From what I understand, these gems are actually better than natural ones, since they're 100% pure. Maybe it's time to call lab-grown diamonds "real" and mined ones "fake".
It's funny what massive marketing campaign can do.
DeBeers' big win was when they convinced the US FTC that synthetic diamonds had to be labeled as synthetic. They're real diamonds, and arguably not different from natural ones. The tests required to detect synthetics keep getting more complicated and expensive as the synthesis technology improves.
The old heat and pressure process was first used by General Electric to make a synthetic diamond in 1956. That's used today to make diamond abrasives by the ton. Making gemstones that way wasn't cost-effective until, in the 1990s, Gemesis, in Florida, got the process to work better. The process is touchy, but that's what computer control is for. DeBeers tried threats and intimidation. Unfortunately for them, the Gemesis CEO was a retired US Army general and didn't intimidate. The synthetic diamond gem industry, based in Florida, was soon going strong.
Then came controlled vapor deposition of carbon. The heat and pressure process forced some metal from the press anvils into the diamond, and this was detectable. The CVD process, using technology similar to that used to make near perfect crystal IC substrates, didn't do that. Synthetic diamonds could not longer be detected with standard diamond industry tests.
DeBeers developed more elaborate tests. Diamonds glow for a few milliseconds after being hit by a UV flash, and DeBeers makes testers which flash the target and then take a picture. The results differ for CVD diamonds, but not by much. There are videos of the difference, and it's now at the point where the precise symmetry of CVD diamonds is what distinguishes them. This blows away a basic sales pitch of the diamond business - the best diamond is a flawless crystal. Now they're up against a semiconductor materials technology that makes perfect crystals. DeBeers has been trying to spin this as "natural flaws" being important, after decades of promoting "flawless" as the goal.
CVD was originally really slow. Then the process got faster. Then more companies started using it. Now there's a glut of small diamonds. You can buy them in kilogram bags on Alibaba.
As for cubic zirconia, that's now so cheap that for $500 you can buy a gemstone 200mm across for about $500.
Most other gemstones have been produced in bulk for decades. You can buy ruby and sapphire rods and sheets, and it's not that expensive. The checkout scanners at Home Depot have a sapphire layer on top of the glass. You can drag tools across those all day for years before they scratch much.
Yes, for decades they claimed clarity and purity to be indicators of the highest quality. Now that humans can manufacture them with better specs than nature, they're shifting to claim that "natural" is better. In the end it's a pretty carbon lattice.
It's such bullshit, from the social usage as a token of value for females to the fake perception of value.
I hope they fall hard.
(Less so for industrial uses, or for inserts into the average person's engagement rings where it's the thought and style rather than the provenance that counts)
Painting and drawing went for various forms of stylized representation, because competing against photographs doesn't interest most people.
But you also had a new field of photography, where the focus is now composition. There is a marked difference between the photographs I take and the photographs a skilled photographer takes, even if both are realistic depictions of a scene, and the difference is, sometimes, art.
That is, it's not so much about composition, as it is about using objects around you - people, nature, etc - to paint a picture instead of using paint and brushes.
It's much easier than painting when the picture you see in your head is much like what the camera lens sees when you point it in a given direction.
However, often there's work required to paint the picture you see in your head. With people, it's figuring out what to say to them to make them look the way you see them - to bring out the inner warmth - and to figure out how to capture in a static image what the eye sees over a stretch of time.
Ultimately, with movies we've come full circle: filmmakers often resort to painting (i.e. CGI) instead of photography, because sometimes it's easier just to paint the picture one has in their minds with a graphics tablet than it is to paint it with real-world objects positioned around the camera - even if realism is the goal.
The artistic merits and goals are another axis altogether from market demand, and a bit more difficult subject.
There was a similar problem with Rubies and they detected the fakes by virtue of the fact that they were flawless.
Geo-sourced vs anthro-sourced?
They could go the granola from the earth natural route but unlike organic farming, which evokes images of the stoic farmer, their image is of conflict diamonds and exploited children in dangerous mines.
Couple that with the fact that many people no longer buy the diamonds or see the value that DeBeers put on them. And the fact that millennials are poor and they have a fading empire.
I believe that with really good marketing (which De Beers can easily afford) this should not be a problem. For example the fact that Persian rug makers traditionally include deliberate small imperfections into their carpets
> https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/32361/did-persi...
might be a good starting point for how one might create such a campaign.
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/diamond-de-beers-marketin...
With that gone they have very little to play with. Fashion, possibly, but that’s strongly fickle & temporary.
Those kids growing up in the 90s who heard about all the shit DeBeers did and continues to do are now of the age where they would be a customer and they aren't buying. The up and coming generations certainly don't value diamonds either.
I would bet that in 15-20 years the market will decline significantly further and the artificial diamonds are only going to hasten that decline.
I wonder whether they could go a fair trade route, focus only on communities which could be improved, and give them a small slice (which would make an enormous difference). It would require a change in approach, not just a marketing whitewash.
If you want a fair trade diamond you need one that's certified to have come from somewhere like Canada.
Develop methods to distinguish "natural"/"organic" impurities from artificially introduced flaws.
In other words, I basically agree that diamond prices are subject to artificial scarcity, but give credit to the other side’s point. They have a reasonable and internally consistent argument, even if we find it disagreeable. If you interpret “real” to mean “natural”, their position is reasonable. This isn’t novel - we use “real” and “fake” to refer to “natural” and “artificial” for many other things.
The only thing I credit them for is being ruthlessly manipulative. "Fakes" is not a neutral word. It was very specifically chosen for its emotional baggage, similar to "pro-lifer" or "franken-foods". It is an emotional distracting piece of doublespeak and should not be condoned at all as being "reasonable".
It’s only doublespeak if you subscribe to a literalist form of communication that most people do not use. “Fake” isn’t a neutral word because it’s not intended to be - some people actually do prefer natural diamonds, just as some people really do prefer non-GMO food. It doesn’t matter if the reason they have that preference is due to artificial scarcity or a marketing campaign, the point is that they have that preference and many will keep it even if they are very informed on the matter. People are not hyperrational in the development of their preferences.
The point I’m trying to make here is that while I agree people shouldn’t spend ostentatious amounts of money on items with artificial scarcity, I think litigating the use of the word “fake” is effectively a strawman and a sideshow when we’re discussing De Beers. In my opinion, while lab-made diamonds are more fiscally responsible, they’re not less silly as a purchase than natural diamonds if you dislike the capitalist insertion of a jewelry preference. It’s just local maxima: if you buy a lab-grown diamond you’re still buying a diamond. You’re still buying into that “emotional baggage”, as you put it, you’re just being a bit more fiscally savvy about it. If we assume people are not born with a desire for diamonds, then there is a credible argument buying synethic ones is still feeding a desire you (and I!) find fundamentally disagreeable.
No, I'm not. I'm stating the fact that the language used by De Beers is manipulative. Whether or not people fall for that manipulation is a separate argument.
I did not bring consumers into the equation, you did. And speaking of manipulative language, I would appreciate it if you didn't try to spin it as if I'm the one talking down to them.
More abstractly, to call a marketing campaign emphasizing the “realness” of a luxury item manipulative is to say that people could be manipulated by it. I disagree that people are manipulated into their desires for these items, even if their desires are not financially rational.
The fact that an entire industry relies on fallacies does not make calling out those fallacies counter-productive. On the contrary.
More to the point, what exactly is the fallacy? That the “real” products are better? They are better for some definition, you just don’t share the same definition of “better” as the people buying them. That’s the problem: the claim of superiority is not falsifiable, and it’s normative. It’s valid to say that synthetic diamonds are better according to some metrics like flawlessness, but that isn’t the metric everyone values. Many people demonstrably want “as flawless as possible for the ‘real’ diamond I can afford.” That desire is not based on a fallacy, it’s based on different priors. People are approximately never perfectly price-efficient in their purchasing decisions, which means there’s some amount of irrationality everywhere. A desire to buy an inefficiently priced luxury item with artificial scarcity and status associations is price-irrational but it can make sense in general. In your view, there should be a rigorous notion of “the metric” to optimize for across various products, but that notion is fundamentally at odds with how humans operate culturally. To put it bluntly, many people know and don’t care that synthetic diamonds are better in many respects, just as many people know and don’t care that a “franken-Rolex” can be better than an actual Rolex in many respects. They still want the “real” version, and from there they’ll optimize further.
Like I said, I think there are legitimate criticisms of the diamond trade, but in my opinion they’re glossed over when we get preoccupied talking about what constitutes “real” versus “fake” and whether or not people should want the “real” thing.
Oh really? And you did not think of explaining this completely non-standard usage of the word "productive" until now? Who is not being "productively precise" in their argumentation here?
I'm done with this debate. Your style of discussion is basically building up a giant Rube Goldberg machine of words for something that is extremely simple at the core, which is turning it into an endurance run of who can keep up with the walls of text the longest. That is neither convincing, nor respectful of the person you are debating with to.
Sorry, that wasn’t my intention. But respectfully, I disagree. I don’t think this topic is at all simple, and I find nuance to be a helpful perspective.
Especially for people who are not (yet) particularly invested/interested, it signals that the "fake" ones are flawed and objectively worse in terms of quality, because of the parallel to fake (counterfeit) goods which often are.
Instead of fake, calling them synthetic or artificial would be more neutral choices. For "real" you could use "natural(ly occurring)" or similar.
Predisposed is a pretty strong word. Do you think people are born with a preference for “natural” diamonds? I happen to believe that most preferences you hold are learned throughout life, perhaps even manufactured by others.
"Fake" means something isn't what it's claimed to be.
A piece of glass cut to look like a diamond is a fake. You make like it or not, but it isn't a diamond. A diamond is a mass of carbon in a particular structure, and glass isn't.
A lab-grown diamond is not fake. It is, in fact, a diamond.
If people want to distinguish between "natural" vs "synthetic" or "mined" vs "grown" diamonds, fine. But "fake" is truly a misleading term here.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07...
De Beers definitely mined cornered the market for a long time. But its over.
The meme that diamonds are falling off frees if not for De Beers is not accurate. But with these artificals, it may very well come true.
IMO it's not much different than deciding to drink "natural water" over simple tap water (though I'm basing this off living near a spring well that supplies my tap water, experiences may vary).
Preferring the “real” over the “fake” is only irrational insofar as preferring either is irrational. You either buy these items because you want the status signalling effect, or yoy buy them because you actually have an innate appreciation for them.
"What makes a diamond "natural"?"
Diamonds are perceived as luxury goods because of the elaborate fiction of artificial scarcity woven around it by De Beers, which you have acknowledged upthread.
Mentioning gold wasn't necessary because alchemy never delivered on a man-made substitute for gold. And it distracts from the core issue, we are here debating the consequences of the Chinese lab's feat for diamond after all.
EDIT: To summarize, I'm not clear on why you think applying a "luxury goods" lens will lead to better insights as to why people prefer "natural/real" over "man-made/fake" substitutes, when the underlying issue is one of perception, which can be shaped by anyone with an agenda and a marketing budget.
They now basically say, "the more pure they are, the more valuable, because they are incredibly rare (because we artificially limit supply) unless they are really, really pure, because we can't limit supply of those."
Remember, lots of things are natural, but only the rare ones are valuable.
If you approach this from the perspective that you’re spending more money for imperceptible characteristics encouraged by a massive conglomerate, then sure, it’s obviously irrational. But if you look at it from the perspective of signaling or status seeking, it makes sense to pursue the “real” item over the “fake” one.
If you buy a synthetic diamond, the only people you’re signaling favorably to are those in your particular ingroup with respect to opinions on De Beers. If you buy a real diamond, you are signaling to a much wider set of people. It’s not fiscally rational, but it’s not supposed to be.
Do you keep the price tag on it?
Or do you just talk about how, obviously, you'd never stoop to buying man-made diamonds?
Can't argue with that.
The Diamond cartel has done a lot of PR spin to say these new ones "threaten viability..."
The world is literally run by PR and marketing.
https://www.sciencealert.com/super-deep-diamond-contains-cal...
"Rare" still has status and therefore a price premium.
Which is fine, but it’s a massive cultural shift for them & I’m not sure they’d want to do that (though they may have no choice).
Also I was surprised that the price difference wasn't bigger, in the 1-2 carat range it seemed the difference was maybe 10-20% or so, which is not nothing but not massive.
Could be an artifact of where I was looking however.
If god herself could not tell the difference in a blind test, then there's no significant difference. Except price of course.
Der Bers, take that! (I hope your social listening catches this)
I believe that De Beers has hired a group of highly qualified advertising specialists. So your "little first world anarchy" is really futile.
You probably might want to, like, spell their name even remotely correctly for that to happen.
If that is the story, then it doesn’t need to be told.