Diamonds are losing their allure | Hacker News Reader

Diamonds are losing their allure

economist.com

82 pointsj-a-a-p128 comments

From what I understand about diamonds they’re completely uninteresting to me.

The way you measure how valuable a diamond is? Purity. The way you tell a lab made diamond from a “real” diamond? Purity.

If it’s too pure it’s fake. There is this weird market where you want the purist diamond you can find, but not too pure. So you want some imperfections, just the perfect number of imperfections.

Too many imperfections and it’s low quality.

Too few imperfections and it’s worthless enough to grind to dust and use on consumable parts for power tools.

The modern jewelry market is also substantially different than what past generations taught me jewelry was. To them, jewelry was meant to be a value store. You purchase a valuable ring, the stone and metal held their value and you or your heirs could sell it later if times were tough.

Now jewelry seems more like buying a new car. It loses half its value when you drive it off the lot.

> Too few imperfections and it’s worthless enough to grind to dust and use on consumable parts for power tools.

Industrial diamonds have been important for much longer than synthetic gem-quality diamonds have. Abrasive tools need diamonds, but they don't need to be attractive, so they aren't.

Cheap industrial diamond tooling is one of my favourite things about living in the future. Just incredibly useful.

At least gold still keeps its value, while looking good/expensive.

I dont have a dog in this fight but hilariously the argument //for imperfection// i see here: People are flawed, damaged and utterly fragile. Is a "pure diamond" the projection of unrealistic expectations? Legal disclosures: - I am married (for much longer than the bell curve would suggest) - I did buy a diamond - I did stress about spending that money - I don't see the diamond as any real asset (financially or otherwise) - I bought said diamond AFTER i asked my SO's patriarch for permission - I DID NOT receive a dowry (imagine all of the dirtbikes i could have purchased with that sweet, sweet chattel monies!)

My opinion: Diamonds are hotpockets: there is a lot of money going into advertising an otherwise unhealthy thing (for you and global society as a whole).

I see i was down voted - gentle request for the opportunity to understand why?

> There is this weird market where you want the purist diamond you can find, but not too pure. So you want some imperfections, just the perfect number of imperfections.

Another "weird" market where this holds true is the dating market. In general it seems similar to how we evaluate other humans or forms of life in general. If another person is too perfect they either seem fake or trigger a weird uncanny valley effect.

Art is another prime example. A photograph is the most accurate portrayal of a scene, but a painting is often more interesting/valuable.

Not to diminish any skills a photographer has, but it's a totally different skill set than a painter. A photograph can be duplicated in 1:1 quality so there is no difference from the original to the bazillionth copy. There is only one original painting. A photograph is taken in (typically) a fraction of a second with the obvious long exposure still within in seconds of time. A painting obviously takes much longer.

I say all of this as one that has made a living with various modes of image capture with a camera.

Marketing

The sentimental value of a diamond is its rarity. And natural diamonds with few imperfections are rare. And a big diamond, useless for anything else, is the only way to show how much the marriage is worth. This is what is being sold to us.

Synthetic diamonds are destroying 50 years of marketing.

> And a big diamond, useless for anything else, is the only way to show how much the marriage is worth. This is what is being sold to us.

And I can't believe males and females of 21st century still fall for this. Literally any use of this money could have been better.

> And I can't believe males and females of 21st century still fall for this*

*In the USA.

> And I can't believe males and females of 21st century still fall for this. Literally any use of this money could have been better.

Seems pretty narrow minded. Of course engagements rings are symbolic. The best symbols are deeply rooted in cultural context anyway.

If diamonds aren’t the best symbol for you that’s fine, but try not to fool yourself into thinking you’re being more rational. You might have different priorities or values.

You might also just be a 2 dimensional NPC with nothing to share and therefore no need for symbolism. /jk

> The best symbols are deeply rooted in cultural context anyway.

The irony here is that diamonds as engagement gifts given by males to females (why not the other way round btw?) have very shallow and well-documented roots. Moreover, given the exploitation around it, it's really bad to found your marriage on if you really think about it.

Fall for it? It's signalling. If it wasn't a diamond it would be something else.

> Synthetic diamonds are destroying 50 years of marketing.

It's not even just synthetic diamonds, natural diamond scarcity is artificial as well.

That moment when you learn natural diamonds are literally dumped into the ocean by the boatful to created artificial scarcity...

Yes, it's all about marketing now. Previously DeBeers was able to control supply for diamonds which kept the prices artificially high but that's not the case anymore.

I suspect we'll be seeing an increase in branding in the diamond business. That's really the only way they can control prices since it's now possible to create man made ones. Given enough time the prices will collapse to the point of cost of producing them plus a small premium. Competition will make sure that happens. There's no way mined diamonds will be able to compete.

Diamonds aren't going away they are just making a marketing transition.

> a big diamond, useless for anything else, is the only way to show how much the marriage is worth

Why not just destroy money? And record this as a memento if needed. May be less wasteful than making the diamond.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Foundation_Burn_a_Million_Qu...

Is there evidence that jewelry was a good store of value in previous generations though?

We hear about families selling their jewelry to escape the country or when they're short on funds, but did they actually get a good price for it?

I suppose losing half your money in jewelry devaluation is better than losing all your money in currency devaluation or asset seizure?

It’s like real estate in China and other less developed countries.

It’s used as a store of wealth that is likely to appreciate. Doesn’t matter if the currency goes bust, ownership is recognized by the government in all but the most extreme examples.

We’re spoiled in the developed countries where you have thing like government bonds and equities (where public companies are vetted to some standard) and courts that can reliably protect ownership of an otherwise intangible asset.

They got liquidity. Sometimes that has a lot of value.

One of my relatives, uncle George, was fired ~30 years ago. His most valuable possession was a gold watch that baroness Coudenhove gave to a her maid 2-3 generations earlier. I don't remember who exactly the maid was, but she was somehow related to the family. In order to raise funds to buy his own tipper truck, George went to the Charles Bridge in Prague and found a buyer for the watch, a German tourist. The money was at least 50% of the price of the truck. These were the first steps on a long journey leading to a successful business.

This was in a country with high inflation that's just gone through a regime change. Did he get a good price for the watch? Yes, at that moment, the truck was more valuable than the watch.

Underappreciated point! What makes jewelery a good store of value? Value:volume ratio.

Three trucks full of wet concrete have value too, but they're a helluva lot less convenient to bring with you in a bag on the run.

Jewelry is (a) small, (b) valuable, (c) widely exchangeable for currency or goods.

Sure, you're going to take a haircut on the price, depending on how screwed up your immediate environment is, but there will be some buyers at some non-zero price.

It depends on the jewelry, diamonds are notoriously bad in resale. There are however genuinely rare and beautiful gemstones which retain their value... just not diamonds.

Now I'm wondering what the markup is on a plain gold band compared to the spot price of gold.

There's a business idea, figure out how to sell jewelry at a markup low enough that it makes sense as a store of value and then actually participate in both buying and selling.

jewelry is rarely pure gold. so you'd have to take that into consideration of your spot price. the person you sell that jewelry to later will also incur an expense at melting and separating the gold of the lesser metals. so not really sure how jewelry is a good way to store gold value

If you just stroll into a standard jewelry store looking for gold, markup over spot is disastrous.

I've heard of people making that sort of thing on a limited basis, but the market isn't there. There aren't enough people aware enough of the issue, and the temptation to just go ahead and charge the jewelry premium as a result is pretty overwhelming.

> The modern jewelry market is also substantially different than what past generations taught me jewelry was. To them, jewelry was meant to be a value store. You purchase a valuable ring, the stone and metal held their value and you or your heirs could sell it later if times were tough.

Jewelry sellers pretend their product is like precious metals: a store of value.

In fact, it's more like collectable trading cards: popularity contributes more value than component materials.

I.e. why heritage Tiffany or Rolex pieces still have substantial value

A while ago I checked to see how much gold actually exists in circulation. It is less than 22 meters cubed. That's it. Diamond mines regularly dump more than that in the ocean to create artificial scarcity. And at the end of the day, it is just carbon, one of the most abundant elements on the planet. Diamonds can just be produced in a lab with raw carbon, heat, and pressure. Companies even exist to make a diamond from a deceased person's ashes. Diamond value is amazingly artificial.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/sp/chart-how-much-gold-is-i...

https://lifegem.com/

Hunh, the gold mining output vs underground reserves is fascinating.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_gold_pr...

At current rate, China will have mined all its reserves in under 6 years.

Diamonds are basically the AI of burnt carbon

It’s also hard to discern purity with the naked eye unless you’re trained, and it’s anything but a scarce resource

Diamonds are a lot like luxury clothing lines. What makes a Louis Vuitton bag genuine? It's all a mental category, there's no physical property test that can classify Louis Vuitton atoms from counterfeit atoms.

Diamonds have the unfortunate (for diamond sellers) property that they have a very simple chemical structure. So what DeBeers is trying to do is create a mental category for "natural diamonds" vs. "lab grown diamonds". The last thing they want is for diamonds (the investment / luxury good) to be defined by the diamond crystal structure.

Consumers are very happy to pay extra for these mental categories when they know the belief in the category is widespread. Let's say you know your significant other will be disappointed if you buy her a lab grown diamond. Well, you have no choice but to buy a natural diamond I guess. A social fiction like this is self reinforcing once it reaches a critical mass. That's what they're driving for

Watches are moving in a similar direction. Time telling moved from a mechanical masterpiece to a digital commodity and watchmakers have become luxury brands.

> Diamonds have the unfortunate (for diamond sellers) property that they have a very simple chemical structure.

On the bright side (for diamond sellers) they're known to originate from a certain location. So they could in theory be protected by Champagne style trademarks and extract higher pricing that way.

It's funny because most diamonds actually manufactured are impure too due to generic engineering reasons

Not weird. Literally how beauty is measured.

Symmetry and skin smoothness are markers of beauty. Too much and a girl looks like she’s had too much work done, or the photo is shopped.

Purest*

I remember visiting my grandparents houses and they had curios everywhere. Just cabinets of dishes and Royal Doultons and silver spoon collections and such. And these were not wealthy people by any means. Growing up, my parents had similar. Copper cookware hanging from the wall that we never used, an entire room with a piano and sofas and more curio cabinets that we went into twice a year: Thanksgiving and Christmas.

A big issue is that all that stuff ended up with my parents and their siblings, and now all their stuff is ending up with my siblings and I. And none of us want any of it.

I got to thinking: why did they collect all this stuff? And I came up with two guesses:

1) historically it was seen as a good way to "store" your wealth. My grandparents grew up in an environment that deeply appreciated the Great Depression. My parents were raised by parents who experienced it.

2) When you have money and there aren't GTX 3080s or smartphones to buy, you find things to spend it on, even if they're not as practical.

I'm not saying this doesn't exist anymore: collectables is a massive thing. But I feel, in general, my siblings and my friends and I all kinda feel the same way: "why would I want an extra room we never use? Why would I want all that stuff I don't use?"

I'm wondering if this is purely a generational cultural transition: we are finding less value in expensive do-nothings now that there's a thousand-and-eleventy ways to spend that money in a more usable way?

Isn't that the whole quintessentially Millennial "buy experiences, not things" meme?

In the old days, a middle class income buys you a good house and some trinkets to fill it with. Nowadays a middle class income buys you nothing except a few fun trips. Might as well make the best of it.

Yeah, that concept may be quite related!

This also reminds me of when I bought my house, my agent had mentioned how homes with all these superfluous rooms are becoming more difficult to sell because as prices go up, buyers just see useless space that costs money.

(And now I'm also reminded about the sickening ostentatiousness of growing up in a home with so many rooms that as a kid I'd sometimes think, "hey I haven't been in this room in six months. Let's go inside just to... be inside for a minute.")

What drives me nuts are the goddamn desks in kitchens.

Someone in the 80s looked at room-use studies, saw that the most important part of the house, the hub of family life, was the kitchen table but it was mostly used as a desk and/or document storage area, and thought “oh, this means I should build a desk into the kitchen cabinets!”

It’s a bone-headed, ugly, inconvenient failure of an home design idea that afflicts tons of houses built in the 80s through the very-early 2000s.

Wait, what? Was this in the US? I've never heard of or seen this, I don't think. Got a picture of an example?

https://carlaaston.com/designed/desk-in-kitchen-design-featu...

The “before” picture with the oak cabinets somewhat down the page comes the closest to what most of these look like, in the wild.

Often their placement is even worse than that, though.

They almost always end up a chaotic dump-area for miscellaneous crap, in my experience, and usually end up even worse-off if the owner attempts, initially, to use them as an actual desk, because then they’ll have the clutter of a desk chair and maybe even a monitor and keyboard among the pile of other junk.

They are basically never better than having more ordinary counter space or a cabinet pantry in the same spot. Usually they occur in houses that are plenty large enough to have other desks in several places, not little space-constrained apartments.

They come from a fundamental misunderstanding of why kitchen tables end up used the way they do. I’ve never seen them successfully replace the kitchen table as the shared family desk and hub-of-organizational-activity, because they’re much worse for that than the table is.

What was the reasoning behind this...? Why would anyone ever want to work on a tiny desk by the fridge?

Lol I feel like I'm getting a history lesson from aliens. It's so bizarre!

Studies revealed that the kitchen table is the hot-spot of family life at home (at least in the US) and that most of the time it’s used as a desk and/or document dumping area, not for eating.

Some designers and architects reacted to this by deciding this meant people wanted a shitty desk in the kitchen, so started adding them, presumably thinking they’d done something very smart and helpful.

… actually this could probably be used as the basis for some kind of presentation or article about how data-driven design or decision-making can go very wrong, now that I think about it.

Whoa. That's fascinating. I never knew this was a thing. Thanks for the details!

> could probably be used as the basis for some kind of presentation or article about how data-driven design or decision-making can go very wrong

Lol, exactly!

Yeah. The house I grew up in was built in 89 and the kitchen had this little built-in desk beside the pantry. And it really felt like a “you sit here and take a corded phone call and make notes” it was far too small to be a serious desk for work and yet it had drawers and cubbies above for documents.

In its defense it got used as a place to store school forms and sports forms and other “family administration” stuff that was too daily to belong in the office with all the taxes and financials and warranties.

Yeah, the core problem with the idea is that even if you have one, it’s nearly always more pleasant and comfortable (and less in other people’s way) to sit at the kitchen table for the same clerical/homework/WFH activities, just as one would before these started being added. It fails to be better than the thing it’s trying to replace, and is less-useful (and uglier) than having more ordinary kitchen cabinets and/or counter space, which can do just as good a job of storing paperwork and calendars and such, without the misguided specific-purpose design.

So basically the 80s version of Microsoft Teams?

I think it's just changed. Tons of people I know with disposable income buy retro gaming systems, collectible old cartridges, etc., when a MiSTer (or even sufficiently advanced software emulation) can do. There is still some affinity for Stuff, it's perhaps just that there are more readily-available things to attach oneself to rather than the stuff your parents or grandparents attached to.

I don't want my grandparents'/parents' Hummels stash, either. My hypothetical kids probably won't want whatever I end up into.

Yeah that sounds quite plausible. Instead of pulling out the nice dishes once a year, we pull out the Atari 5200 once a year.

Fussell marked a lot of this behavior as related to class-socialization. I’ve sometimes found it hard to tell where my attitudes differing from my parents’ and other older relatives’ is part of a generational shift, and where it’s because theirs all fall very much in a range of every-flavor-of-prole through middle (in Fussell’s terms), while I’ve both accidentally and on-purpose adopted a lot of upper-middle (again, as Fussell breaks the terms down) preferences and attitudes. This can easily happen entirely unconsciously just from, say, going to college.

I’m with you on disliking useless or near-useless rooms (formal dining room when we already have a large eat-in area in the kitchen? LOL no, that’s an office now) and finding “collectibles” or curio cabinets full of never-used and not-even-particularly-nice (but even if they were—you should use things unless they’re purely art!) e.g. dishes practically repulsive, but I’m not sure how much of that’s generational and how much if it’s my own small, but significant, class shift.

I've been going through some of this after inheriting all my parents stuff. I feel some guilt about tossing so many things that they hung on to so they must have valued them (but I don't feel enough guilt to keep all this stuff).

I think there is a third possible cause to add to your list: companies exploiting something that maybe used to be sort of true but our parents hadn't realized it no longer applied. Collectible things might have been expensive and slow to produce when they were hand painted in upstate new york, then they started to be machine stamped across the world for pennies and for a while they could still fetch the old price and sentimentality as the market was saturated and then some.

I sometimes wonder if I'm going too far in the other direction and not sentimentality in at least a few things and preserving them. Maybe I'm setting up the pendulum swing in the other direction and my kids will have interest in collecting something when they grow up.

We finally became real adults the other year, in that we were hosting a big Thanksgiving at our own place. When we pulled out all the fine china that we'd been handed down we found that we were going to be short some table settings.

We looked at all the traditional stores (Penny's, etc) and found the prices for new china sets to be quite a lot.

On a lark, we went to the charity shop to just see what we could find. Hey, maybe, just maybe, there would be a set that matched what we already had?

The kitchen area was just chock-a-block with fine china. Glasses, plates, little forks, you name it. The silver was real silver judging by the tarnishing, still in those wooden velvet lined boxes. A bit of cellotape binding all the various items together. A whole coffee pot, pure silver, just sitting there next to dozens more. Any style or coloring or gold plating that you liked. Yeah, some of the sets were incomplete. Missing a tea up or a spoon. But no gold lined dinner plate made in Italy or Japan was ever more than a dollar.

We pieced together a whole set for 16 people of everything we could think of for under $200. Little oyster forks, big dinner plates, gold plated napkin rings, you name it, we have it now. And if we ever break anything, back to the charity shop to just replace it for under $0.50. Get a whole new set of them for under $10.

People are practically giving away all the fine china in my part of the world, and they still can barely find anyone to take it.

I don't know what our ancestors were thinking with this stuff, but I doubt it turned out like they thought it would. A good lesson to us all.

I remember hearing from my mother about how her grandmother (my great grandmother) got her chinaset. It was during the great depression, and some flour companies held long running promotions where a piece of China would be placed inside the bag of flour. If you ended up with too many pieces of one type (for example tea cups), you could trade with your neigbors to equal out your set. It was a way of buying/owning something nice when you barely had money to pay for the food itself. I'm not sure how apocryphal this story is though. Could the China really have survived transport that way? Maybe the purchaser redeemed the China piece another way.

They would also use the bag the flour came in as material to make underwear. Literally nothing was wasted. That is probably also why this stuff got passed down to our generation: they couldn't bear to part with anything.

Some full sets are worth quite some money but most of that crap is mostly worth its weight in silver (it's not pure silver) and that's it.

Now here's the kicker: some of these sets have several kilograms of silver in them.

Here'd be the biggest french auction site and full "menagere" can go from 2 K EUR up to 15 K EUR for the rarest and biggest ones:

https://drouot.com/fr/l/22652407-couverts-espagnols-en-argen...

They're usually listed with the weight of the various pieces.

If it's 750/1000 silver (or whatever: it's not pure silver I think) and there are x kilograms, you can figure out what these are more or less worth.

> The silver was real silver judging by the tarnishing

I wouldn't be so sure... Many other material do look not unlike silver and were precisely used to make it look like they were silver. These aren't worth anything.

As a side note, silicon carbide (also known as moissanite, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moissanite) has better optical properties (slightly higher refractive index, twice as high dispersion) while not carrying multiple ethical dilemmas. It has a slightly lower hardness, but it does not matter unless you want it precisely to cut things.

The engagement ring I bought my (now) wife has a main Moissanite stone (clear), a ring of artificial emeralds, and artificial diamond accent stones (clear). The fact that we can artificially produce gemstones is really cool, green is my favorite color, there are no negative ethical implications from mining, and it makes for a very pretty ring. And it cost a lot less than an equivalent-sized diamond, even an artificial one.

When I proposed to my wife, I proposed with a ring with a single, solitary moissanite gemstone, about 1kt. She loved it (I assume she still loves it, she still wears it and gets complements on it frequently). One of the main complements that she receives is how "shiny" it is, probably due to how refractive moissanite is compared to diamond. That made me feel good hearing how people noticed.

It was also SIGNIFICANTLY less money than an equally sized diamond at the time. I understand that you want to demonstrate your love and affection to your significant other, but I can't justify spending nearly $10k on a ring, whose gemstone was probably harvested by someone working in reprehensible conditions (probably slavery).

Totally cool and not everyone's cup of tea. Wasn't mine when I was growing up.

But I married a woman who grew up more in that type of sphere. I ended up having a lot of fun diamond shopping in the upstairs office of a dealer in the diamond district in NYC, learning a lot, connecting to the stone, etc. My wife loved it and I love seeing the ring on her hand.

If the market value of it goes to zero and it's just a sentimental thing we share and then give to our daughter, I got my money's worth.

Obviously wouldn't have done it if I couldn't afford it etc

A bit sexist though isn't it? This is one thing men should no longer feel obligated to do, in the name of equality.

Not if written by a woman.

In the same sex weddings I've attended, both parties had the same or similar rings. One party didn't get a ring that was wildly more expensive than the other.

You’re dunking on a fictional hyper-woke straw man in response to someone sharing a wholesome anecdote about doing something nice for their wife. Lol.

Do you have a good argument why this tradition should stand or are you just going to make assumptions about me?

Not the person you're responding to, but I'm confused what you're arguing against. Men proposing with a ring?

Either way, to me it's someone sharing a story about a romantic gesture. If you remove your implication of sexes (or swap them), do you hold the same belief?

Also, the OP never said they felt obliged because they're a man. They said their significant other appreciates this type of jewelry. Anything outside that is you projecting your own beliefs (which we don't have to discuss) into the story

> Men proposing with a ring?

Not just a ring, a very expensive one in contrast to the one the man ends up with. A ring price gap if you will.

> If you remove your implication of sexes (or swap them), do you hold the same belief?

Yes and society does generally in these matters as well. There was a number of expectations of women in marriage historically that they have been liberated from, yet this expectation remains for men at some level.

> Also, the OP never said they felt obliged because they're a man. They said their significant other appreciates this type of jewelry.

He might appreciate sports cars, there isn't a industry trying to get her to buy him a sports car and via conspicuous consumption, socially siginal her value as a wife to his friend group and family. Sports car showrooms aren't full of anxious young couples, taking out loans so he can pull up in something with 500 horsepower on the special day. Why?

> Yes and society does generally in these matters as well. There was a number of expectations of women in marriage historically that they have been liberated from, yet this expectation remains for men at some level.

Different circles of people have different expectations, and I think that's okay.

I still think we're over-analysing an anecdote here. He was attrac to a woman—for the sake of the argument, but we don't know this—has those expectations. So, he must've been fine with them! If there was a big disparity on world views, we'd never have lived to have this discussion, as the story wouldn't have happened.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, of they're happy, who are we to judge them? Traditional or not.

I'm personally with you on the stance that it's a bit of a funny tradition, but I don't think it's an egregious one.

> He might appreciate sports cars, there isn't a industry trying to get her to buy him a sports car and via conspicuous consumption, socially siginal her value as a wife to his friend group and family. Sports car showrooms aren't full of anxious young couples, taking out loans so he can pull up in something with 500 horsepower on the special day. Why?

I am neither into sports cars or super familiar with engagement jewelry, so I might be wrong, but I don't think the price brackets overlap, or do they? So, I'm not sure it's a fair comparison. However... I concede there's a point there. I don't know why that's the case. Maybe because traditionally men earned more while women stayed at home? I have friends who've bought their boyfriends gaming gear/consoles (I know it's not the same price range, but the sentiment was there).

Regarding social signaling: maybe her family is upstanding and cares about that. So, he just wanted to impress the in-laws. We don't know! But either way, he was okay with it! It's his life to live after all. We can live ours differently

There is a double standard sure. It's up to us to make the best of our situation.

You made the comment...

I can't tell if this is satire or not, but of course you do your life your way.

Maybe we're old-fashioned. My wife's done some pretty "unequal" things like 2 pregnancies and many months of getting up at night to breastfeed. So I don't mind doing some of the "unequal" things from my side. Frankly, I think I get off easy :)

"Connecting to the stone"? That's a slippery slope you're on. You could be shopping for healing stones online before you know it.

Given the history of the diamond trade I'm fairly sure the slope slips in the other direction!

Too late to edit my comment, what I meant more is like "learned the nuances of various stones, understood the nuances of this stone and appreciated it."

Maybe instead of connected I should have said something like "nerded out." But now, a few years down the road of marriage, with a house and two kids, I have a deep sentimental appreciation for the journey of which our engagement was the start.

Like I said, the ring wasn't necessary to that - if we couldn't afford it we'd do something else but it was an enjoyable part.

Thanks for clarifying, makes sense. It's like me appreciating some fine coffee or my father's old records..

To each their own, I guess :)

> If the market value of it goes to zero

it already did, the second you bought it

Where I can buy a "used" diamond for a very low price?

set up as a jeweler

fools who bought them as an "investment" will pile in and you can offer them nothing

Had similar journey years ago, entering the shop naively thinking: ah, it will cost me a month' salary, soit!

I wonder how this goes at the other end of the table. Seeing all these young couples crazy rationalising their purchase, not to mention their sales toolbox they have to close these deals.

> connecting to the stone

Can you clarify what this means? It's an inanimate object with no spiritual meaning or no meaning in general. Why not connect with something cheaper, like some pebble from a river bank?

Attaching symbolic meanings to objects is a pretty standard human thing to do and has been as long as there have been humans.

It was a great trick, for a while at least, for diamond sellers to connect that sentimentality to something super expensive!

Good.

When I told my fiance I was thinking of proposing, I asked if she would like to be involved in picking out the engagement ring, and if she minded whether it was genuine or lab-grown. She did not. We commissioned a nice, lab-grown Alexandrite stone, which she loves, and the several grand in savings allowed me to get her a nicer band to go with it.

None of our family/friends that she shows off the ring to care that it's lab-grown. The only people who sneer that it is not a "real" diamond do not belong in our social circle.

When the only difference between a lab-grown diamond and a "real" one comes down to "Some children in an African diamond mine had to suffer to bring you the latter," you could very reasonably argue that the cruelty is the point.

>The only people who sneer that it is not a "real" diamond do not belong in our social circle.

Clearly, I'm not in that circle either. If someone shows me their ring that they a clearly proud of, just finding the gall to even dare asking "is it real" is so beyond me that I don't really even know where to begin. It's not like it's a knock off hand bag that these same people seem to embrace, so I really am quite content (more than that really) that I'm not in those circles.

Congrats on having a good experience with that whole process.

I imagine most of those people expect to hear "yes" as the answer, even if it isn't.

I don't know exactly why they do that (I suspect it's just childish), but I know a few people that behave like that.

>> The only people who sneer that it is not a "real" diamond

No one really cares about "real" diamonds

Boycott the cartel and their resource curse/slavery/conflict diamonds. There are plenty of other ways besides advertising-manufactured material expressions of commitment. Make your own rings.

This doesn't work unless you can get women on board.

There is still significant demand from them for engagement rings.

>American couples date for about three years before getting engaged, and thanks to covid-19 very few people were out and about meeting potential husbands or wives in 2020. An unusually small number of people are probably getting engaged this year.

And all the people who would have got married during 2020 but couldn't?

Well, I'm going to take a leap of faith and guess that a significant portion of those split during/because of the pandemic.

Good!

They're mostly a marketing ploy by DeBeers and other companies to push overpriced stuff

Get a moassanite or a synthetic diamond. Engagement rings with a stone are not even a thing outside of the US it seems

If you want a rare rock, get a nice colored gemstone. They are much rarer than diamonds and often have a lot more character.

You're right about gemstones.

I saw the lab grown stuff coming a while ago didn't want to spend money on diamonds: I wanted gemstones and not to throw away money. My now wife wanted a diamond so I caved. I did add emeralds but wish that the ring was mostly gemstones.

This said, if it's going to be worn commonly, check into the hardness/brittleness of the stone you are getting.

As a latino I can confidently say that diamond engagement rings are extremely coveted in latin america

Can you shed some light on why that is? I'm assuming value/cost to acquire?

> in latin america

Well, define "latin america". This place has huge cultural differences. Culturally and ethnically we're even more diverse than the U.S.

In parts and some social circles of Latin America, closer to the U.S. marketing, diamond engagement rings are coveted, indeed. But it is not everywhere.

I'm originally from Brazil and the first time I heard about diamond engagement rings where when I moved to the US. It's basically a scam.

Stones are still a thing in the UK and Ireland

Exactly, before like the 1920s people just gave gold rings. It’s all marketing, probably the most successful one ever

It's up there. But does it compete with Christmas?

My SO got an engagement iPad. The jewelry aspect is in the sapphire glass shielding the camera.

It still has better resale value than an engagement ring with the same original price.

I'd rather have an engagement poem than an engagement iPad. I could say the former is priceless.

True, but the original point of an engagement ring was for it to be a store of value should the fiancee perish unexpectedly, so I was aiming for that.

HN sees diamonds with a focus in science, economics and ethic. Other demigraphics are not like that, to other people is about status, showing off, tradition, etc. Yes we know that other objects can show more status, but some people really like The Idea about diamonds.

The question is about size of markets...

Being in the diamond market from 1900 to 2000 was probably good if you wanted to make money.

Being in the diamond market now is going to involve a shrinking market, at least in most western countries. The number of marriages in the US per 1000 per year has halved since 1990. Add in that some growing portion of the population doesn't care about diamonds and then add artificial diamonds then the market looks a lot different. Unless you talk some other large population source into buying expensive diamonds (China? India?) expect the prices to decrease over the years.

I proposed last year with a lab-made diamond. I did almost no research, went to one jeweler and only twice, shelled out less money than I was spending on rent, and I walked away with one of the prettiest rings she has ever seen. Her friends unanimously love it. They can’t believe I picked it out.

I don’t know or care about the politics of the diamond trade. All I can confirm on is this: Lab-grown diamonds are the real deal. They will even fool a jeweler’s naked eye.

They don't need to fool anyone. Lab grown diamonds are real diamonds. Only a tiny minority of people vested in the industry care about earth made diamonds.

The prices of synthetic stones have been eroding rapidly [1] as more makers come online. I'm aware of two factories ex-USA, one with ~700 CVD systems, the other with ~900 systems. Each system yields raw material for ~25 1+ct finished gems every two weeks. These two facilities alone can produce about 1.6 million 1ct finished stones/year.

In the 1-2ct range, naturals can't compete anymore on price. In the 3+ct range, Asian markets are still very strong for naturals. I think that will persist, as natural diamond reserves are in decline [2] and the cachet of natural vs. synthetic is particularly strong in some cultures.

[1] https://fortune.com/2023/09/03/diamond-demand-falling-lab-gr...

[2] https://www.fcresearch.org/the-last-diamond-unearthed-the-co....

Nile Red on youtube did a great video where he burns diamonds in a O2 rich atmosphere, collects the resulting CO2, and makes carbonated water.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0wvDwSnzcw

Well duh, why would I want a shiny rock when I can instead have a $800 apple watch and $1700 cell phone, and a $100K Tesla? It's 2023 not -1000bc, there are better ways to display wealth to the opposite sex than shiny rocks.

Diamonds made from atmospheric CO2 would have a wide marketing appeal, and their provenance would be easy to distinguish (as the synthetic route involves capture of atmospheric CO2, conversion to methane as the synthetic diamond feedstock, so they'd have the same 14C content as atmospheric CO2 does).

Eventually I imagine diamonds will go the way of aluminum, which used to be very hard to produce and so was valued similarly to silver and gold, and so was also seen as a material wealth flex (e.g. Napoleon's aluminum dining set etc.). It'll be just another industrial material.

> It'll be just another industrial material.

It already is, except it has a legacy marketing department attached. The article's point is that they're kinda losing.

If anyone is interested in a good documentary about diamonds and the De Beers cartel I can recommend Nothing Lasts Forever [1][2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHIGGdxZe64

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/feb/12/nothing-lasts-f...

Diamonds, viewed as a scam, is pretty much the norm no? Resale is a joke, and De Beers have held an effective global monopoly for decades.

Given this, how are they "losing their allure...." what allure?

An article in The Economist that doesn't touch on the actual economics of diamonds, not once. And, they talk about gold as if it only does well in economic downturns.

Diamonds are worthless rocks.

Is this something related to people wearing less jewelry in general or just diamonds ?

Copy of the article without the paywall: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-diamonds-losing-allure-20...

I’d argue so is marrying

Getting married in the first place is losing its appeal. Lots of millenials have witnessed boomers getting serially married and divorced in their lives and have interest in that drama.

Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? (1982) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37396372 - Sept 2023 (11 comments)

Diamonds Suck (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26698511 - April 2021 (53 comments)

Diamonds aren’t special and neither is love - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25978139 - Jan 2021 (90 comments)

Diamonds Are Bullshit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25059605 - Nov 2020 (27 comments)

Billions of dollars of unsold diamonds are piling up around the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23502201 - June 2020 (104 comments)

Shaking Up the Diamond Industry - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22209364 - Feb 2020 (120 comments)

Diamonds Keep Getting Cheaper - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21522898 - Nov 2019 (389 comments)

Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? (1982) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20818618 - Aug 2019 (237 comments)

The Elite Club That Rules the Diamond World Is Starting to Crack - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20555503 - July 2019 (200 comments)

Would You Pay $32,709 for a Lab-Grown Diamond? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19287565 - March 2019 (34 comments)

Diamonds Suck (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17186457 - May 2018 (215 comments)

Diamonds Are Bullshit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17184539 - May 2018 (45 comments)

De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17183603 - May 2018 (439 comments)

Lab-grown diamonds threaten viability of the real gems - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16551147 - March 2018 (301 comments)

Diamonds Suck (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12944464 - Nov 2016 (576 comments)

A Lab-Grown Diamond Is Forever - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11903409 - June 2016 (106 comments)

What the diamond industry is really selling - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11099809 - Feb 2016 (83 comments)

Diamonds Suck (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10834567 - Jan 2016 (2 comments)

Diamonds are Bullshit (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9251952 - March 2015 (75 comments)

A Diamond Market No Longer Controlled By De Beers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7793386 - May 2014 (111 comments)

Diamonds Suck - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6868968 - Dec 2013 (3 comments)

Diamonds Are Bullshit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5403988 - March 2013 (734 comments)

Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? (1982) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4535611 - Sept 2012 (225 comments)

Have you ever tried to sell a diamond? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1405698 - June 2010 (85 comments)

Have you ever tried to sell a diamond? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1110283 - Feb 2010 (76 comments)

The Facts About Diamonds (and why I don’t like De Beers) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1109318 - Feb 2010 (41 comments)

De Beers profits fall 92% - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=722115 - July 2009 (25 comments)

Diamonds on Demand - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=330749 - Oct 2008 (16 comments)

Well they burn at 600°C so they really have no value.

Aem, I doubt you can judge the value of an object by the temperature it starts burning. By that measure, no book, no human, not oil nor wood has value.

A diamond is forever... poof!

The downvotes are telling... Karma is inverted!

Even the universe isn't forever

Reply on news.ycombinator.com