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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

I personally find the decision to buy lab grown diamonds to be weirder, because if you are already thinking logically rather than emotionally and can resist the social pressure then why waste money on a diamond at all? There are plenty of gems or metals out there that are cheaper, prettier, more rare and hold their value better than diamonds (whether natural or lab grown).

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If you like the shininess of diamonds, they're really hard to beat on the "pretty" front. Diamonds have a crazy internal refractive index, which, once exemplified by an appropriate cut, gives them a pretty unique shininess. The only gems that come close are substantially softer, meaning they lose they lose the precise cuts that give them the extra shimmer relatively quickly.

Don't enrich Russia by buying mined diamonds, but there's definitely a compelling argument for lab-grown ones.

But Moissanite are shinier than diamonds, very nearly as hard, but at a fraction of the price. And nobody can tell the difference without training and possibly a microscope.

When I last researched the topic, Moissanites almost exclusively came with a kinda ugly yellow tinge, but apparently that's not an issue anymore. Definitely a great choice. (Though I disagree that laypeople can't tell the difference between doubly-refractive and singly refractive gems)

When considering getting a Moissanite ring, I spent a significant amount of time researching the differences between diamonds and Moissanite, but I couldn’t explain or recognize the difference between doubly-refractive and singly refractive gems. We’ve even had jewelers who have looked at my wife’s ring and thought it was diamond. Admittedly that was a casual look and not a thorough appraisal, nevertheless, I doubt even a tiny percentage of the population could spot the difference.

Oh, looking at one or the other, almost certainly not. I mean that if you lined up 2 diamonds and a moissanite, I'd bet the average person would be able to pick out the odd one out.

Lie to them and say there's one diamond and they'd still pick the moissanite. Just being able to differentiate relatively with a biased test doesn't mean you can tell the difference one way or the other in absolute terms.

> exemplified

Amplified?

Logically, it's literally the hardest gemstone around and it also happens to look very pretty. I personally love the look of Emeralds and Opals, but they are so delicate that they would not stand up to daily wear and tear. Diamonds? You can abuse the hell out of it and it will look as nice as the day you bought it.

Exactly, the whole point of buying at all is to adhere to a convention or tradition.

Because lab grown diamonds are naturally grown, unless humans are supernatural.

humans are natural, therefore all human creations and processes are natural?

so my plastic bottles are naturally grown?

Naturally made, yes. the specific process called "grown" would better apply if there was, say, a plastic bottle-fruiting plant, but whether that plant was designed by humans or simply found by them in the environment does not change whether it is natural.

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.

Would you say soda bottle preforms grow into plastic bottles?

https://www.teachersource.com/product/preforms-and-caps/chem...

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