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.

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...

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.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Beers#Legal_issues

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.

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.

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.

Why is it that everyone seems to have a soft spot for industries that have some kind of monopoly, suddenly losing that monopoly.

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...

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.

The mining, corrupt trade practices, etc are all well known and sometimes subject to enforcement action.

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.

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.

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.