Diamond prices are in free fall in one key corner of the market
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
The jeweler told me that one reason to get a natural diamond was that the prices of lab grown diamonds had been falling, whereas natural hasn’t as much, so the ring would hold more value. I told her that was exactly why we wanted to go with a lab grown diamond! This isn’t an investment — we aren’t planning to sell the ring.
Ultimately, for a price that didn’t break the bank, we got an absolutely gorgeous ring with diamonds larger and higher quality than we would have been able to afford with natural. Diamond rings may have started as something to resell in divorce, but for us (for my fiancé really), it was more about getting something that was beautiful, and if it didn’t cost as much, great! I suspect most Americans will feel similarly.
It's seems crazy that Debeers is actually trying to drive lab prices down to make them seem too cheap for bridal use. Their strategy is to try to retain the higher-end luxury market while giving up the more mainstream market where they can't compete.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
That was… prescient.
Oracle acquired Sun in 2009-2010 and notably Oracle is a software company that benefits from the commoditisation of hardware, unlike Sun.
Java byte code portability is great for Oracle, but was a strategic mistake for Sun.
Grove talks about six forces:
• Power vigor competence of competitors
• Power vigor competence of suppliers
• power vigor competence of customers
• Power vigor competence of potential competitors
• Force of complementors
(Lol why didn't I write down the sixth in my notes?)
And these are all super important for business analysis, but complements is somehow overlooked in casual study
I ended up picking a lab grown diamond and was able to get a larger and (in my opinion) prettier diamond. My wife didn't seem to mind that it was lab grown when I eventually told her.
Never enter into a contract where one party benefits by breaking it.
I'm not knocking marriage or (outright) stating that financial motives may be at play, here, but it's a big indicator if "who your with" is more concerned about what's "on their finger" than about what's "around their arm".
For all intents and purposes, they are. The voluntary processes the diamond cartels adopted to supposedly reduce diamonds coming out of "conflict areas" are a joke. Most diamonds are mined under exploitive conditions, often with severe ecological impact, and the owners are almost without exception "blood on their hands" people even if one particular mine operates more ethically.
> Most diamonds are mined under exploitative conditions
You’ve clearly never been to a diamond mine. More than 70% of diamonds come out of “modern” countries like Australia, Canada, Russia, and South Africa. Botswana used their diamond bounty to teach hundreds of their citizens to grade/cut/polish the very stones mined in the country, ensuring tons of high skill jobs.
> the owners are almost without exception "blood on their hands" people
Well you’re only right on a loophole on this one - the Russian government owns the company that produces 40% of the world’s diamonds and it would be tough to argue Putin is blood-free.
You can Google this. Russia, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Botswana.(the contentious one would be DRC). These are regulated countries with labour rights and human rights. If they operate in these countries they are subject to those laws. May as well say you won't buy anything imported if you still feel there's ambiguity.
These are industries in these countries. Without these exports these people don't have jobs which feed them.
https://www.australiandiamondvalley.com.au/products/10ct-aut...
https://www.solidgold.com.au/argyle-red-diamonds.html
If you object to the mine owners (rio tinto) "blood on their hands" (from > 2,000 years of mining since Roman occupied Spain) then get rid of all your steel products as they're a major supplier of raw high grade iron ore (and copper, and ...)
https://www.riotinto.com/en/operations/australia/argyle
(NB: If you're going to downvote at least provide a comment as to why)
The small, ugly diamonds we use for industrial abrasives cost pennies per carat.
Min order is 1 carat.
I mean, assuming that you like your spouse, it's a perfectly rational decision to stay with them despite it being possible to make money by leaving them. It's economics-paper level sociopathy to suggest that "I could maximize my personal income by divorcing the person I love" is an action to be taken.
Indeed. Ask my ex-wife (an economist) how that worked out for her.
And is that universally true? Does it apply to all relationships, like parents for their children?
That only works if both partners have similar income, similar working times, and also split household work equally.
Most relationships are not like that, especially when kids are involved, but often even before that. So you often have one partner work more while the other takes care of most of the household. This leads to a situation where one partner is financially dependent on the other.
Marriage laws are supposed to protect the dependent partner in that case.
Child support doesn't last that long — just until the child reaches 18. And alimony stops if the spouse ever gets remarried (though of course some people dodge that by not technically getting married to a new partner).
A nice little white lie by omission anyway, as the resale value of a diamond drops up to 50% when it leaves the store! If you were planning for an investment, you'd be better off looking elsewhere.
Retailers don't even own their inventory, it's on loan and they only pay the diamond cartel when they sell a diamond.
Met him at a jewelry store and had it verified and appraised, he had the receipt for the 12k or so he paid, it appraised for 16k (not sure why they appraise for more than the retail price), and I paid him 5k (CAD).
This was years ago, and I think it was a 1.4ct VVS2.
That same budget in store had me looking at sub 1 carat SI2 crap that was cloudy as all hell.
Diamonds have 0 resale value, not sure why people think otherwise when it’s so easy to see simply browsing used ads.
wasnt that a fraud by a jewelry store, claiming its worth 16K while not willing to pay that much for it?
Maybe it’s a marketing thing, but to me it just feels like fraud against whoever has to insure it (if I list it on my home insurance for example).
This is purely the diamond scam. There is no market for selling ur used diamond. The diamond merchant sell u the high price, but u will not be able to do same to get the money back from the next sucker
The icky diamond thing is arguable, these are generally mined in countries with decent labour laws. On the contrary, lab diamonds require few workers and takes food out the mouth of poorer mine workers who become jobless.
I gave my wife a large synthetic diamond ring for our 15th anniversary and she absolutely loved it.
This write-up from The Atlantic from 1982 explains the situation well. [1]
Not sad to see the cartel taking an L.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-yo...
> De Beers's market share of rough diamonds to fall from as high as 90% in the 1980s to 29.5% in 2019
> De Beers sold off the vast majority of its diamond stockpile in the late 1990s – early 2000s and the remainder largely represents working stock (diamonds that are being sorted before sale). This was well documented in the press but remains little known to the general public.
> As a part of reducing its influence, De Beers withdrew from purchasing diamonds on the open market in 1999 and ceased, at the end of 2008, purchasing Russian diamonds mined by the largest Russian diamond company Alrosa
Every episode makes horrific errors, uses subpar sources if any, and frequently gets really basic facts wrong in an effort to "ruin everything" and weave a narrative.
It explains the situation 40+ years ago, but is completely irrelevant today.
Sure, there’s some romance from hand-harvested ice, but you can’t beat the price and purity of ice from a freezer.
(The freezer, of course, has nothing to do with this - it's the water you're putting into it that's impure.)
> Water purification is the process of removing undesirable chemicals, biological contaminants, suspended solids, and gases from water. The goal is to produce water that is fit for specific purposes. [1]
Other sources list carbon dioxide, oxygen, and nitrogen as impurities that can cause corrosion in pipes [2], or can form bubbles in systems where there are major changes in pressure or temperature, blocking pumps, fine tubing, filters, etc. [3]
So it’s a bit context dependent, but there are situations where it is totally reasonable to view dissolved gases in water as an impurity. And this context - the discussion of what makes ice clear or cloudy - is one of them.
How can you claim so confidently that “no one thought” something, or that the parent is “using a word much differently than basically anyone else”? If you honestly think that you speak for all 1.35 billion English speakers in the world - or even all the people reading this thread - the best I can say is speak for yourself.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_purification
[2] https://www.watertechnologies.com/handbook/chapter-01-water-...
> The most common impurities found in tap water include lime (also known as limescale), calcium, fluoride, nitrates, magnesium and certain other organic elements that are practically impossible to remove with regular filtration methods. So, when water freezes, the impurities that were evenly distributed in the water, tend to congregate near the middle, making ice cubes the whitest at their center. [1]
> But the reality is, most of the “impurities” found in your freezer ice cube are more likely nothing more than the minerals present in your tap water. Tap water commonly contains minerals such as: Calcium, Magnesium, Potassium [2]
Do you have a citation to back up the claim that it's only air bubbles?
[1] https://www.scienceabc.com/eyeopeners/why-are-some-ice-cubes...
[2] https://blockice.com/blog/whats-the-science-behind-clear-ice...
As evidence that directional freezing can filter out impurities other than air, I would point out that the directional freezing process is an effective enough filtration method to filter salt out of sea water in sea ice. [1] So my assumption is that those other minerals commonly found in water (lime, calcium, fluoride, magnesium, etc) are also being filtered out in the process - and it certainly seems plausible to me that filtering those out contributes to the clarity of the resulting ice.
So my intuitive understanding, along with what I could learn with a bit of googling, is that there are a number of impurities which can make ice appear cloudy including (but not limited to) dissolved air. A number of people here seem to be adamant that it's just air bubbles, so I'd honestly like to know why they believe that to be true (e.g. sources, some clear explanation, etc)? So far the only justification I've seen is "because directional freezing works" - but as explained above I really don't see that as being a sufficient justification since it filters out a number of impurities other than air.
I hear this a lot... But where can I buy a massive diamond 2nd hand for a few bucks?
Look up Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace in your area and you'll find plenty of cheap listings for diamond jewelry. Will you really take a chance on any of them though?
https://www.konkurser.dk/search/?s=diamant
It is in Danish, but it is bankruptcy auctions, the high price is the valuation (typically the retail price before bankruptcy), the low price is the final highest bid, all in DKK.
Edit: searched and found about 25 places, none of them have much inventory, most are lower quality (or incredibly expensive), many are in-person only with no real pictures you can see, closest I can find is https://www.catawiki.com but still for the type/size I've been looking for there's really only two options and both are lower grade.
> Diamonds are effectively worthless the moment they leave the store
That's not the case! You can have the stone removed from the ring and, in case you don't have the original certificate, sent to a certification authority (like GIA) to have it graded. I think it also, once graded, gets automatically laser-engraved (above a certain carat) but I'm not sure about that: maybe you need to pay for the laser engraving too. And it's then got a value on the market: there's a worldwide market (or several) and every single jeweler in the world can see which stones are available at which price depending on their specs and book any stone and have it shipped in a few clicks.
Source: I've got a good friend who's a jeweler and he showed that to me.
Now: fancy shops (with famous names) may make fun of people by selling them stones at 3x their values or more (I don't doubt that) but you can also go to an independent jeweler and have him model/build the ring (or he'll outsource the 3D modelling) then put the stone on it and you'll pay a price much closer to actual price of the stone (the jeweler doesn't really work harder for a 0.5 carat stone vs a 2 carat one, so the bigger the stone, the less is "wasted" on the ring).
Regarding the differing values: I think it's mandatory that every lab-grown diamond above a certain carat are laser-engraved so unless labs growing these diamonds are cheating, it's extremely hard to make a lab-grown one pass for a billion years old one.
https://www.gemsociety.org/article/lab-grown-diamonds-faq:
“Many lab-made diamonds have an inscription that identifies them as lab-made.
Diamonds can also have a lab report number inscribed on the girdle”
I think it’s very likely that, If that “above a certain carat” were true, that page would have mentioned it.
I also cannot think of a good argument why it would be reasonable to require producers of artificial diamonds to add such markers.
> I think it's mandatory that every lab-grown diamond above a certain carat are laser-engraved
That’s not “diamonds that are lab-grown by GEM Society members”.
Why would it be reasonable to require anybody who’s not the GEM Society to engrave their products, so that the GEM Society can protect its source of revenues?
But there’s also a lot of concern about stolen jewelry and even diamond swapping for seemingly legitimate businesses. So, not too hard to make it also sound like it’s for the consumers best interest.
Yes, but the subset of people that can afford and would drink a $200 bottle of wine is hardly any bigger than the subset of people that can afford and would drink a $2000 bottle of wine.
It makes perfect sense to me why people would drink the $2000 bottle of wine. Why not? They've got the money.
If you balk at a $2000 bottle of wine, you're probably not casually drinking $200 bottles of wine either - and if you are - you're in a very small percentage of people where the price difference means something. It's maybe 2% of the population.
The other 97.75% isn't buying $200 bottles of wine. And the other 0.25% can buy $2000 bottles just fine.
I don't think this is correct. Most wine nerds/enthusiasts I know (and I include myself) would consider dropping $200 on one of their 'dream bottles' in the right circumstance, especially if splitting the cost with a couple of friends. I don't know a single person who would ever drop $2000 on a bottle of wine under any circumstance.
I also have a friendly relationship with a local wine shop, where I usually buy bottles for 10-15 bucks. They also carry (and sell) many bottles at 5K a pop and up.
And if you want to get all mathematical about it, assuming the right kind of power law distribution, it is more likely to see one person who would pay 2000 for a bottle than to find 2 people who would pay 200.
power law stats is weird. Once you are outside of the bell, the bell area has NO constraint on the observation. Unlike Gaussian and similar distributions, where probability falls off very rapidly as you move out of the bell.
Hah!
The big issue with choosing a smaller, natural stone is you can't really be sure it's actually natural. The industry has so many unethical practices I wouldn't be confident in any "certification" that comes with a stone's origin. Even lower-grade stones might just be from lab rejects, or labs intentionally growing good, but not perfect stones.
Mined diamonds may actually be lab grown diamonds certified as mined.
The financial incentives only goes in one direction on this one.
Try hey will also burn readily at house firm temperatures
The reason why on an anvil you need to orient the diamond carefully to break is just because the tip needs to be facing some kind of reasonably hard material like tool steel, if it's being driven into mild steel, that will basically just act as a pillow for the diamond and allow the flat face to align parallel to the surface of hammer, minimizing the impact.
There is no practical value in jewelry anyway, it is a status symbol and the context of coming from the wild extracted under wild conditions (and maybe violently, ooh, blood diamonds, how exiting, erm shocking) has of course a higher symbolic value. So a artificial made one would be considered "fake".
Romanticism is not attached to logic. But it is still a real factor in human decision making. And to be honest, if I would be into jewelry, I probably would prefer the "real" one, too. But I am rather into extreme sports and any rings or alike are just dangerous baggage there (a friend of mine allmost lost a finger, while climbing over a fence and his ring got stuck on some metal piece).
But if your wife happens to be into it - applying logic here will be probably seen as a cheap way to save money.
What do you suppose is the value that distinguishes these two processes? The story? Or is it the persistence of the naturalistic fallacy, surfacing in all sorts of places and in all kinds of minds including those one would expect are habitually vigilant against what is essentially a generalized form of superstition.
Diamonds are just about the only thing I can think of where artificial and natural are encouraged to be seen as equals. I’m sure some people have a naturalist/spiritual angle, but I’d bet most are simply applying the wisdom of so many other shopping areas to this one.
Well I say we should avoid artificial distinctions - such as the one between natural and artificial!
An artificial diamond would be something like cubic zirconia.
Of course it is the story. The value in everything is the meaning we attach to it, not the thing itself.
With a natural diamond, it's the idea that you have a unique artifact formed over millions of years, an irreplaceable corner of the Earth and its history owned by you and you alone, which then suggests that you yourself have a certain uniqueness and irreplaceability.
You can argue that people should not choose that particular story and that particular meaning, but that's a moral argument, and not an argument about the object itself. (And if you choose to make that argument, I would first suggest introspecting over how much of your own stories and meaning are as arbitrary as that one.)
I don't care a bit for natural diamonds, but I have infinite respect for the stories and meaning people choose to embue their lives with. Ultimately, it's all we have.
In fact my username, chain of fools, is the title of a song whose lyrics, although very brief, are very much about believing stories told with the motivation to do harm - or at very least to deprive others of something valuable so that the teller can have that same something cheaply.
Diamonds are the hardest objects found naturaly. While everything around them was crushed and changed ober the eons - they persisted. And if polished they shined. And can cut any other known material.
It makes for a good story, which is why humans are after them, since a long time. Kings and queens wore them. Pirates stole and buried them.
Is the story justified categorically? I don't know, but it is an old story.
But personally I rather would like to have the sci-fi story, where diamonds are cheaply avaiable, as a very strong building material..
No it isn't. There are plenty of ugly diamonds — they are also formed over millions of years and are never sold to consumers. This is an ad hoc justification. People only cared about the beauty of the diamond until lab made ones came along. They are cut to increase the beauty. That already makes it processed. Nobody buys uncut diamonds. And I'm sure there are other stones formed over millions of years that are just black and nobody cares for. Raw olivine for example is priced by the ton. I'm sure there are even cheaper minerals at these depths that nobody cares about at all.
It is ad hoc, yes, but is not the only justification.
Diamonds are also rare (unlike olivine) and clear diamonds are pretty (unlike ones with lots of inclusions). We can like things for multiple reasons.
Only if you define them such that you exclude lab-made diamonds. But I agree that we can like things for multiple reasons and that rarity is a part of the demand for diamonds.
In any case, I believe people will eventually forget about "unnatural" diamonds. People will be more creative with thier works if a failure does not cost so much, and the average size will be larger. Consider that modern farmed perls were once considered unnatural. But they are not only cheaper but more uniform than wild ones and now nobody buys those.
> ... has of course a higher symbolic value.
To some people, others of us think that it's frickin amazing what can be done with machines in a lab, and that the sheer ingenuity and advanced tech used to make that lab-created gem is awesome.
Anyone can dig shiny rocks out of the dirt.
so my plastic bottles are naturally grown?
There is no such thing as natural versus unnatural, this dichotomy is a holdover from the time when we believed there was another plane of reality outside or distinct from the "natural" universe, which was somehow tainted by flaws unique to humans, being creatures with one foot in both realities.
I realize it sounds like a technically correct Internet argument of the nitpick variety, but I think that the norm of asseting an unchallenged bias toward "natural," and against "artificial," could use a general reassessment as it is constantly exploited by people using this ultimately baseless distinction as a way to bias opinion uncritically toward one kind of behavior or another.
https://www.teachersource.com/product/preforms-and-caps/chem...
Don't enrich Russia by buying mined diamonds, but there's definitely a compelling argument for lab-grown ones.
Amplified?
You're only considering intrinsic value. That's helpful for raw commodities.
For nearly everything else, value is tied to perception, history, etc.
If I have two identical baseballs, they're both "just" baseballs. But one of them could have much more value due to its history: maybe it was a homerun ball by a famous player, or a ball that I or a family member hit/caught. Same function. Could be otherwise identical, but could also be worth very different amounts.
The stories we tell is where the primary value is.
In this case, your wife values the story of a natural diamond that was formed through long, natural processes and required the effort of finding, excavating, cutting and so on.
Now you could disagree with that story, or you could dislike the tellers and amplifiers of that story, but the fact remains that your wife and many others value that story, making it more precious than merely "shiny carbon."
This is branding and marketing 101. Humans are storytelling machines and they understand value largely via stories and relationships. Misunderstanding that is a failure to understand essential human characteristics.
> Misunderstanding that is a failure to understand essential human characteristics.
I’ll add that to the list of human behavior that I don’t really understand.
Note: my engagement ring cost $12.00 on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/TIGRADE-Titanium-Polished-Wedding-Com...
I see this come up a lot, but I doubt very much that this story forms a large part of many people's thinking.
People want the status symbol and they want what they perceive as the ‘real’ thing, not what they rightly or wrongly perceive as an imitation.
As such ‘natural’ diamonds currently have successful marketing around them. I really don’t think the geology figures in many peoples minds. Geologists excepted of course.
Humans are indeed story telling machines, but you know what else they are? Hierarchy-driven apes who love showing off shiny, expensive shit to make themselves appear high status. The emergence of chemically, physically identical synthetic diamonds has triggered this in really very predictable ways - rationalisations of prior behaviour and desperate searching for ways to utilise this new phenomenon to maintain or elevate status.
The story here is a prime example. When both 'prettier' and 'not real' can no longer be defended, a new rationalisation for the large outlay of cash, and new explanation of how this makes the outlayer special, must be found. It doesn't have to be true (please don't try to tell me that all women have some sort of innate appreciation of carbon geology, I'm sorry but I don't believe it) it just has to sound right and allow the teller of the tale to continue to claim the high ground.
Because otherwise we have to face up to questions like "Did I spend all that and not prove I'm better than Bob who spent half as much?" and "Was I just doing this because of peer pressure and societal expectations? What does that say about me?"
For simplicity, I was considering "story" as part of the "status" side too (i.e.- there's a story here that I'm better than you for these reasons).
I know it's Hacker News, but come on folks, it's not that hard to understand that marketing, branding, storytelling and whatnot are real, meaningful forces in human dynamics.
Maybe if artificial diamonds are made from forsaken orphan ashes they would have a similar sentimental value.
Unless you’re willing to bundle everything beyond pure Buddha-tier equanimity as “character flaws.”
it’s unfair to draw the line between “useless thing you were socialized to spend money on” and “useless thing someone else was socialized to spend money on.”
Then there's consumer electronics manufacturing... ...or being a tourist to the Saudi Arabia/Turkey/Russia/UAE where modern-day slavery is taking place at scale.
Out of sight, out of mind.
We’re all deluding ourselves for the sake of sanity + having nice stuff.
So a shiny thing that’s less expensive actually doesn’t satisfy the same role.
A shiny thing that’s just as expensive but less valuable (ie lower $/karat, ie lab grown) is so large as to out itself as not-the-truly-ridiculous waste of money that a real diamond is supposed to be for its signaling value.
You can't fix the whole world with personal choices, like an eyedropper against the ocean, but you can still opt out of the worst excesses without having to compromise every modern convenience.
"Failure to see reason" is probably the next biggest red-flag/dealbreaker for me.
I'm going to die alone.
I don't really think there's an unbiased way to ask. 'Lab-grown or natural' makes the latter sound more 'real' and better. 'Ethical or blood sweat and tears' is obviously out. 'Lab-grown and technically superior for the same money, or natural and more flawed' is about the best I can come up with, but the former is just objectively the correct answer isn't it? I don't see how anyone could understand the question and answer the latter. There just isn't a reason to prefer natural, all else being equal, for an item of personal jewellery that you're going to wear?
It’s only functionality was a button that when pressed displayed the text, “I am rich!”
There must be a lesson (or perhaps even a metaphor?) in that half a dozen or so copies sold. At least one or two of the "marks" claimed they bought it on accident. Maybe. Or maybe some people have a lot more disposable income than I do.
It still feels to me like developer performance art.
Not really a problem if you're the developer; just offer an absolute refund guarantee.
My mother likes to tell the story of an American company that used to sell pills to determine the sex of your baby. You'd buy (and take) a girl pill if you wanted a girl and a boy pill if you wanted a boy.
If your baby came out the wrong sex, they'd give you a refund.
Lab-grown diamonds are the same thing as natural, the same material, and can be produced to a higher specification for the same cost as finding (due to scarcity, labour, etc.) an objectively worse stone. (Or equivalently a given spec can be manufactured cheaper than it can be found.)
The correct flower analogy would be growing nicely coloured varieties in a nursery vs. hunting for those random mutations in the wild.
(Nobody does the latter!)
Or the cheeky version: use such a rule to determine the clarity, colour, etc. of natural diamond you want; then buy that lab-grown and pocket the difference.
(I have a friend who used to have a job drawing cut plans for diamond wafers at Kyocera Unimerco.)
My first thought is that the high conductivity doesn't necessarily mean it won't, being loose and hand-wavey with terminology because I don't know it, fracture with thermal shock, like non-borosilicate glassware (don't change the temp. too quickly) say, or ceramics (don't introduce too much of a temp. delta across the item, e.g. heating on a hob)?
Second thought is 'is it too much better than copper', in the sense that is the conductivity no longer the limiting factor? Copper is prized (and actually bloody hard to get these days - afaict everything on Amazon is copper-coloured or at best clad aluminium) because of fast 'response time' to change in heat, as you adjust the burner or pull it off the heat altogether. Conductivity also helps with even heating of course, but it doesn't help it cool particularly, which is limited by the rate of loss due to convection through air (and what's being cooked, which is what we want to limit if we're hoping for it to cool) and radiation?
While a lab grown diamond might be technically superior, there's something sort of romantic and interesting with the fact that it has been in the earth for a billion years and somehow made its way into your ring.
That said, my wife has a lab grown diamond in her engagement ring.
Diamonds were essentially a shadow banking system, with analogies to the way crypto exchanges work today. You put cash in to get a tiny portable stone that you could exchange for cash or deposits anywhere else in the world, and you could reliably transfer massive amounts of capital around without records. Simultaneously diamonds made wealth both highly visible, and completely invisible when they disappeared. No public ledger either.
In June 2022, De Beers was charging about $1,400 a carat for the select makeable diamonds. By July this year, that had dropped to about $850 a carat. And there may be more room to fall: the diamonds are still 10% more expensive than in the “secondary” market, where traders and manufacturers sell among themselves.
. . .
. . . India, where about 90% of global supply is cut and polished. Lab grown accounted for about 9% of diamond exports from the country in June, compared with about 1% five years ago. Given the steep discount that they sell for, that means about 25% to 35% of volume is now lab grown, according to Liberum Capital Markets.
. . .
About five years ago, lab grown gems sold at about a 20% discount to natural diamonds, but that has now blown out to around 80% as the retailers push them at increasingly lower prices and the cost of making them falls. The price of polished stones in the wholesale market has fallen by more than half this year alone.
I really can’t think of an example better than people buying shiny rocks for absurd amounts of money that demonstrates how non-advanced we are, as a society generally.
There are a lot of things throughout history that you could say about. At the time it would have been impossible to see any other way, and yet we have advanced.
Peacock's feathers, caribou antlers, those absolutely kickin' nests that some birds assemble, penguins with their shiny rock collections, humans with our shiny rock collections.
It's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma, in that one's unwillingness to engage in such demonstrations of status will be interpreted as an inability to do so, but to the individual its still an optimal play. At least it gives us an excuse to acquire pretty things. Can you imagine how ugly the world would be if no one was building architectural marvels or designing elaborate cars or jewelry because they could poor concrete into cubes more cheaply?
Placing a hand on the Bible before testifying in court, physically signing a legal document, are both the same concept... a symbolic, physical representation of an intangible promise
Edit: grammar
You think my previous comment is "devoid of reason" because it's about ritual and symbolic gestures, not about economics, concepts you either cannot comprehend or choose not to. Which is fine -- most atheists believe they are wiser than believers, for example -- but no amount of rationality or logic is going to change people's minds.
Are people becoming more careful about such valuable purchases since losing a diamond ring is so heartbreaking? It seems like the concept of "throwaway" rings is increasing so you don't have to worry about losing the real one which is an argument no person ever wants to have with their spouse. I keep my real one locked away and wear a titanium one around.
This is what happens when one company corners a market, and controls supply and marketing.
People thought that was the beginning of the end for de Beers, and between that and better synthetics that seems to be how things played out.
Instead, it would shift the expense to another category (platinum or other expensive metals) or simply lead people to buy more carats (4 is the new 2!). In some ways, these moves could help luxury brands like Tiffany, since their well-known price premium would provide the same signaling device for folks who want to spend tens of thousands of dollars when proposing.
Customization has been on the uptrend for several years.
Anyone over about 25 and actually mature enough to commit probably doesn't care that much about the ring as long as it's not literally a funyun.
How about a nice home, a leisurely lifestyle and solid career, an amiable personality, a great social circle, track record of being dependable with family, etc. You know, the things the ring is supposed to actually represent.
I think that's a maybe. It's equally possible that people are seeing through the bullshit of this faux ritual.
Will they? Why?
People getting married these days are far more likely to already live together, maybe own a house together. These sorts of signals to each other seem somewhat pointless. Especially as it's common for both partners to work, making it somewhat anachronistic for one partner to have this expectation on them.
This whole idea of stupidly expensive diamonds signalling commitment is just marketing bullshit, that has been so ingrained that people think it's somehow natural or necessary. If that's falling away piece by piece then that's something to celebrate.
Now the other form of signalling - "I am high status, look at my high-status shiny stuff", yeah that's not going anywhere.
I really want to buy a lab-grown tennis bracelet, but no luck yet finding one from a reputable vendor.
WOOSH
There's no logic involved here.
People buy all kinds of expensive stuff because it has a brand name on the outside. It’s not what I would do, but there it is.