’s likely synthetic diamonds mixed in with real ones somewhere.
Natural diamonds are more expensive, and they therefore have a conspicuous consumption element to them. That could be valuable as a means to gain social cachet. Except you'd have to speak loudly about how they were natural.
And in doing so you are loudly proclaiming you don't care about human suffering it took to get the diamonds. That's probably fine in very wealthy circles, but in upper middle class/upper-upper middle class circles, it's likely quite gauche.
If the natural ones didn't have this faux pas attached to them by default, then they might carry more interest as a "I saved up for these" class indicator.
I've never understood this really because no-one carries their GIA certificate with them. With the existence of moissanite and artificial stones, it should be a "market for lemons" situation where a given stone on someone's finger is assumed low-value by default.
Other people would still assume you might have bought a blood diamond, so instead of buying a lab diamond, I would expect these people to have bought another gem if they bought a gemstone at all.
Yet in the end she still wanted to get a ring from one of the big names because that’s what she grew up with and what she had always dreamt of since young.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The irony is that as synthetic diamonds become indistinguishable from naturals, the price will plummet over time.
This matches my experience with people, including myself. I think it's about the feedback. The price pain or the energy pain is readily and immediately felt, whereas ethics violations are not, as people are shielded from the impact externally, and have many defenses against it internally as well.
But in any case, these aren’t mutually exclusive. People want conflict free diamonds but not to spend a years pay getting one.
“Have you ever tried to sell a diamond” https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/archives/1982/02/249-2/132...
Natural Diamonds Had a Rough Year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42592424 - Jan 2025 (6 comments)
See how a lab-grown diamond is made - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42257245 - Nov 2024 (49 comments)
Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41488353 - Sept 2024 (490 comments)
Diamond industry 'in trouble' as lab-grown gemstones tank prices further - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40585594 - June 2024 (39 comments)
UK mining giant to offload De Beers diamond business - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40359867 - May 2024 (7 comments)
Forget billions of years: Researchers have grown diamonds in just 150 minutes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40172784 - April 2024 (61 comments)
Lab Grown Diamonds Are Too Perfect for Their Own Good - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39298644 - Feb 2024 (1 comment)
Diamonds Suck - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38247300 - Nov 2023 (163 comments)
The diamond world takes radical steps to stop a pricing plunge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38245762 - Nov 2023 (588 comments)
Diamonds are losing their allure - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37508058 - Sept 2023 (128 comments)
Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? (1982) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37396372 - Sept 2023 (11 comments)
What's the case for naturally mined diamonds anymore? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37275308 - Aug 2023 (49 comments)
Man-made diamonds are falling in price and appealing to more people - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35748205 - April 2023 (9 comments)
Diamonds Suck (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26698511 - April 2021 (53 comments)
Diamonds aren’t special and neither is love - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25978139 - Jan 2021 (90 comments)
Artificial diamonds creation process generating lonsdaleite - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25158428 - Nov 2020 (61 comments)
Diamonds Are Bullshit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25059605 - Nov 2020 (27 comments)
Billions of dollars of unsold diamonds are piling up around the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23502201 - June 2020 (104 comments)
Shaking Up the Diamond Industry - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22209364 - Feb 2020 (120 comments)
Diamonds Keep Getting Cheaper - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21522898 - Nov 2019 (389 comments)
Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? (1982) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20818618 - Aug 2019 (237 comments)
The Elite Club That Rules the Diamond World Is Starting to Crack - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20555503 - July 2019 (200 comments)
Would You Pay $32,709 for a Lab-Grown Diamond? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19287565 - March 2019 (34 comments)
Diamonds Suck (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17186457 - May 2018 (215 comments)
Diamonds Are Bullshit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17184539 - May 2018 (45 comments)
De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17183603 - May 2018 (439 comments)
Lab-grown diamonds threaten viability of the real gems - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16551147 - March 2018 (301 comments)
Lab-Grown Diamonds Come into Their Own - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13085273 - Dec 2016 (103 comments)
Diamonds Suck (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12944464 - Nov 2016 (576 comments)
A Lab-Grown Diamond Is Forever - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11903409 - June 2016 (106 comments)
What the diamond industry is really selling - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11099809 - Feb 2016 (83 comments)
Diamonds Suck (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10834567 - Jan 2016 (2 comments)
Diamonds are Bullshit (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9251952 - March 2015 (75 comments)
A Diamond Market No Longer Controlled By De Beers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7793386 - May 2014 (111 comments)
When Diamonds Are Dirt Cheap, Will They Still Dazzle? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7615712 - April 2014 (70 comments)
Diamonds Suck - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6868968 - Dec 2013 (3 comments)
Diamonds Are Bullshit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6331565 - Sept 2013 (8 comments)
Diamonds Are Bullshit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5403988 - March 2013 (734 comments)
Ask HN: How have HN readers bought diamond engagement rings? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4971735 - Dec 2012 (25 comments)
Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? (1982) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4535611 - Sept 2012 (225 comments)
Have you ever tried to sell a diamond? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1405698 - June 2010 (85 comments)
Have you ever tried to sell a diamond? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1110283 - Feb 2010 (76 comments)
The Facts About Diamonds (and why I don’t like De Beers) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1109318 - Feb 2010 (41 comments)
De Beers profits fall 92% - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=722115 - July 2009 (25 comments)
Diamonds on Demand - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=330749 - Oct 2008 (16 comments)
Haha, upvoted for this, if not for the effort :D
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
> Graham Pearson, professor with the University of Alberta's department of earth and atmospheric sciences, says that the natural formation of diamonds deep underground results in a "complexity" you can't get with the lab-grown variety.
Okay; but why should I aesthetically prefer this?
The whole thing is such an obvious marketing exercise with very little to back it up (as evidenced by the extremely low resale value of diamonds)
Glass doesn't sparkle.
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Miluxas-Women-s-Glitter-Tennis-Sn...
Diamonds (and other gems) really are beautifula to look at in ways that glass just isn't. And manmade ones, sparklier still out of the forge of our own cleverness, are much nicer in my opinion.
(Moissanite is even better, so it should be preferred over diamonds unless I’m overlooking some other difference in their attributes?)
But plain glass gems look comparatively bland when used as jewelry.
Diamond (10) is 4x as hard as corundum (9) which is 2x as hard as topaz (8).
The modern-day aesthetic of diamonds is just that they are expensive. They're not distinguished by utility, quality, or appearance from cheaper products. The ultimate status symbol, but also obviously a bit of an issue...
(I don’t know if color gradients are even desirable in the market.)
It's much much more complex that a solid sheet of tempered glass, and it catches the light and reflects it in sparkling ways.
Maybe these so called "complex" diamonds create more interesting light interfaces?
If they did, it would be possible to detect the difference with perfect accuracy. Instead, the detectors made by those interested in pushing the concept of "real, natural" diamonds have a false positive rate of 5% looking for the inclusion of things labs could easily add if they cared to
At the same time, I do understand the sentiment around wanting a mined diamond. The whole idea behind a diamond engagement ring is a marketing exercise backed up by a cartel, so if you're gonna participate in the ritual you might as well do it right. There are silly backstories buried in every part of human society today, from "some king did it and everyone copied him" to "this piece of land got special status a thousand years ago which accidentally let it become its own country" to "my grandmother was too poor to do XYZ the right way so we still do it her way." That's just part and parcel of being human.
Like they're alive or there's some weird chemicals involved.
It's not silly stories when evil corporations with deep pockets are outright lying, like ads with doctors smoking.
I think "lab-grown" is a pretty neutral term, and it is also scientifically accurate in the case of CVD and other diamonds where the process really is "growing" the diamonds. There are certainly other terms for them that sound more derogatory such as "synthetic" or "artificial" diamond.
Next stop is the self-repairing vegan leather also made of the mycelium: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/vegan-leather-fungi-repa...
You just know they want to get the receiving partner on their side of "I'm worth the waste of money for a "real" diamond"
Indeed: Even the article perpetuates this:
"Whereas a two-carat real diamond engagement ring might cost $35,000, Oymakas says a two-carat lab-grown diamond with the same clarity and colour could only be about $3,500."
Sorry - they're both real diamonds.
I am not an expert so take this with a grain of salt, but for what I do I have seen no difference between flawless natural diamond and flawless lab grown diamond, the difference is that the flawless natural diamonds are almost always far more expensive.
I think I’d be quite swayed towards the lab ones knowing that there were engineers who used them for industrial use and found them exactly the same.
Also being much cheaper, I’d likely spend money towards getting a better grade lab-grown diamond than I could afford with a mined diamond.
If I was the lab-grown industry I’d also be actively attempting to shift the narrative around the term real, and say ones mined one is lab made, both are real. But that’s its own fight I’m sure.
Also part and parcel of being a human being is logic and empathy. Anyone who possesses one of these traits, never mind both of them, should find it easy to choose the product that isn't literally the product of human suffering an exploitation.
That's not to paper over the issues with the industry (environmental, poor working conditions, poor pay etc) - but those are more generally applied to any mined product. I'd be willing to bet that your average set of modern electronics cause far more suffering than your average diamond: see conflict resources such as tantalum, tin, tungsten, gold.
> That's just part and parcel of being human.
Yes, but what kind of human?
“The major investors in the diamond mines realized that they had no alternative but to merge their interests into a single entity that would be powerful enough to control production and perpetuate the illusion of scarcity of diamonds. The instrument they created, in 1888, was called De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd., incorporated in South Africa…” From the classic 80s article “Have you ever tried to sell a diamond” - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-yo...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonydemarco/2025/05/09/de-be...
• Scale: I'm aware of one company that operates over 700 CVD systems that each make 25 stones/run - there are at least 3 others of similar volume;
• Cost: the variable cost of making a 1ct finished brilliant (D-E,F-VVSI) is <$30US. Obviously, that cost is for ex-US production. See, for example, the recent demise of de Beers' Lightbox growth center in Oregon.
Naturals simply can't compete. They are forming a completely separate market involving a much smaller, extremely wealthy clientele.
The business case for synthetics is deteriorating as production costs bottom out and margins decline in an ongoing race to the bottom.
To this day I change the channel when I hear a commercial for a diamond store on the radio and its been 20+ years. I am so excited about lab grown diamonds.
For some reason my ideal vision of capitalism is where a company simply makes a product that solves customers' problem and makes them happy, receiving a fair amount of money in return for their efforts. No corporate propaganda campaigns or anti-consumer shenanigans needed, just a solid [thing] for people who need [thing].
Interested to hear potential problems with this approach in the replies.
Need to look into the differences so I can be precise when debating these things.
New metaphors: "What trim level of capitalism have we got?" "`class ImperfectCapitalism implements Capitalism`" "RNG capitalism modifiers"
I do recommend Sowell’s book basic economics. Its a trudge but its very educational and written in an easy to understand way
Btw Blood diamonds was also a successful marketing ploy of De beers to keep out the competition. It was weird to me how western countries only cared about the exploitation of diamonds.
As the jewelry industry repositions around the uniqueness of natural diamonds I would expect to see more promotion of this kind of socially responsible production.
De Beers tried to squelch the first US startup to turn out gemstones in production by intimidating the founder. The founder was a retired US Army brigadier general (2 silver stars earned in combat) and wasn't intimidated. That was back in 2011, and since then it's been all downhill for natural diamonds.
De Beers later tried building synthetic diamond detectors. There are simple detectors for detecting cubic zirconia and such, but separating synthetic and natural diamonds is tough. The current approach is to hit the diamond with a burst of UV, turn off the UV and then capture an image. The spectrum of the afterglow indicates impurities in the diamond. The latest De Beers testing machine [2] is looking for nitrogen atoms embedded in the diamond, which is seen more in natural diamonds than synthetics. The synthetics are better than the naturals. Presumably synthetic manufacturers could add some nitrogen if they wanted to bother. This is the latest De Beers machine in their losing battle against synthetics. They've had DiamondScan, DiamondView, DiamondSure, SynthDetect, and now DiamondProof. Even the most elaborate devices have a false alarm rate of about 5%.[3]
[1] https://e6-prd-cdn-01.azureedge.net/mediacontainer/medialibr...
[2] https://verification.debeersgroup.com/instrument/diamondproo...
[3] https://www.naturaldiamonds.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/A...
Took me longer than I care to admit reading the Wikipedia page for Carter Clarke Sr. (also a brigadier general) who led a pretty interesting life of his own (e.g. leading the War Department investigation of Pearl Harbor intelligence failures) before I realized I had the wrong generation of Clarkes.
Hahaha, this is amazing. All of the US ex-military I worked with was super chill but had zero tolerance for bullshit, I can't even imagine somebody trying to pull it off and thinking it's a good idea.
Except the guy that founded BJC was an ex-corporate lawyer. His response letter (https://www.bluejeanscable.com/legal/mcp/response041408.pdf) is full of zingers, but most appropriate for this exact point is this:
> After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1985, I spent nineteen years in litigation practice, with a focus upon federal litigation involving large damages and complex issues. My first seven years were spent primarily on the defense side, where I developed an intense frustration with insurance carriers who would settle meritless claims for nuisance value when the better long-term view would have been to fight against vexatious litigation asa matter of principle...
> If you sue me, the case will go to judgment, and I will hold the court's attention upon the merits of your claims--or, to speak more precisely, the absence of merit from your claims--from start to finish. Not only am I unintimidated by litigation; I sometimes rather miss it.
"RE: Your letter, received April Fools' day"
Oh, this is just great.
Shoot, if I was in the unlikely fictional scenario where I even wore a diamond and someone asked about it, I would be THRILLED to get into the science of how it was grown in a lab. What a cool story. Instead of just going “yeah, thanks, it cost a fortune and three kids died pulling it out of the dirt”.
When I see somebody with diamonds and check with them that they are naturals, its pretty clear what kind of person I am dealing with. To be kind and polite here, its not a nice evaluation and it ends up very precise. I let them know what's the general consensus on morality regarding those stones, its sometimes funny to watch their reactions and at least now they know something and can't anymore argue they didn't. What they do with that info is up to them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7tGZzwe4mQ
PS Question : Who is stealing the content idea from whom? Is it possible that the article author saw this video and decided to write abou it?
https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/de-beers-diamonds-price-...
In it he calls lab grown diamonds a "huge con", though doesn't really explain why...
See also: France and Nigerien uranium.
Certainly this is an approach, get a bunch of nerds engaged with the product, co opted into marketing it. You’re quite literally storytelling. But something tells me that “CTO” is not the fashion industry’s most lucrative demo. And for better or worse, no matter how you’re making you’re diamond, you’re focusing on 18-45yo rich women seeking experiences, and I don’t see how the diamond’s origin, even if everything you say is 100% true, factors into the retail journey at Tiffany’s.
It's not the 1950s anymore, and blue-collar workers don't want to piss away 3 months salary to buy a depreciating asset. It's really only marketable if you lie to the customer.
As someone who’s already cynical about the ”natural”(/extractive) diamond “industry”(/cartel), the points made on that site are hilarious and absurd — highly recommend a scroll for anyone interested in how desperate they are to attack the new tech. Just from that comparison page, my favorite argument is probably “lab grown diamonds are from (dirty, evil) India and China, whereas natural diamonds are from ~nature~”, although “lab grown diamonds are so perfect that they’re all the same grade, and therefore boring” is a close runner up.
The fact that they’re now publishing a magazine devoted entirely to this topic tells me they haven’t slowed down, just improved their ad spend so that it’s not wasted on me! Something tells me there’s quite a mountain of financial instruments secured by the warehouses of diamonds they have to keep supply tight, so I can only see this ramping up in the short term.
https://www.diamondstandard.co
Commoditized diamonds.... In essence artificial products where multiple diamonds are packaged inside plastic container... Somehow making them more investible ala NFT or crypto... Not to forget fractional market with tokens...
The unit at the time of DaBeers smashing 1947 "Diamonds are Forever" campaign, in 1947, was the -family-. It wasn't too long after women's suffrage, and still women were expected to be barefoot and pregnant, after all, birth control wouldn't come for another 20 years. Families were the operative entity messaging targeted, and the campaign was successful because the diamond was a sort of foundation for the foundation of the family, the marriage, not dissimilar in spirit from long held human societal norms of dowries and such.
The sexual and hippie revolution of the 1960s shook the whole thing up. Women didn't need families, there was birth control, women could work, a revolution carrying forth to the 1980s shark killer business woman to today where in fact many universities have become female majority. The modern unit of american society is the individual, not the unit, making the diamond an anachronistic echo of a once proud culture, now seen as a bit dated, a bit weird, a bit unsettling and paternalistic, instilling the same feelings in a person that an old Playboy magazine might.
Amusing.
This would end the De Beers cartel basically overnight by smashing the "appeal to nature" fallacy that "natural gem" marketing and pricing relies on.
But here's the fun thing. You can destroy the value of a natural ruby by cooking it. If you heat it in the right way the impurities will anneal out and you will be left with a near flawless stone that appears to be artificial! Bye bye value :)
For any man, for past few decades (at least 3-4) a woman insisting at all costs on big shiny natural diamond is a massive red flag for undesirable personality traits. Given stable divorce rates and general misery on all sides before and after that red flags are and should be considered very intensively. Once physical attraction wanes, only personalities remain.
Think about it like a supermarket—at scale, it’s not practical for grocery stores to source fruits and vegetables from the wild (like natural diamonds).
Wasn’t it inevitable that “farm-grown” produce (lab-grown diamonds) would become the long-term solution?
Pay an entrance fee and bring or rent your own equipment and keep any diamonds you find. It's a 37 acre field that was once a volcanic crater. I never found any personally, but it was surprisingly fun and worth the detour if driving through the state. I also don't care much for diamonds, but if I ever find one it'd be pretty special. More than 600 diamonds are found each year according to wiki
[0] https://www.arkansasstateparks.com/parks/crater-diamonds-sta...
This is moot sans the "source that you quoted" and some stats and studies.
For interest, Australia: https://www.ga.gov.au/bigobj/GA13928.pdf
India, Mali, Fiji, Africa, Americas, etc have similar trace amounts across their surfaces that are detectable from an aircraft 80m above ground level traveling at 70 m/second.
"Radiation: it's everywhere"
jqpabc123•6mo ago
Regardless of how it was made, one is just as much "forever" as the other. The real major difference is in the labor practices being used.
De Beers had a good run as a cartel but as they say, "the jig is up"
close04•6mo ago
Every gem out there is “the crystalline form” of something. Diamonds are (were?) the expensive crystalline form. And plenty of people equate “expensive” with love, or care, or respect. Even if the same people would never be able to tell the difference between diamond and cubic zirconium, knowing it’s the cheap one makes it less valuable in other ways. This depends on the person, of course.
If it’s not diamonds it will have to be something else that shows “I put my money where my mouth is”. A simple metal wedding band is the same wherever it’s made but a famous jeweler will charge an arm and a leg more than your local shop for the same amount of precious metal, same effort, and same result. And yet Tiffany’s isn’t going out of business for the same reason. It’s what it represents.
I am curious to see if tastes or fashion shift towards other rarer or more expensive gems not yet manufactured cheaply en masse.
AnimalMuppet•6mo ago
As people quit believing in God, they stop thinking in terms of "God brought us together/we were made for each other" (though they stop thinking that a generation or two later than they stop believing in God).
If you think that we made this relationship, then maybe a lab-grown (human made) diamond fits? (Though it may take an advertising campaign before people see it that way.)
Disclaimer: I'm not a sociologist. This is just my speculation about how the dynamic could change.
jqpabc123•6mo ago
For those obsessed with materialism, real satisfaction is out of reach. There is always bigger, better and more expensive.
Personally, I would tend to reconsider any long term relationship with such a person.
close04•6mo ago
Jewelry is the pinnacle of “just monetary value”. Unlike almost any other possession, a car, a house, clothes, etc. jewelry serves no practical purpose, only shows the willingness or ability to spend for it. The more you spend, the more valuable the gesture, the more you cared to please the recipient.
Materialistic people have the same feelings you have. Those just happened to be triggered by different values than yours.
Muromec•6mo ago
close04•6mo ago
If you want something nice, you get something nice, not something expensive. That's difficult to comprehend for people who measure niceness in a visibly displayed price tag.
Muromec•6mo ago
close04•6mo ago
> nice things that are done by people who love making them have a tendency to be expensive
No and no. People love making things as much as anyone loves their job, and the price of your output is not what determines it. Niceness and price are almost completely independent characteristics. You can have beautiful cheap trinkets, and garish expensive jewelry, and everything in between. Look no further than when you need an expert to tell apart real and counterfeit items. Or when your "nice and expensive" luxury items are cheap crap because nothing says "made with love so it's expensive" like luxury companies making a $50 bag with slave labor and selling it for $3000 [0]. In the end what matters to some people is the visible price tag, that's the signal, that's the core value.
In the real world you’d flash some bling and people would instinctively give more weight to your opinion. Here it has to stand on merit. So I see why price is such a core value.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/pamdanziger/2024/06/24/italian-...
atmavatar•6mo ago
The entire point of using diamonds in wedding rings is for the male to signal how committed he is to the marriage by expending a large amount of money on both the ring and the wedding itself. It then acts as a way for the wife to signal her status to other women by showing off how much her husband was willing and able to spend on the ring.
It is a hold-out from the tradition that the male is a provider and the female is a caregiver. If you reject traditional gender roles, you should also reject expensive diamond rings regardless whether they are mined or grown. Otherwise, embrace the shiny, but make no mistake: the cost is entirely the point.
jqpabc123•6mo ago
Assume you have 2 diamonds that cost the same.
One is natural, the other is larger and man made.
Which one is more likely to convey your point to the average person?
WorkerBee28474•6mo ago
grues-dinner•6mo ago
cwmoore•6mo ago
Are you arguing that anyone who would accept and display a precious gem is ineligible for marriage? More so if it is larger, but not if more expensive? The post you are replying to presents a plausible social economy of the tradition. What is your point?
jqpabc123•6mo ago
No. My point is that anyone who conditions marriage on the size or cost of a diamond is ineligible to marry me.
My wife accepted my marriage proposal without a ring. One was added later --- after other more urgent finances were covered and reassuring her that it would be modest and not overly wasteful.
In other words, this was done strictly because I wanted to --- not as a pre-condition for her acceptance. She says doing it this way was more meaningful.
AnimalMuppet•6mo ago
Muromec•6mo ago
That's some nice historical background (which could be post-hoc contextualization that fits certain agenda), but traditions have this weird habit of outliving their actual purpose and still having the form without the role.
So no, you don't have to commit to traditional gender roles to have diamond rings and don't have to make them expensive as otherwise it's not doing the thing it's supposed to do. The could just not do the thing at all and you can still have them.
Incipient•6mo ago
I'd say it's like AI music or art - something made by a machine, for some reason, just doesn't have any "soul" to it.
I'm not actually entirely convinced in my argument, but there is something there...
whatevaa•6mo ago
yen223•6mo ago
Wired: we will put a soul in this rock for $10,000
cantor_S_drug•6mo ago
For the first time, physicists have demonstrated that information can flow through a diamond wire. In the experiment, electrons did not flow through diamond as they do in traditional electronics; rather, they stayed in place and passed along a magnetic effect called "spin" to each other down the wire -- like a row of sports spectators doing "the wave." Spin could one day be used to transmit data in computer circuits -- and this new experiment revealed that diamond transmits spin better than most metals in which researchers have previously observed the effect.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140323151718.h...
jqpabc123•6mo ago
And thus, any distinction between them exists mainly in your head.
lightedman•6mo ago
Natural diamonds won't always fluoresce but the ones that do will do so in a variety of colors, and sometimes change depending on what wavelength is irradiating them.
jqpabc123•6mo ago
The difference is not instantly apparent under UV.
Only about 30% of natural diamonds have fluorescence --- which is *caused* by impurities and imperfections in the material.
Manmade diamonds tend to lack this because they have fewer impurities and imperfections. Equating increased perfection and purity with inferiority is highly debatable and smacks of marketing BS.
9dev•6mo ago
ridgeguy•6mo ago
tehlike•6mo ago
mc32•6mo ago
loloquwowndueo•6mo ago
CommieBobDole•6mo ago
spwa4•6mo ago
rimunroe•6mo ago
Stable hydrogen wasn't able to form until several hundreds of thousands of years after the Big Bang when the universe cooled sufficiently for electrons to bind to protons.
Even assuming you're counting lone protons as hydrogen atoms, it's still absolutely false. I don't know if that's true for the majority of protons in the universe, but there are mechanisms by which new protons are made all the time. Neutrons can turn into protons through beta decay, and high energy particle interactions like those involving cosmic rays can produce brand new protons. These processes can and do happen terrestrially.
spwa4•6mo ago
... and at rates that mean that the amount of non-big-bang hydrogen is not even a trillionth of a trillionth of the total.
rimunroe•6mo ago
I didn't say it was a huge fraction of the total. You said "literally all of them" were from the Big Bang, which is just wrong. Plenty of other processes produce protons/hydrogen
nwienert•6mo ago
cogman10•6mo ago
mensetmanusman•6mo ago
nradov•6mo ago
gooseus•6mo ago
> We exchange diamond rings as part of the engagement process because the diamond company De Beers decided in 1938 that it would like us to. Prior to a stunningly successful marketing campaign, Americans occasionally exchanged engagement rings, but it wasn’t pervasive. Not only is the demand for diamonds a marketing invention, but diamonds aren’t actually that rare. Only by carefully restricting the supply has De Beers kept the price of a diamond high.
Imho, that "soul" you describe is an artifact of human sentimentality and a very successful marketing campaign by a bunch of Afrikaner colonialists.
TheOtherHobbes•6mo ago
Walter Benjamin called it "aura" - something a physical original has, but a reproduction doesn't.
It explains why collectors pay $$$$$ for a guitar played by [famous musician], even though they can't play.
There's no objective way to look at any one guitar and divine its history. Without provenance or physical customisation, any Rickenbacker or Les Paul is indistinguishable from any other of the same production run.
But we believe in sympathetic magic. Objects are charged with mysterious non-physical manna through proximity to wealth and status. Owning these special objects confers that manna on us, and perhaps our fortune will increase.
It's the logic of witchcraft lurking at the heart of capitalism.
One of the fun things about AI is that it deconstructs this while reinforcing it. Huge collections of high status manna are now inside a machine, and available for free, or near as.
Do we still believe in magic, or not?
cantor_S_drug•6mo ago
They do that so, when they get together, they have a story to tell to other famous people. If that guitar were to be replaced, nobody would be able to tell the difference.
throawaywpg•6mo ago
cladopa•6mo ago
We can talk about "anima", in latin, the same inside "animal" or "animation" to apply it to a wider concept of living beings.
We can go further in time to the greek concept "daimon", devils, allude to supernatural powers or spirits to start applying it to things.
Then we could apply De Boers sociopaths concept that goes back to using the Christian concept to rocks again.
The only "soul" those rocks have is the one of the millions of African people that died in wars, the women that were raped and the kids that were traumatised being forced to kill their family members so a woman can look at beautiful iridescence in her finger.
Disclaimer: I have worked as a volunteer helping refugees, mostly from Congo, so I am biased a lot.
rollcat•6mo ago
Diamonds are a product of natural geological processes. (Or, are grown in a lab, by recreating similar conditions.)
Music and art are products of human talent, skill, and labor - that ML companies have used (without a license, permission, or even credit) to build datasets that are now being used to make money, at the expense of these artists.
These are not the same things.
pyman•6mo ago
rollcat•6mo ago
kstrauser•6mo ago
decimalenough•6mo ago
https://ai-art-turing-test.com/
kstrauser•6mo ago
asadotzler•6mo ago
lovich•6mo ago
cantor_S_drug•6mo ago
Urea disproved "vital force" theory. You are doing something similar.
lovich•6mo ago
thrawa8387336•6mo ago
dyauspitr•6mo ago
umeshunni•6mo ago
cantor_S_drug•6mo ago
Indeed there is a diamond planet that old too.
A diamond planet, "55 Cancri E", is a super-Earth exoplanet known for its high density and potential diamond composition. It is located 41 light-years away and is about twice the size of Earth and nine times its mass. The planet's extreme heat and pressure are believed to have crystallized its carbon-rich composition into diamonds.
shvdle•6mo ago
jqpabc123•6mo ago
People buy inferior, counterfeit merchandise all the time because they can't tell the difference.
But there is nothing inferior or counterfeit about a manmade diamond. It is *exactly* the same material as a natural one.
shvdle•6mo ago
Yes, you can buy a man-made diamond the same you can buy counterfeit branded clothes. That only shows that you’re tasteless and that you can’t afford the real thing.
jqpabc123•6mo ago
If it is strictly about the money, a larger man made diamond can easily cost just as much as a smaller natural one --- while instantly conveying to the untrained eye the appearance of being more expensive.
michaelt•6mo ago
If you see someone wearing a 6-carat diamond, you know it's either a $100,000 natural diamond, or a $4,000 lab-grown diamond. And you'll assume it's the latter, as far more people can afford the latter.
On the other hand, a 1-carat diamond would be more like $2000 natural, $300 lab-grown, making it far more believable that it was natural.
xhkkffbf•6mo ago
cantor_S_drug•6mo ago
mathiaspoint•6mo ago
jqpabc123•6mo ago
cwmoore•6mo ago
My screenshots of NFTs are pixel accurate, but not exactly as valuable as the real thing.
mathiaspoint•6mo ago
dplgk•6mo ago
xhkkffbf•6mo ago
I recommend to all newly engaged couples to buy them and save the money for more important things like raising children or buying a home.
And if you look on eBay, you can get CVD diamonds for even less. (At a bit of a risk, of course.)
JKCalhoun•6mo ago
xhkkffbf•6mo ago
ooterness•6mo ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bfa-cKDzYSg
dehrmann•6mo ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0wvDwSnzcw