Lab Created Diamonds Come to Market

E writes "Technology is putting some new sparkle in the world of diamonds. Until recently, naturally occurring, mined diamonds were unchallenged in their quality and desirability. But now laboratory-created diamonds, which possess the same properties as naturals, are poised to give them a run for their money. A new company, Adia Diamonds, has quite the variety in their inventory. They have the same chemical and physical properties as a mined diamond and come in white, blue and yellow. Both GIA and EGL grading labs are offering certifications for lab created diamonds. Seems like a good, high-tech alternative to the DeBeers diamond cartel."

Re:Real importance beyond jewelry?

[WindBourne]

Actually, De Beers is terrified. Over the last decade, they have pushed "genuine diamonds". Cool. A good jeweler and a bit testing could determine the difference between natural and artificial. Note, that I do not call it real vs. fake. The reason is, that they are both real. The problem is that the new artificial are not only indistinguishable, but it appears that better larger ones may be available soon for less than the cheaper "real" ones. De Beers would LOVE to kill these folks. But it is way too late for that. All in all, an investment in a diamond mine or even in a diamond ring may be a very bad investment. OTH, a nice gold ring may be a good one. In particular, if it has some disappearing scribbling inside.

Press release? What the...?

[thesolo]

Over 3 years ago, Slashdot ran an article on these lab created diamonds; it was a great story [wired.com] on Wired.com. The difference there was that it was an independent piece, a solid read, and offered a glimpse into the future of computing (i.e. using diamonds as semiconductors).

This current story, however, is just a link to a damn press release, with no mention What was the point of it, aside from giving free press to this company?

Re:Natural Complexity

[Frogbert]

Bullshit! "Imitations" as you call them are more pure then the naturally occurring ones. They are chemically perfect and there is absolutely no way you would be able to tell with the naked eye.

It's FUD like yours that keeps DeBeers in business. The complexity you speak of is the diamonds imperfections.

Re:Real importance beyond jewelry?

[BJH]

Interestingly enough, it IS possible to distinguish the new artifical diamonds from natural ones.

The artificial ones have fewer impurities and inclusions ;)

Re:Natural Complexity

[Jane Q. Public]

Others have made these points but they have not put them together into a logical whole:

People pay a premium -- a VERY big premium -- for "flawless" diamonds. The fewer flaws, the higher the premium. So much so that there are at least three separate quality categories that are commonly called "flawless". As you can imagine, the top category is expensive indeed.

Given this truth, there is no such thing as je ne sais quoi when it comes to diamonds. Flaws are flaws, and they are undesirable. That is how the entire market is based!

Therefore, a near-perfect lab diamond is "worth" much more than almost any other natural stone, according to the EXISTING diamond market.

You can't have it both ways.

"conflict-free"

[Duncan3]

I love how DeBeers turned "diamonds we got by killing Africans and anyone else in our way, funding local wars, and ripping you off on something that is so common everyone could have 10 and we'd still have warehouses full" into ... "conflict-free".

Until these guys ramp up to massive capacity, buying a diamond still involves killing people.

Re:Real importance beyond jewelry?

[eln]

A diamond ring has always been a bad investment, because the same marketing push that has been so successful at convincing everyone that diamonds are somehow rare and valuable have also convinced people that second-hand diamonds are nearly worthless. You will never get anywhere near what you paid for a diamond ring on the secondary market unless you happen to have a diamond with some historic significance.

The DeBeers story, and the history of the diamond as jewelry, is simply the story of the most successful marketing campaign in history. It is simply astonishing how the DeBeers cartel has managed to turn a fairly ordinary (but shiny) stone into one of the most expensive, sought after stones around. A stone that is so valuable that not only is it worth 2 MONTHS salary, but is so personal that it should never be purchased second hand.

Artificial scarcity

[Gregoyle]

Supporting what the parent poster is saying, diamonds are the only gemstones I know of that are artificially scarce. Thus, in my mind, they are a poor investment.

They are made scarce by the fact that the overwhelming majority of productive diamond mines are controlled by one company, which jealously guards that scarcity (literally, the "extra" diamonds are guarded in huge warehouses). In my mind diamonds are only a few productive non-DeBeers mines away from being made much less valuable.

If you really need to get gemstones to invest in, I would recommend rubies or sapphires (I know, they're the same stone). Star sapphires are especially prized. Otherwise stick to precious metals.

If she insists on a "real" diamond...

[humberthumbert]

...run, not walk, away from your woman.

Especially if you have explained to her what a scam DeBeers has perpetuated
upon the world, and it has not changed her mind.

Sure, you can offer her a non-blood diamond. But you have to ask yourself
if a person like that is someone you want to spent time with.

Of course, I carry a cellphone with tantalum capacitors in them. The world's a fucked up place.

Re:Natural Complexity

[buswolley]

Yes, the post certainly conveys upper-class, Ivy League snobbery. Furthermore, the author, I would contend, is less a scientist and more a literary scholar of classic schools of thought. That is to say, a culture of scholars who consistently misktake eloquence for sound argument, who consistently believe that truth can be discovered by coupling logic with fuzzy verbal terminologies such as utility, happiness, common good, etc. In a word: Philosophy. Can't solve a damn thing, but they feel better about themselves by having an expanded vocabulary (jargon) in an effort to appear sophisticated.

Pointless to argue

[Plutonite]

It doesn't matter which is technically proven to be better. Even if you can sit the average gal down and give her a 2 hour lecture on the details of crystaline flaws in natural and synthetic diamonds, it will always be "real" versus "man-made/fake" in her head. And when the gal is your wife, you don't want that to happen for a large number of good reasons.

For slashdotters the synthetic one may actually be more desirable, but the sad (or perhaps natural?) state of human psychology will always put the market in favor of the naturally formed diamond. This is good for industry however, and I wonder how much it would cost to make PC cases out of them.

Joking, joking..

Drop 'em over Namibia...

[LeDopore]

Step 1: sell short on diamond stocks.
Step 2: drop a boatload of artificial diamonds over the *natural* diamond mines in Namibia. Document your "salting" of the diamond mines, but keep it secret.
Step 3: wait until you're sure the new artificial diamonds are in the system (i.e. sold as natural diamonds).
Step 4: reveal the documented evidence that there are artificial diamonds being sold as natural ones.
Step 5: profit!

This idea was originally proposed by A.M., a friend of mine. Pure genius!

Re:Artificial scarcity

[ceoyoyo]

Still, ever tried to sell a diamond?

Diamonds are some of the most expensive gem stones, but they're not even close to the rarest. They're actually quite common, as gemstones go.

When you try to sell one you find out what their actual market value is.

Charcoal: a real long-term investment

[ari_j]

I don't know about you suckers, but I finally found a girl who likes the joke about getting her a charcoal ring for the truly long-term investment. :P

Re:diamonds are forever

[retro128]

third, I never understood what all the fuss was about diamonds, until I bought my fiancee (now wife) one. I'm a pretty miserly guy in general but I have to say splashing out for a 1ct SI1 with excellent cut and symmetry was an amazingly good decision (for me) in retrospect. she gets complements on it every day (years later), and, sad to say EVERYONE JUDGES OUR RELATIONSHIP BASED ON THE FRICKING ROCK. I can't tell you how many times she's heard "oh he must really love you" -- gak -- sad but true.

Why is it important to you that anyone judge your relationship based on the size of a trinket? It's the height of materialism to believe that the love you feel for someone is proportional to the amount of money you're willing to part with on a diamond (or anything else, for that matter) Sad to say, anyone who thinks so is a victim of the DeBeers marketing machine. The very article you cited from The Atlantic is a perfect illustration of this. One of the more pertinent parts of the article:

Since the Ayer plan to romanticize diamonds required subtly altering the public's picture of the way a man courts -- and wins -- a woman, the advertising agency strongly suggested exploiting the relatively new medium of motion pictures. Movie idols, the paragons of romance for the mass audience, would be given diamonds to use as their symbols of indestructible love.

The ultimate Reality Distortion Field

[nobodyman]

Couldn't agree with you more. I feel DeBeers is a truly evil organization, yet the sham they've been able to pull is nothing short of a marketing masterstroke.

Take the "two-months-salary" thing. Convincing the consumer that this is a legitimate scenario is the holy grail of product pricing. Imagine asking a jeweler "hey, how much does that ring cost?", and blindly pulling out your wallet when the jeweler says "well... how much ya got?". Yeah, I'm oversimplifying... but considering prices are so inflated, the consumer is really paying in proportion to his/her income rather than in proportion to the diamond's size.

Somehow DeBeers got it in people's heads that two-months salary is somehow indicative of the your love and ultimately the strength of the marriage. The irony here is that that financial woes are the leading cause of divorce -- if anything this silly notion is probably setting up young couples to fail.

Re:Natural Complexity

[Al Dimond]

Well if ya don't want to support the De Beers monopoly and all the harm it causes then don't. "Here, babe, I got you this nice ring, I paid an arm and a leg for it... AND SO DID SOME KID IN AFRICA!... err, marry me?"

Or would you just let your concerns be bowled over by corporate propaganda telling you that you can buy her love? I don't actually know that much about the behavior of the diamond miners, but I do know that jewlery ads on TV make me sick and I change the channel every time they come on. And comments and links from this article's discussion have certainly taught me something. Grow a pair and stand up against those manipulative fuckers.

Re:Consulted with my wife about this

[shitdrummer]

At the end of the day, if it looks like a diamond, it's good enough. Well, for my wife and I anyway.

Not to mention the added bonus of no-one having to die for my wife to have it.

I mentioned your comments to my wife (putting my life on the line mind you) and her response was "So what! It looks like a diamond, people think it's a diamond, and it came from you (me). I wouldn't want anything else.". That's probably one of the reasons I married her. :)

Shitdrummer.

Re:diamonds are forever

[glesga_kiss]

secondly, diamonds are definitely an item for which you get what you pay for.

Nonsense, unless you value buying over-priced tokenistic items from highly violent cartels that ruthlessly control the price. People that make fake diamonds need to have armed guards for their sites and bodyguards for their home. This is the "value" of diamonds. DeBeers allegedly has a 400 year supply sitting in warehouses.

Diamonds are completely and utterly worthless unless you want to drill through hard objects. You might "get what you pay for" with a diamond drill bit but I prefer the GTA interpretation: "Nothing says I love you more than a lump of rock mined by child wage slaves in Angola".

Bogus from DeBeers

[PopeRatzo]

I only recently bought my wife an artificial diamond. She's a mathematician, and wouldn't dream of spending tens of thousands on a real one, but we recently had our anniversary and she deserved one (she lets me play Eve-Online to my heart's content).

The artificial diamond wasn't cheap, but it wasn't anywhere near the price of a real one of the same size. It's beautiful and kicks light like crazy. I love to play with my laser pointer and that ring. Her friends all think I'm a stud for buying her the rock. (By the way, I bought the stone loose and had a jeweler set it into a beautiful ring. He was extremely impressed by the stone and gave me a dollar-quote that was a few hundred times what I paid. Of course, didn't put it through lab tests, though).

Screw DeBeers and the pain they've caused in Africa. I say let those bastards go broke and feel pain on the way.

Re:Real importance beyond jewelry?

[Carnivore]

Or you could, you know, have a mutually respectful relationship and talk about it. A lot of women, especially the ones we slashdotters get involved with, are pretty reasonable. My wife and I decided that we didn't want to go anywhere near a diamond, and my efforts to have a chunk of meteor set into a custom ring didn't work out. She's an astronomer, so we both thought that the extraterrestrial setting would be cool.

We ended up getting an "engagement computer"--she wanted a TiBook, and since it was about $2k, we thought that it was a funny joke.

The whole wedding industry is a giant scam. If you are with a reasonable woman, you can dodge a lot of the crazy stupid extravagances and have a fun time instead. We got titainium wedding bands (custom designed by us in Autocad and made by Bruce Boone [boonerings.com], who is awesome), her dress was custom made by a local seamstress for $200, we got married on a volcano in Arizona with 8 people, I grilled steaks for the reception. We're having parties in the Spring for all of the family friends and relatives who weren't at the ceremony.

We had to go to the mall "ring shopping" to get our ring sizes. Some of the more complicated, but still not crazy, rings were hugely expensive--$3500 each!

I know that a lot of women have been planning their weddings since they were 6. I also know that I'm really lucky. I'm trying to tell everyone that it is possible to have a fun wedding without giving DeBeers any money and not that much to the rest of the wedding industry. Fight the Man! And reason with the Woman!

Re:Bogus from DeBeers

[JesseMcDonald]

careful, sounds like you're hinting at fraud there...

How so? It is a real diamond ring, after all, even if the diamond was created in a lab. As long as he doesn't try to pass it off as a DeBeers diamond he should be fine.

I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

DeBeers invented the modern marriage proposal

[spun]

The whole thing is a DeBeers invention. Before DeBeers, no one would even think that surprising a woman with a big sparkly rock that cost two whole months salary was a good way to get her to say yes. Their market research showed that most women would rather have the man save the money for a downpayment on a house. So they came up with the whole "Surprise her with a diamond" idea. Don't tell her ahead of time or ask her father or any traditional shit like that so that she has a chance of talking you out of doing something stupid, surprise her!

Re:This cannot be

[DavidTC]

No shit.

Can we check for the mark and if we find it, not buy the thing?

It amazes me that people used to complain about fucking Nikes and not about DeBeers. Think what you want about sweatshots, at least Nike wasn't waging a fucking war and killing people, and it's not a gigantic cartel that's been manipulating the market for 100 years.

An informed boycott would ruin DeBeers, because people wouldn't come back, no matter what they did. But, no, let's go after Nike, the wife-beater, instead of DeBeers, the serial killer.

Re:The ultimate Reality Distortion Field

[infinite9]

The irony here is that that financial woes are the leading cause of divorce -- if anything this silly notion is probably setting up young couples to fail.

+20 insightful.

Number of years I've been married: 15, and not likely to end any time soon.

Amount I paid for my wife's ring: $0. :-)

Starting out in debt for both the ring and the wedding is the worst possible way to start a marriage.

Re:Real importance beyond jewelry?

[DavidTC]

They should care it wasn't pulled out of the earth.

At gunpoint.

From a mine where a war was waged to retain control of it.

And polished by child slave labor in India.

You shouldn't marry fucking retards who think a 'real diamond' is better. 'Real diamonds' and the DeBeer's cartel have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths over what, in reality, are just rocks.

Carefully explain that you can pay X, and have a completely flawless rock, or you can pay X*5 and have a slightly flawed rock with the blood mostly washed off of it.

Re:Real importance beyond jewelry?

[Anonymous Coward]

And how do you explain DeBeer's verified stockhouse of gem-quality diamonds? They have a huge surplus. Which implies commonality.

Re:Bogus from DeBeers

[budgenator]

Many would argue that the only reason a dirt-dug diamond from the DeBeers Corp is more expensive is because DeBeers goes to great lengths to create both artificial demand through marketing and artifical scarcety through the almost complete monopoly control of the diamond business

Re:Real importance beyond jewelry?

[Lord_Dweomer]

You shouldn't marry fucking retards who think a 'real diamond' is better.

Correction: You shouldn't marry fucking retards who think a 'real diamond' is better PROVIDED they have been educated about the evils of DeBeers. The vast majority of women don't have a fucking clue that these are blood diamonds, or what a blood diamond even is. All they know is they want a status symbol that proves their man spends the big bucks on them.

So before you propose to her, make sure you teach her about DeBeers, and guage her reaction. If she still wants a real diamond, THEN tell her to go find a guy who supports the suffering of others to provide her with one.

Re:Consulted with my wife about this

[Lord_Dweomer]

Women, well at least my wife, don't necessarily want natural diamonds. They want to feel special and see the look of jealousy on the faces of other women. Having said that, there are always the snooty girls who won't wear anything other than a natural diamond. The're usually the ones who will leave you because their new man has a bigger house, better car, and bigger bank ballance than you.

I don't mean this as an attack...but don't you think your wife is being a bit hypocritical? She doesn't want you to buy her a real diamond because she knows where they come from...yet she wants other women to THINK you bought her a diamond paid for in children's blood? That seems a bit fucked up to me personally. Now if the other women all gawked and got jealous and then your wife explained her reason for not wanting a real one, that would be one thing. But it seems to me that by reveling in the jealousy of other women and playing in to it, she is perpetuating the desire for natural blood diamonds.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Bogus from DeBeers

[Phroggy]

This may be a stupid question but did you ever think about buying another one, getting it set into a ring and then see what it would get make ebay?

Moderators are on crack, this is not a troll.

I think people need to look at how to market these things. Stop buying into DeBeers' marketing spin - stop thinking of artificially-created diamonds as cheap knock-offs of the real thing. Artificially-created diamonds are better than the real thing, not because they're technically flawless, but because they don't support human-rights abuses in Africa. Anyone who's socially conscious ought to be able to see this as a positive thing. A quick Google search turned up this list [fguide.org]; for this purpose ignore the first three items.

Somebody needs to start marketing artificially-created diamonds as being the socially-conscious alternative to the existing cartels. Anyone who already supports fighting HIV in Africa (for example), or opposes funding child/slave labor, should prefer them.

So, when you advertise it on eBay in that way, no, you're not being fraudulent at all.