De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds
money.cnn.com
money.cnn.com
This is clearly a play to devalue the image of man made diamonds. "May not be forever" my ass, it's the exact same thing. Their goal is probably to try to quickly drive the price of man made diamonds down to the price of Moissanite, and create a artificial distinction between natural and man made dimaonds. All of this so the price of man made diamonds doesn't bring down the price of the natural stones with it.
Modern high-quality synthetic materials, whether in gemstones or other uses, have so much to offer in fashion innovation. Indeed, diamond jewelers claim that silicon carbide (SiC) has "excess fire" as it has greater dispersion than diamond. SiC has a greater index of refraction, which improves the properties of total-internal-reflection as well! (Edit: It is also birefringent, which does require care when choosing a cut, size, and setting)
Cubic zirconia, too, can be stunning. Order a handful of 10-15mm stones and see for yourself. Or, for a little more money, synthetic rubies and sapphires can transform how you think about nature (they're the same crystal, except for differing defects). The real beauty of many stones is in the cut, not the base material. Diamond absolutely has its place, but it is but one in a spectrum of really cool offerings.
It is the rarity of materials that give them cachet, but the physical properties that make them beautiful. Platinum is a boring metal, visually, difficult to distinguish by eye from steels, aluminum, and titanium. The bloom of the commonest flower is far prettier, but we barely notice because they seem so commonplace and ephemeral.
Every one of these materials was born in the heart of a star or in the heat of an astrophysical cataclysm, each just as natural as the next.
Disclaimer/Caution: I've lost (so far) large fractions of small amounts of money betting long on SiC as a business venture.
If you can create the exact same rough/uncut synthetic diamond, and therefore can deterministically reproduce the same cut on each diamond, then the decision of how to cut that diamond becomes intellectual property and is potentially copywritable.
If de Beers really can't hold back the synthetic market, they'll find a way to take it over, and legally-enforced monopolies sure isn't a bad strategy.
The most important commercial cut (the brilliant) was described in Marcel Tolowsky's 1919 book Diamond Design, so would not be copyrightable without some tremendous legal gymnastics. De Beers could dream up some "improvement" to the brilliant cut and trademark it, but there really isn't much room for improvement. The cut that Tolowsky described is very, very close to the mathematical ideal for brilliance and fire. Most of the later optimisations in diamond modelling are in the public domain.
Admittedly their marketing scheme is under a little more pressure with the various articles about their "interesting" past and price fixing schemes, but that's a drop in the bucket compared to their decades of propaganda.
They will find some way, openly or through any back channel they can find or manufacture, to control as much as they can. Plus or minus further monitoring and exposes.
I'm with you so far.
A more realistic option is use nanoscale etching to get unique colors. Much like those blue butterfly wings that don't use pigment.
> Indeed, diamond jewelers claim that silicon carbide (SiC) has "excess fire" as it has greater dispersion than diamond. SiC has a greater index of refraction, which improves the properties of total-internal-reflection as well!
As an investor you probably know this, but for the benefit of everyone else, Moissanite is a marketing term for (crystalline) silicon carbide.
Similarly to how sapphire is a special term for crystalline aluminum oxide, but the word "sapphire" has a bit more tradition behind it.
Clear crystalline aluminum oxide you’d generally just call corundum (or aluminum oxide if you’re not feeling fancy), but that doesn’t market as well when you’re making watch faces and camera lenses out of it, so I guess we’re calling that sapphire now too.
TLDR: Gemstone naming seems a bit super arbitrary and marketing driven (not that I’m an expert on the subject)
Many famous historical "rubies" are not corundum but spinel; they were called rubies because "ruby" was the term for any red gemstone.
"Moissanite" is purely marketing, though.
For some people, geologists in particular, there is a romance to the formation of a natural diamond due to heat and pressure within the earth. That's great too!
[1] Look at your high-efficiency LED lights to find some SiC in your house. Thanks, Cree and others!
Considering this, I don't think this is going to bring about the Diamond Age unfortunately.
Platinum has very low reactivity so it doesn't rust, corrode, whatever easy, unlike the others. That's why it's considered valuable, because it looks almost the same after a lot of time.
Neither of those metals becomes structurally weaker in any meaningful way over time due to oxygen exposure.
Srsly no one cares if a stone is real or not.
Personally, I just didn't even bother buying an engagement ring (or wedding ring for that matter) because it's a "tradition" that means literally absolutely nothing to me. My husband doesn't care that I don't want jewelry and he prefers to not wear a wedding ring too. So I guess we are happy being "less stupid."
This issue is squarely in the women feminists' court, and (for the most part) they haven't taken up the cause to stop supporting this evil system that hurts both men and women.
Besides, I personally feel that "lab grown diamonds" have more weak (marketing) points than "natural, made by stars, millennial diamonds". Could be wrong though.
So... the two items are identical in every possible way that matters except in the way that lines De Beers pockets?
It almost feels like De Beers sponsored this article in a desperate campaign to make dirty mined diamonds more valuable.
Is there any other product where resale is "voluntarily" limited like that?
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-yo...
People just didn't go for the colorless cola fad that year. Why did "Tab Clear" "kill" Crystal Pepsi, but not Sprite or 7-Up?
The person who tried to copy Crystal Pepsi failed, and made up an excuse to cover his failure.
Doesn't stick = Intentional devaluation Sticks = Brilliant capitalization of the market.
Tab back then was far more popular than today. It was at today's level of Dr. Pepper.
If you want a natural stone that is "forever", look into the nature shop, they have tons of beautiful solid stones. If you want a shiny, pure gem stone, lab-grown is going to give the best quality.
Natural diamonds are hopefully becoming a commodity for wealthy and misguided hipsters. It is a good thing that the bloodstained business is failing.
Hmm, both natural and man-made stones have price/quality trade-offs. I am no expert in the field, but I think both kinds are post-sorted into quality grades based on what flaws are found. And I guess labs can also tune their growth parameters for different trade-offs.
So yes, for a given price and size, the artificial stone will have better quality -- but that is just another way of saying they are cheaper.
What may fool your intuition is that the process is not about refining, it is about growing a crystal. IIRC, the vaporize carbon in a very controlled atmosphere and let it grow.
Natural processes are much more messy and are made in the presence of a lot of other chemicals that need to be artificially introduced in the crystal growing atmosphere for it to be integrated.
Some processes have actually started introducing "fake" occlusions just to make them impossible to distinguish from the natural variety.
(I believe I've only seen them in hotels)
First time I saw them I thought it was some kind of dystopian joke.
In this case the market needs the average consumer to buy into that status symbol, and enough of them are price conscious that a cheaper alternative that almost nobody can tell is cheaper is quite a draw.
Just like lab grown meat is gaining traction, I think synthetic companies have the ability to push the social angle. "Identical in composition to the diamonds mined by slaves and used to finance terrorism." Just need an English major to turn that into a catchy slogan! :)
That's why my favorite stones are corundum and nephrite.
http://11points.com/coke-made-intentionally-terrible-clear-c...
The strategy is called Kamikaze marketing... and can result in fantastic stories like this, but it is almost never successful. Unfortunately I think DeBeers might have the ability to pull it off.
At that point, natural and man-made will reach a price parity... Far below the current cost of natural diamonds. Because there will be no way of knowing where your diamond comes from.
They have enough money, resources and incentives to try to destroy man-made diamonds for at least a few more decades.
You can get synthetic diamonds on Alibaba now. Some of which really are diamond.
Edit: Typo
Unlike mines you can't really establish a monopoly in vapor deposit ovens, so in the long run competition should drive down costs. It makes sense that De Beers would want to fast-forward that process, particularly since the price of natural diamonds is kindof arbitrary anyway.
To be fair, diamonds have value because of rarity and marketing. Not sure how many normal people can tell the difference between a diamond and a cubic zirconia, so it isn't just how it looks.
...is also a lie. The man made diamonds will last just as long (or longer, as they're generally more perfect) than mined diamonds.
Hedging sounds like a more sensible explanation.
Case in point. Despite overwhelming evidence there are people today who still debate climate change.
People disbelieve facts that would cost them to believe. If I believe in climate change, I have to make expensive life changes (sell the SUV, buy a Tesla, etc). Therefore I will not believe in it.
This belief is 100% honest, BTW. This is key to understand!
For diamonds, the incentives are reversed. If I believe that artificial diamonds are as good as the natural kind, I can get a wedding ring much cheaper. So I will probably believe that!
If I have already bought natural diamonds, I might believe something else. But it doesn't matter much, since I'm not buying more diamonds.
In part this is true, but none of those are necessary, but what is neceaary for most deniers if they flip is “abandon my political tribe, whose leaders have defined the belief in climate change as outside the bounds of the tribe.”
That's really very nearly the only factor that matters.
I think "have to" is a bit strong. I absolutely believe in climate change. But I have no intention of selling (or stop driving) my 2004 Chevrolet Suburban.
Whatever the message, say it loud and often, and it becomes accepted as true. Call it spin, call it PR, call it marketing, it works.
If I found an “influencer” who was right on product recommendations 95% of the time it would be a relief and I’d be so happy to get all that research time back.
I think the bar for right enough varies among different people. And for some people it applies to everything from politics to science. These people are also likely to believe the topics too complex to follow in detail. If they choose a good person to follow they may be more right than if they researched themselves.
What you attribute to laziness could perhaps be seen in a different light: economizing time plus intimidation/fear.
Like anything powerful, an intelligent person calls for caution.
A lot of people are worrying about GMO in food because we don't have enough data about them. We are changing things that could have important biological, health and ecological impacts, but the companies producing them are not willing to test them extensively for safety during 20 years before selling them.
We don't know what are the long term effects of cross breeding the GMO species with non GMO ones. We don't know the long term effects of the fauna. We don't known the long term (on decades) effects of ingesting any of them.
What we know is that if you give mouses the GMO food in isolation for a short time, they don't develop apparent problems. That's not a lot to go on, especially since very simple products, like processed meat, revealed themself as being carcinogenous on the long run (http://www.who.int/features/qa/cancer-red-meat/en/).
That's not science to me. That's business as usual.
I don't trust business. History taught me that for profit entities don't make the right decisions on this. After all, we knew asbestos was dangerous in 1920, but had to wait 1980 to act on it. After all, we fed cows with meat while knowing it's an herbivore, leading to spongiform encephalopathy. After all, we used the least safe nuclear technology we knew about because it was more suited for our military ambitions.
On a technology as complex as GMO, with a lot of interactions in different systems, it can take a lot of time to realize something is wrong. If it happens, it will take even more time before we act. The companies creating GMO will then, as usual, protect them-self to the extreme, and eventually just pay some money to get out of trouble, money they already earned by selling the GMO anyway.
So yes, whether it's GMO in food, nano-particles or anything that is very potent, I think it's fair to say "hey, slow down, we are not doing our homework here" when the other side is just trying to sell it to everybody.
It's a matter of agenda.
Why would "traditional" crops going through random mutations be any safer than GMO crops going through highly controlled, highly tested mutations?
It isn't a mysterious process - it's science. It allows us to create products like Golden Rice to alleviate malnutrition and increase crop yields. It's probably the only thing which has helped curtail world hunger in any meaningful capacity.
As for De Beers, throwing marketing dollars at misinformation pretty much has been their business model since the 1930s. Diamonds are a girl's best friend ...
Yes, by people who are trained scientists and researchers. We don't need more poorly informed, mathematically weak, statistically challenged, dilletantes yelling into the mix.
Read this article: https://www.thestar.com/business/2018/05/29/de-beers-to-sell...
Read the last paragraph:
The move also comes at a sensitive time for De Beers and its relationship with Botswana, the source of three-quarters of its diamonds. The two have a sales agreement that gives De Beers the right to market and sell the diamonds from Botswana. The deal, which gives De Beers its power over global prices, will soon be up for negotiation and Botswana is likely to push for more concessions.
So this is not about man-made diamonds; it's a negotiating tactic! They'll use this move to pressure Botswana to accept weaker conditions and less money.
De Beers has spent the last 100+ years controlling the diamond industry's economics in it's entirety, from mining (via such contracts) to retail. They even invented the diamond engagement ring tradition, as we know it today. De Beers are most active on the wholesale side, where they control supply (and when they can, demand) to maintain stable, high "prices."
...That's why they are/control a cartel. I have no doubt that de beers does not intend to enter this market so that they can compete in an "efficient" level playing field. That's not what they do. They want to exert control over one or both of these markets, in some way. That is always the de beers business plan.
Anyway... I always get a little worried when people apply the basics of supply-demand logic everywhere. Classical economics describes markets of a certain type: many buyers and sellers, reasonable transparency & information flow, not too much collusion, reasonably low transaction costs, mild psychology/cultural effects..... This is some fraction of the economy but not all.
Supply-demand is not the main thing determining outcomes (prices & volume) in a lot of big markets: labour, financial services, banking, oil, ISPs... diamonds. Supply and demand effect those markets, but not in a way that can be described by 2 intersecting curves.
If you can replicate cooked food perfectly, will people still claim that "real" food, grown, slaughtered, and cooked, is "better" or tastes "more authentic", despite no technical difference?
Synthetic diamonds could, in fact, be in every way "better" (though hilariously, De Beers suggests a synthetic diamond "may not be forever"), but I won't be surprised if authentic diamonds remain the "real ones" long term. (After all, as we know, diamonds actually have no real value, it's all marketing.)
I highly recommend this story to anyone who's even slightly curious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_...
Value comes in the appreciation of the art. So diamonds that have been created over billions of years probably has more appreciation than ones created in 500 hours, even if they are exactly the same at the molecular level.
This is really getting at a core contradiction in how we analyze value. On the one hand, you have something's monetary value. This is the exchange value - the value you can get, denominated in a currency, via a sale. On the other hand, something you need has value because it fulfills a role when you use it. This is use value.
We don't consider use value at all when talking about the value of a good and consider the exchange value to be paramount. But this makes no sense. When you're starving, a loaf of bread is quite literally worth your entire world. When you have plenty of food, one more loaf of bread is worth almost nothing at all. When you need to get around, one car is extremely useful. Hundreds of cars together are essentially worthless, except perhaps to rent to others (literally rent-seeking).
If you can recreate something down to its molecular level, and produce arbitrarily many copies, then it's only value can be its use value. And use value is difficult to quantify as it's tied to the subjective experience of need.
> If you can replicate cooked food perfectly, will people still claim that "real" food, grown, slaughtered, and cooked, is "better" or tastes "more authentic", despite no technical difference?
I suspect that some amount of this comes from our attempts to justify the price we pay. It costs more, and so it must be worth more. We invent reasons in our minds to justify the dissonance. Though, if you experience something better, there isn't really any argument that can satisfactorily say that you don't, since experience is subjective, anyway.
The raw materials themselves, I think. After all, you have to supply the basic building blocks to replicate objects. That's why there is the feed in The Diamond Age, bringing the raw materials, plus vacuum and power.
Until you can artificially create heavy elements, their rarity will determine their value.
>"If you can replicate cooked food perfectly, will people still claim that "real" food, grown, slaughtered, and cooked, is "better" or tastes "more authentic", despite no technical difference?"
Yes, absolutely. At least certain segments will, witness how people fawn over "artisanal craft" this-and-that. More effort goes into the production, so there is more of an emotional connection. The mass produced item could be superior to the hand crafted item, but the latter will feel more "real" to a lot of people. Even more so if they craft it themselves.
It's just how we're wired, I think.
In the True Synthetic Era, the only input needed is energy, which can be cheaply collected from natural sources until they are exhausted.
If you could create diamonds at will in a lab the price of it's price is bound to go down significantly, it's not just a matter of supply and demand.
Exactly why a model will never replicate reality.
Well, you're quite exaggerating here. Diamonds actually have some very useful physical properties, in particular regarding their hardness, thermal conductivity and optical properties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_properties_of_diamond
>> Diamonds actually have some very useful physical properties.
Physical properties shared and almost always improved upon by their synthetic counterparts. Someone using diamonds exclusively for their optical properties or hardness would probably prefer a synthetic diamond due to the lack of impurities.
The ideals of a moneyless society by virtue of just being in the freaking future in TOS and then later because of replicators in TNG and beyond had to be adapted for the multicultural bazaar on Deep Space Nine by introducing Gold Pressed Latinum. Something that replicators couldn't reproduce. I think that is an interesting thought experiment. The only currencies on a federation ship are friendship and duty, but once you add in a mix of cultures and the complexities that develop because of their clashing goals and desires, you need a scarce item to keep accounts. We've done it over and over throughout our human society. My favorite is the Rai Stones[1] from the island of Yap, where they can't even be moved for the most part. The transfer of ownership is purely a social construct.
Diamonds are interesting and I think unparalleled in their arc as a store of value because of how technology is eroding and changing that. Not just the ability to produce them, but information technology swaying trends relating to their status and ethical usage. You can't tell a blood diamond from anything else once it's mixed with others. Some people see diamond jewelry to be akin to wearing fur. Some other people still find the suffering that came from their extraction to be part of the value. Not going to debate the morality of that issue, but I've heard it expressed more than once. Suffering will always be more bespoke even if the item can be identically reproduced. Some might prefer to soften "suffering" to "effort", but I'm unaware of an ethical diamond mining operation. Like lab grown meat, a strong case can me made that once we can make the thing in the lab at scale it is absolutely unethical to extract it from the earth at scale for vanity. No excuses.
In some ways suffering as a store of value is sort of like the social construct of a rai that floats with the idea of the item. Maybe we can build a crypto supply chain technology to verify chain of custody on natural diamonds so you can correctly track the bodies on it and their value in relation to your net worth. I'm only sort of being glib here, making it an accurate record would undoubtedly make them less romantic prizes.
Surely the tools and equipment to create synthetic diamonds will continue to drop in it's price to own and operate. It will be interesting to see how De Beers handles the first online custom gem shop where you can set your specs via your browser and have your gem grown to order, cut, and drop shipped for the price of a latte.
I mean, I think I covered all of that pretty well but yeah, to stay it's not a store of value at all just because it's a bad investment is inaccurate.
[1] https://priceonomics.com/post/45768546804/diamonds-are-bulls...
Right now there's currently a (publicly) huge 'security' margin on the time complexity of hash preimage attacks that allows the mining lottery of generating zero-prefixed hash collisions to proceed orderly for Bitcoin as an example. And while you might be tempted to say that because of the relative stability of BTC as a store of value for the past ~8 years is indicative of just how bulletproof that security really is, you might also realize that a market capitalization of only several billion USD is a drop in the ocean of _positive_ human monetary incentives to exploit, nevermind the alignment of negative incentives that work against anyone actually trying to make use of cryptographic breakthroughs in today's society whether as direct profit within the system as it exists today, revolution, or some other grand long-game.
In the P versus NP debate, our universe _could_ potentially be 'Algorithmica' although I know the majority of research mindshare is heavily assumptive of that being a trivially small possibility.
But there's also research lines on other forms of computational resource asymmmetry that we still assume exists but haven't really come up with proof for yet. For example, besides just deterministic versus nondeterministic polytime and the unproven assumption of one-way functions existing, there's also the open question of NC versus P, which roughly translates to the supposed asymmetry of parallel speedups versus sequential processing -- yet another potential source of scarcity if the current incarnation of crypto puzzles doesn't pan out. Computational space is another potentially unproven source of scarcity: PSPACE versus P.
Even really mundanely there potentially exists inversion 'crypto' puzzles of linear versus quadratic time, while not giving the exponentially wide safety margin every everyone expects for practically, could afford enough clearance to transfer and establish value at least between some highly centralized/colluding resource base against some very poor fraudster if that's the only threat model.
Humanities fascination with ascribing, denominating, and transferring 'value' between each other will be the most enduring and profound research avenues while our species last. And while to me that seems vapid to think that figuring out 'what exactly is money?' is the greatest question in the universe, maybe it really is.
Your points are reasonably related though.
Vanilla is actually vanilla - it's a complex substance. Artificial vanilla is just one component of vanilla - vanillin.
Not quite 100% identical, but yeah.
But you're probably right that DS9 made a bigger deal of it, especially with Sisko's dad and his restaurant featuring more than once, as well as various luxury products fetching high prices, when you might otherwise assume such high prices would quickly ensure they'd get replicated.
I believe there's a good hint when you combine some stuff from across TNG/DS9/VOY: Replicator patterns are relatively low-resolution for storage.
They only go to the molecular level, not the subatomic/quantum level [0], and even then occasionally have issues [1]. And even if you had a high-quality pattern stored, the replicators themselves are built around that low quality, hence why the genitronic replicator was needed for Worf's spine [2].
Transporters are built on the same technology, but work at the much higher resolution necessary to break down/rebuild a person. However, the amount of memory needed for that is insane [3], hence the specially-designed pattern buffers, which under normal circumstances degrade very quickly [4].
[0] http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Cold_Fire_(episode)
[1] http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/The_Enemy_(episode)
[2] http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Ethics_(episode)
[3] http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Our_Man_Bashir_(episode)
Yup, found the clip here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBWpVjzJXIs&feature=youtu.be...
In the case of hackintoshes, it's Apple... Prada shoes, the seal of Mario Prada... etc.
This way a man made stone can't easily cannibalize the value of a natural stone's market price premium.
The goal it seems is in-fact to maintain a premium with natural stones which is De Beers speciality. If they can't have all the revenues, De Beers want all the profits of the industry.
"De Beers launched a new jewelry brand on Tuesday [...] The brand, called Lightbox [...] will transform the lab-grown diamond sector by offering consumers a lab-grown product they have told us they want but aren't getting: affordable fashion jewelry that may not be forever, but is perfect for right now,"
Genius attack from marketing.
I fear the publishing and journal industries will stick around for another 100 years, just like De Beers has done to the diamond industry. We'll still be in the same crappy predicament in 2118 asking how we got to this point where a few publishers control all the world's flow of knowledge, and the answer will be something to the tune of "because people still like paying high prices for shiny rocks"
By creating a mass market and demand for these artifically produced diamonds, the cost of production will significantly drop where it could be more affordable for researchers and companies to invest their time and ideas into.
is this really the case? AFAIK industrial diamonds are quite cheap. if anything, debeers's meddling made industrial diamonds cheaper, because it suppressed the demand from the jewelry market.
I'm guessing "industrial applications" includes scientific research, so I doubt too much will change.
I have to say this is a huge step forward. I just talked to her about buying her a 3 carat lab-grown diamond ring now because of this news. She's still in doubt. I told her "It's the exact same thing, and no one died in the process the rest is up to your perception now".
Actually, the best way to demonstrate it is via these rules:
(1) you have to get something that is very hard to get (more money than you normally have),
(2) something that has no use for you (you want to convince her, it wouldn't be convincing if you benefitted from spending)
(3) and preferrably it is not monetizable for recipient (in general, woman is much less motivated to tricking you only because of gift)
So, if she's already convinced to merry you, spending fortune for diamond ring is futile. And if you are in hurry, you can really just burn some money to ash in front of her, it would do the same :) Nonetheless, not as fancy as diamond ring for her :D
I was very surprised at how everyone were pretty shocked, be it our parents or some of our friends (despite being open minded, modern millenials). Gotta give credits to the marketing firm that did this whole thing, it might be the biggest marketing success ever.
It's great that diamond mining is starting to fade from human history. It will take a while. The mall jewelry shops are still advertising the engagement-ring "one month's wages" schtick.
My snarky electrican engineer pal puts it this way. "Sure, crystals can put you touch with the whole universe. But you have to build them into circuits first!"
For the "couples ring" (whatever that is called in english, i dont know) my suggestion is to just get 2 solid rings of gold. Gold is actually worth something, I like that.
I'm simply speechless at the stupidity of this statement. A contender for one of the outright dumbest CEO-speak lies of the decade.
In some sense of the word, one is forever, the other is the potential of forever.
That said, yeah it’s obviously meant to cast doubt on the longevity of synthetics. But I don’t think stupid is the right word for it. Malicious comes to mind.
It's an interesting coincidence that artificial rocks came along at the same time that nobody can afford or even cares about the real thing anymore. What if manmade diamonds had come along during the boomer era when anyone could afford a house? What if newlyweds today had the buying power of their parents (the old rule-of-thumb for a ring was "one months salary"… hahaha)? "economic signaling" isn't going to save their industry and De Beers bloody well knows it. Good on them, btw, most industries deny the obvious and get steamrolled by upstarts.
(note: My father is a retired engineer from the mining industry, we literally have little bags of precious gems lying around for me to inherit; I'd tell them to liquidate, but anyone who's read the Atlantic classic from thirty years ago knows it's already pointless.)
Also, manmade diamonds tend to resemble scarcer flawless diamonds rather than more common flawed / included diamonds. Even if preferences shifted to included diamonds to signal a "natural", the more obviously flawed / natural are also the most plentiful, again posing a pricing challenge.
The diamond industry is a racket built on the backs of impoverished Africans to produce frivolous symbols. It isn't even useful like the cobalt and tantalum mining. And it extorts young married couples out of serious cash ("three months salary" for a rock instead of a special trip, a car, a down payment...).
Good riddance.
Diamonds, on the other hand, are completely indistinguishable at a macro level and just barely distinguishable at a micro level.
This would suggest that it's not easy to identify lab-grown diamonds from other diamonds.
From mid-90s to early 00s I remember the diamond hype, from Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, to the practical refinement of making cost-effective synthetic gem quality diamonds, high-frequency heat-dissipating semiconductor wafers, and speculation of biocompatible nanotechnology such as respirocytes.
What problems were encountered with scaling, energy efficiency, cost, and competitor materials? Are they still applicable technologies working their way through the R&D pipeline?
Two pathways have led to economically viable synthetic gem diamonds. One is chemical vapor deposition (CVD), the other is high pressure, high temperature (HPHT) growth.
The successful CVD makers use hydrogen+methane and high power microwaves (typically 915MHz, 30-60kW) to form plasmas that cause diamond to deposit and grow on small diamond seeds. IIa Technologies, Diamond Foundry are two of these.
HPHT is an old technology, the first to unambiguously demonstrate diamond synthesis in the 1950s. It grows diamonds in metal solvents at high temperature and pressure (typically 1000°C at a million psi). It has come to be successful in gem diamond production due to better press design and use of modern process controls.
The business challenge in gem diamond production isn't any aspect of the technology. It's the sales.
De Beers has a hundred years of channels for whatever type of diamond they want to sell. Newcomers have to build their own channels, largely because the older ones are highly loyal to De Beers and won't handle goods from any other source.
As the CEO of one of the most successful synthetic diamond producers recently told me, if their cost of production were zero, it would still be a major challenge to sell their gems.
It's pretty funny to see De Beers and co trying to defend how precious their "real" stones are while the face value of man-made ones might actually be higher than those real ones they acquire slaving away poor african countries.
[1] https://priceonomics.com/post/45768546804/diamonds-are-bulls...
They really still don’t get it still. Consumers aren’t making the same distinction for something that’s organically the same.
They’re really pushing a “lab-grown is different and mined is more valuable” branding maneuver that people just aren’t buying.
Many technological advancements had obsoleted traditional companies. I'm surprised De Beers is still around.
Now if you're burying the synthetic diamond hundreds of miles deep, where the pressure is high enough to create diamonds from scratch, then you might be into something.
I think De Beers is looking at a revenue/margin maximization endgame. I wouldn't be surprised to see Anglo American sell De Beers off within a couple of years.
And the price of synthetics compared to equivalent quality/weight naturals will continue to fall. Synthetic/natural prices are now ~70%, whereas a little over a year ago, they were ~90%. Hydrogen, methane and microwaves are much cheaper than titanic mines.
[1] https://www.economist.com/international/2017/02/25/a-report-...
When that happens I wonder what will become of the 'rule' that says a man should spend 3 months salary on a wedding ring. Perhaps a Rolex watch will substitute for a diamond ring in signalling to your friends that you have a rich husband?
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-yo...
For status conscious people (which is most people) they would rather have a smaller natural diamond than a larger man made diamond. This has already been proven with pearls.
Most sheeple would recognize when someone else is wearing a diamond that is too big for their status and decide it is a fake. Many people wouldn't wear a too-big manmade diamond for that reason.
The former president of the US branch of the world's largest synthetic diamond producer once told me personally, that she expected their market to get destroyed once De Beers started to shift focus over to synthetics. They had the head start but didn't dare undercut the cartel that much.
This is just De Beers moving forward on that roadmap which has involved the shutdown of mines and price fixing to keep the price of synthetics and natural diamonds propped up. They've done a very good job of keeping synthetics within 80% or so the price of a natural diamond.
That'll put the industry solidly in the here to stay state, permanently. Probably shut debeers up permanently as well.
Knew a bit about the diamond business from growing up.
- Required huge proof of work. - Few practical use cases. - Store of value. - Highly portable. - Price a function of liquidity. - Clustered around use cases like capital flight, high denomination cash, opacity, and black market transactions, asset protection/hiding.
I would argue blockchain has done more harm to the diamond market than synthetic diamonds have. Between the two, it's been a perfect storm.
Portability / Launderability, perhaps, but that's a bit different from "store"
Sorry, but that is some plain wrong headlining. Maybe its a first that they sell them as jewelry but De Beers is producing (and selling) synthetic diamonds now for 60 years and is already one of if not the biggest producer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Element_Six)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDfs54uwG9w
It's an eye opening Frontline (PBS) doc from 1994. This suggests DeBeers created an artificial diamond 'rarity' and other cultural and economic 'shenanigans' so to speak.
So de beers will intentionally damage their synthetic diamonds. Sure I wanna buy synthetic diamonds from you guys.
It would be fun to have a ~600 carat diamond as a paperweight...
My reaction: "Oh, come on, this is the most insidious monopolist on the planet. What's the catch?"
I think this is it:
>The new synthetic diamonds will come in pink, blue and white, and the stones will contain a tiny Lightbox logo. De Beers said the logo won't be visible to the naked eye, but it will make the stones easily identifiable as lab-grown.
Sounds like a plan to ensure that synthetic diamonds are quickly distinguishable from natural ones and the latter still command a premium. (They had long been seeking a way to ensure distinguishability after lab-growers kept frustrating such efforts.)
Might as well not fall into the innovators trap and position for market share in this new market.
This is a marketing play, not a technology play.
This seems like flawed logic. It's not the exact same thing. If a painter reproduces a Picasso, otherwise knows as art fraud, does it have the same value as the original? Why not? I'll leave it at that.
If you reproduce a diamond, it's not a de Beers, but it's still a diamond.
Source: After reading this Wired article [1] ~15 years ago, myself and two friends tried to (unsuccessfully) put VC money together to commit to large amounts of manufactured diamonds for the consumer industry.
> In 1891, B. Walter was the first person to observe the well known cape spectrum in natural diamonds. This series of bands associated with type Ia natural diamonds (that are usually colorless and have blue fluorescence to ultraviolet light), are usually visible in the blue to violet part of the spectrum. ... No synthetic diamonds will show a cape spectrum.
It goes on to describe other types of visible tests.
The next capture (which I can't fully see on Google Books) describes a device called DiamondSure that fits on a desktop and looks at the cape fluorescence and absorption of particular wavelengths.
In this scenario, we may be witnessing an incumbent firm unable to adopt new disruptive technologies because its revenue structures are incompatible, as the current margins and volumes for synthetics are likely far lower than those of mined diamonds.
How does that work? They should be indistinguishable.
(1) makes people look more attractive, and
(2) enables conspicuous consumption.
Humans aren't Vulcans who make decisions rationally. We're apes with a facility for reason tacked on as an afterthought.
Diamond Jewelry exists because advertisement works.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-yo...
Don't give me a story, give me a MOQ, spec sheet and a quote.