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Comment by A_D_E_P_T | Hacker News Reader

Over the past 10 years, there has been an explosion in cheap lab diamond and moissanite producers in China and India. 10 years ago, it was hard to find quality lab diamonds at a reasonable price, and moissanite was still reasonably expensive at $400-600/ct.

Today, given cutthroat competition and "race to the bottom" pricing strategies, lab diamonds are ubiquitous, extremely high quality, and cheap. Less than $200/ct and sometimes much less: https://detail.1688.com/offer/751071300271.html

Moissanites are now less than $5/carat at retail: https://detail.1688.com/offer/586468555080.html

These are legit. I've bought some.

Within 10 years of today, I expect diamonds to lose almost all of their value. Moissanites have already become as near-worthless as synthetic rubies. This is going to open up new industrial uses for those gemstones.

View on HN

Diamonds have lots of uses beyond being pretty.

I have to bring this up because a lot of people are talking as if this is the entirety of the reason for their decrease. But there's diamond files, diamond cutting blades/wheels/drills, you can make glass from it (really only used in labs that absolutely need them because the price), and many more uses. Many of these don't care about size, quality, or clarity. So instead of pulling from scrap material from jewelry making or rejected diamonds you could just make your own and ensure your own supply.

One of the things I've loved about synthetic diamond prices coming down is just how cheap and available diamond cutting wheels and filing tools have become. You can now get a set of diamond files on Amazon for under $10. That's crazy

> diamond files on Amazon for under $10

Link? I'm skeptical. It seems more likely someone is abusing the term "diamond", no?

Not the same thing, but you can get diamond tipped 3d printer nozzles for ~$100: https://www.amazon.com/Diamondback-Nozzles-Compatible-Polycr...

Considering that these are a niche product requiring a precisely shaped diamond insert made by a relatively small operation in the US, I think it's believable that a Chinese company could produce diamond files for ~$10, considering that it only needs diamond powder and has more space for mass production.

Sets like this one

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B092D4CV56

are also sold in U.S. hardware stores

https://www.harborfreight.com/needle-file-set-10-piece-69876...

https://www.menards.com/main/tools/hand-tools/files/tool-sho...

They are very cheaply made, but as far as I can tell are actually diamond. They're good for shaping glass and ceramics. For metal, you're better off using hardened steel files, but these ones will work, just slowly and with less precision.

I actually have that exact set. Yeah, they aren't high quality, but as far as I can tell they are diamond. They have that hardness and the filing is omnidirectional as one would expect.

Of course you can get much better sets that will last longer and are much more expensive. But I remember as a kid that trying to buy a diamond bit was quite expensive but most Dremel kits come with one and a wheel now

Diamonds are just dirt cheap. You can buy a set of ten diamond needle files for $8 on Amazon, or less than $2 in wholesale quantities. I have hundreds of grams of diamond in my workshop in the form of lapping compound; if you're so inclined, you could buy half a kilo of loose diamonds for a couple of hundred bucks.

A wide range of very ordinary cutting tools are now tipped with big chunks of polycrystalline diamond - cutting tools for machining aluminium, inserts for rock drills, saw blades for cutting fibre cement boards. Even woodworkers are starting to use diamond saw blades and router bits, because the improved wear life over tungsten carbide gives a rapid return on investment.

https://www.amazon.com/Yakamoz-10-Piece-Diamond-Jewelers-Pre...

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/140mm-160mm-180mm-Dia...

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32719545477.html

https://union-diamond.en.alibaba.com/index.html

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003335883020.html

Same. I even have that set from Amazon and am happy with it. It's not the best, but there's always uses for cheap files.

Also this is the first time I've tried to go to ali from my phone and holy hell are they aggressive in trying to get you to use the app. And express links require login? WTF. It crashed my browser

I bought that exact set of red-dipped-handled cheapo rifflers 19 years ago (2005, I remember I was still at school, and I think they came from Maplins, possibly Rapid). They were cheap then too, probably about the same numerical price, perhaps £10 with the Maplins tax, and AliExpress shipping was just a gleam in Jack Ma's eye. Industrial-grade diamond dust has been pretty cheap for a long time.

>> Link? I'm skeptical. It seems more likely someone is abusing the term "diamond", no?

The carat-cost curve is not linear, so it seems plausible. As carats go down, there is a huge supply of diamonds, especially those without beauty attributes (color, cut) which can be used for non-jewelry purposes.

And I'd be very happy to see the demise of De Beers. It's amazing that De Beers can thrive for more than 100 years, but still, using clever marketing and tight control of supply to artificially jack up the price of diamond is counter-productive.

I have heard that they are the ones that made diamonds the engagement stone, and that was relatively recently.

My mother and grandmother had sapphire engagement rings.

So did Princess Diana. Some of this is regional -- the US is the epicenter of marketing diamonds while other places don't value them so much.

Both me mum and grandmum were British.

We don’t say grandmum btw!

But then you don’t say grandmom either and it’s just occurred to me that you were probably joking.

Sigh.

It was a joke.

Here’s me mum: https://cmarshall.com/miscellaneous/SheilaMarshall.htm

Where was she from?

It’s in the eulogy. Her parents were scouse.

100% correct, they with their advertising agency invented the idea that 'diamonds are forever'. There's plenty online but below is a good overview:

https://theeyeofjewelry.com/de-beers/de-beers-jewelry/de-bee...

They never had any value, apart from specialized ie glass cutting tool. Only when DeBeers realized they could push some fictious heavy marketing 'to prove your worth to woman you are asking to marry' for those shiny stones nobody wanted to buy, people who didn't know better got manipulated into buying them. They are supposedly very common in universe, and probably in deeper Earth too.

Correction is healthy and benefits mankind long term, there was nothing good coming from ie impact on Africa. Nobody cared about that, so things are fixed from another direction.

Diamonds where valued before DeBeers even existed, but diamonds in engagement rings (especially in the US) are (at least partially) from a heavy marketing push by them in the 20th century. Previously engagement rings tended to be colored gemstones.

Yes, I've read that in the early 20th century, other precious gemstones (like rubies & emeralds) had more than a third of the market for engagement rings.

I think diamonds are used in some lathes as cutting tools. So suprising thats not more common. I though diamonds strength and iirc its heat tolerance would be attractive to the folks who cut stuff.

The hardness is attractive but the poor heat resistance is a major problem for many uses. For a normal angle grinder you can use normal abrasive disc without paying much attention, but with a diamond-grit one you can easily burn the diamonds.

Diamonds are excellent for cutting some materials, e.g. ceramics or some non-ferrous alloys, but they are bad for cutting metals that are good at dissolving carbon, e.g. iron, cobalt and nickel alloys.

So for the iron alloys, which are the material most frequently processed by machining, diamond is not suitable. Other hard crystals, like alumina a.k.a. corundum, are much better for this purpose, even if they are less hard than diamond.

For those metals, cubic boron nitride works and has about half the Knoop hardness of diamond (and more than twice the hardness of aluminum oxide.)

c-BN is isoelectronic with diamond; h-BN is isoelectronic with graphite (but is an insulator).

Diamond turning is used to produce optical surfaces with lathes. Here's a recent example on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPTFFPLOzCw

They're not that heat tolerant. They're fantastic heat conductors, but they'll burn away into carbon dioxide (via carbon monoxide). The temperatures needed to do that are high, around 900C, but that's not that high. Angle grinder sparks can be hotter than 1000C, as can the edges of carbide tools.

There's no market for e.g. diamond lenses? Sure it's going to be on the expensive end of the market but the same forces are pushing those prices down.

Diamonds certainly have value as a material for jewelry -- essentially unscratchable jewelry is pretty awesome. They also don't get cloudy over time or anything. That's the cool part.

They can be burned up in a house fire though.

Who needs a house fire? A bit of quartz glass, a blow torch, and an oxygen supply, and you can convert your unused diamonds into carbon dioxide without losing the house*

Nile Red uses this approach to make Diamond Water: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0wvDwSnzcw

* You might still lose the house if you opt for the bigger diamonds.

  > Who does not love diamonds? Where is there a mind in
  > which the bare mention of them does not excite a
  > pleasant emotion? Is there any one of rank too exalted
  > to care for such baubles? The highest potentates of the
  > earth esteem them as their choicest treasures, and
  > kingdoms have been at war for their possession

From "Diamonds" by William Pole, published in 1861 [1] (27 years before the formation of the De Beers company)

[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Diamonds/ENwOAAAAYAAJ?h...

The Europeans have encountered for the first time what are now called diamonds during the expedition of Alexander the Great in India, where they had been appreciated for jewelry for a long time.

This is why the Romans, e.g. Pliny the Elder, used for diamonds the name "Indian adamant". The name "adamant" without the "Indian" specifier had already been used for many hundreds of years (the oldest attestation is in Hesiod), but it had not been applied to a gem, but to nuggets of native osmium-iridium alloy, which can be found mixed with the nuggets of native gold in the alluvial deposits of gold (and which, unlike the gold with which they were mixed, could be neither melted nor forged, hence their name, "untameable"; "unconquerable", which is used in the article is a bad translation for "adamant").

Pliny the Elder described the "Indian adamant" as consisting of octahedral crystals, which is the most frequent form of the natural diamonds. It appears that at that time it was impossible to cut the diamonds, at most they might have been polished a little, so the crystals used in jewelry retained their native shape.

By the time of Pliny the Elder, the "Indian adamant" was the most expensive gem, surpassing even the noble opals, the pearls, the emeralds and the beryls, which were the next most expensive gems at that time. The Romans did not care much for transparent crystals, they appreciated much more the higher quality exemplars of noble opals or pearls, if those exhibited a nice play of colors.

> They never had any value

The Crown Jewels disagree with you

https://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/history-and-stories/t...

>They never had any value

They had immense value in ancient world. They were valued much more than gold - due to their rarity. Southern India was the only known source for mining diamonds in ancient world [1]. They were used as currency and was valued higher than gold. In fact there were wars fought for diamonds.

There is a saying about Koh-i-Noor, one of the most famous Diamond - "If a strong man were to throw four stones – one north, one south, one east, one west, and a fifth stone up into the air – and if the space between them were to be filled with gold, all would not equal the value of the Koh-i-Noor" [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golconda_diamonds

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/16/koh-i-...

Good quality sapphires, rubies and emeralds are rarer and in some parts of history were considered more valuable. They’re not hyped to the extent that diamonds have been in the last 100 years.

The 5 stone gold comparison is utter BS (unless those 5 stones are like 5 stones heavy :P).

All the gold available to humans on earth right now fits into a ~20m cube, and that is most certainly worth orders of magnitude more than a single diamond in a historical artifact.

Not at that time when the diamonds were mined only from one mine in the entire world for several hundreds of thousands of years.

Anything rare does have value. So why not big enough diamonds. With big being critical part. The tiny stuff really is very stuff. The big is rare and thus rarity along reasonably brings some value.

>>They never had any value

As they say, "If you want to know a diamond's worth, try selling one"

Radio waves around me are just constant drumbeat from large jewelry stores about why its such a bad idea to buy a synthetic diamond as it wont hold its value. They already know what is coming.

> I expect diamonds to lose almost all of their value.

Artificial diamonds, you mean. The natural ones will keep their price, just as "hand-crafted" goods did (and, I suspect, as "human-produced" content in the future will); it's a matter of status and signalling that you can afford to buy an inferior, more expensive product.

I'd expect this to be true if you could tell at a glance. But the new stuff looks like the old stuff, but bigger and better.

Now we just need artificial diamonds that are flawed enough to be indistinguishable from real diamonds.

There is a whole sub-industry of putting fake mosquitoes into fake amber.

As long as the mosquitos contain real dinosaur blood, it's all good.

"We spared no expense!"

From chickens, right?

Chickens are indeed dinosaurs by all means, so sure, from chickens.

They already do this with emeralds -- fake inclusions and flaws to make them look more like natural stones. If a natural emerald and a good synthetic emerald are distinguishable, it's often only because the synthetic one still looks too much better -- its color and overall clarity are still a little bit too good.

Just like the "distressed wood" trend caused a booming business of making products that all have the exact same "distressed" pattern. History doesn't repeat, but it certainly rhymes.

I know somebody that works in a wooden floor business. They take perfect new wood and move it through a cylinder that drops pebbles on it. They sell it for 2-3 times the price of undamaged wood.

It's based on supply and demand.

In 2012, when I was shopping for an engagement ring, a natural 2ct diamond cost $250,000. (I bought a 2ct moissanite for much, much less, and my wife is very happy with it.)

When I looked in fall 2023, a natural 2ct diamond cost $20,000. That's a loss of over 90% of value, not counting inflation! (Now the supply of diamonds is much higher, and the demand for natural diamonds is much lower.)

I suspect that natural diamonds will be sold for a 40-300% premium over manufactured. I also wonder if impurities will become fashionable, just to show that a specific diamond is actually natural and can't be made in a lab.

> Artificial diamonds

BTW, there is no such thing as an artificial diamond. A manufactured diamond is 100% diamond, for all intents and purposes.

> I also wonder if impurities will become fashionable, just to show that a specific diamond is actually natural and can't be made in a lab.

I hope that happens for purely aesthetic reasons too: natural "imperfections" add a lot of visual variety and interest that's otherwise missing in a lot of diamond jewellery—at least the sort that I've seen.

Pretty sure you can add random/natural imperfections in the lab too!

> BTW, there is no such thing as an artificial diamond. A manufactured diamond is 100% diamond

What do you believe the distinction between artificial and manufactured is? As far as I'm aware, they're almost synonyms.

Dictionaries literally list "man made" as one of the definitions of artificial.

A man-made television isn't an artificial television; a man-made taco isn't an artificial taco.

Man-made beef and artificial beef are both the same thing: a not-beef beef substitute. Beef is by definition cow-made.

Man-made diamonds are just diamonds.

Last I heard from the forefront of geology and ecology, "natural" televisions and tacos have yet to be found.

So I don't think the distinction is best analyzed with examples like that.

If something is normally created and nature, and humans find a way to reproduce it, it is common to call the human produced versions artificial even if the result is identical in principle.

Humans make lots of distinctions that fall apart if we get too pedantic, but have useful casual, cultural, or practical associations and meanings.

Burn hydrogen to make water. Is that artificial water? Or is it forever artificial water? Is all water that mixes with it artificial water? Is all water now artificial since it has mixed with human made water?

While the basic definition seems to be merely "man-made", I would say it holds there is some underlying distinction between the natural and artificial. Natural light vs artificial light -- the two are distinctly different. But are the photons produced by a light bulb artificial, or are they natural photons?

Artificial diamonds are more diamond than diamonds. The diamond portions are identical, regardless of origin.

Or maybe there are trapped gasses or other identifiers left in them that make them distinct. I don't really know about this point.

Anyhow, the natural vs artificial distinction really seems to break down when things are (literally) physically and chemically identical.

>Burn hydrogen to make water. Is that artificial water? Or is it forever artificial water?

This depends on whether you ask a scientist or a homeopathic practitioner.

That's not what makes things artificial vs natural. Artificial vanillin is "more vanilla than real vanilla". A natural vanillin molecule is indistinguishable from fully synthetic vanillin from crude oil. The latter is still called "artificial flavor".

Artifical vanillin is not the whole package though, as there are other compounds in natural vanilla that make up the flavour, so it doesn't reflect the full product. "Natural" vanilla extract may also never have seen a vanilla bean, as it could be plant derived, or even from a beaver's ass.

Until the rise of synthetics the perfect diamond had no flaws or impurities. Now the language has changed and apparently it's all about just the right number of imperfections and impurities, though those will also be mimicked in short order (if they haven't been already).

There is a genuine physical reason to prefer 'real' vanilla extract over artificial. Not so much for diamonds.

> "natural" televisions and tacos have yet to be found.

I refuse to give up hope!

Indeed, "artificial diamond" is one of the top examples of the first definition of "artificial" at Merriam-Webster, which is "man-made." [1]

Etymologically it means "made by skill."

But I understand the hesitation to use the word, as it gives an impression of "fake."

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/artificial

> also wonder if impurities will become fashionable, just to show that a specific diamond is actually natural and can't be made in a lab.

Why can’t you add impurities when manufacturing a diamond? “Doping”

You can, but a flaw in a gem is usually an inclusion of some other mineral, a crack, or a hollow space.

This is Gary: his job is to give the machine a solid kick once a day and crack the vacuum seal on Fridays. Gary made us 120 million in imperfections last quarter.

You get them whether you want it or not, at least some of the time. Entropy and so forth. The synthetic ones with worse imperfections are cheaper.

It's probably possible to guess by inspection whether the imperfection properties imply mined vs lab grown, with some level of accuracy.

Source for the existence of imperfections is reading through lists of specific diamonds a few years ago. The synthetic ones didn't vary much in colour but did vary in number and distribution of inclusions.

The realities of this market have not hit the consumers. Even young people are still out there spending 5-6 figures on a rock and ascribing real value and aspirations towards eventually "upgrading" into said rocks from perhaps an existing synthetic alternative already set in the ring. Even if the supply side price argument is so perverted now, we still have a culture that wants to put a high value on this object for sentimental reasons. No one wants to hear that diamond rings are worthless. They want to spend money on it. Spending an appreciable amount of your savings on it is the entire significance of it, not really the value prospect.

A good example of how marketing can produce cultural values

> No one wants to hear that diamond rings are worthless.

You might convince them that their diamonds are worthless, and that a better investment is cryptocurrency!

Someone should market a synthetic diamond that has a crypto address etched onto it. It just had to be big enough that the augmented reality glasses can automatically pick it up to render the account balance.

>> They want to spend money on it.

no guy ever wants to shell out $$$ for a useless rock

It's not useless as such, although certainly its use is exceedingly niche. My headcanon is that Cecil Rhodes saw something back in the 1880s, something which drove him to create a corporate engine which would continue to bend the culture centuries after his own death. Now, a hundred and fifty years later, an appreciable fraction of the population carries with them at all times an object capable of scratching everything. What he saw, I cannot say, but one day in our hour of need the population will be equipped.

bitcoin is the 21 century's diamond. Same useless string of cryptographically signed bytes, but for some reason the humanity agrees to assign some value just because of scarcity mindset.

At least diamonds are shiny and you don’t have to pay miners literally forever

Bitcoin has its value due to anonymity and global footprint.

I can ransom hospitals with cyber attacks and get paid millions sitting on North Korea/rusia/Iran and dont have to stand up from my desk.

I can run distributed anonymized illicit drug distribution risk free and get paid a lot.

I can hire hitmen to gather intel and harm my adversaries and arrange kinetic campaigns.

A lot of good use cases.

Haven't you heard about goldbugs?

I am curious to know if there is precedent for goods losing their veblen status.

Pineapple and aluminium come to mind. Both were considered absolute luxuries in the 19th century.

Mechanical watches, perhaps.

Sugar was a Veblen good, now its superfluousness is the worst part about it.

When and where?

AFAIU by the time of British colonisation in the Carribean / West Indies, sugar was cheap and afforded plentiful calories (and caries) to the working class.

Along with (relatively) inexpensive tea, the practice of serving boiled water-sugar solution greatly improved health (given the lack of water treatment at the time), reduced alcohol consumption, and provided additional food energy. And that was by the mid-to-late 18th century so far as I'm aware.

I'm not aware of any time or place where sugar was considered a luxury item, at least not for any substantial duration (say, excepting famine, economic recession, or war).

Tulips!

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

That lasted less than a year, I don't think it even registered as part of the culture or tradition.

Quick note that a very nice 2ct stone has never cost $200,000. Not sure who was trying to charge you that much in 2012 or why, but gem diamond prices haven't changed much in the past 30 years, although there was an uptick in the covid/inflationary years, and a reversion to trend more recently.

https://www.pricescope.com/diamond-prices/diamond-prices-cha...

Jewelry store wanted to anchor the price?

Even today, Tiffany will want to charge you $142,000 for a 2ct IF (internally flawless) colorless (D) diamond. Not quite $200K but nonetheless.

This is like arguing about somebody saying a car costs $25,000 when you’re talking about a Bentley. It’s expensive because it’s a Bentley not because it’s a car.

I take your point but theres a still a huge gap to make up for.

I went deep on this topic a couple of years before OP' 2012 date. An IF 2ct would not have exceeded ~80k usd. Not from Tiffany but from a national US shop. And the retailer shouldnt have mattered anyway.

80 is orders of magnitude lower than 250k.

> 80 is orders of magnitude lower than 250k.

Well 80k is one order of magnitude smaller than 250k.

Remind me again, how many orders of magnitude difference are there between say a Bentley Continental ($242k) and a Tesla Model S ($76k)?

Luxury products cost a lot.

Why? Natural diamonds are the inferior product in every way.

For the same reason you can make a print of a classic painting, and digitally brighten and re-saturate the colors to counteract the darkening and yellowing of the original with age. Remove all of the cracking too.

And you'll still only be able to sell the print for tens of dollars, while the original is worth millions.

People attach value to authenticity and originals and tradition, however they define that.

It sounds like some people want to pay more money. Good for them. I'm happy to have a cheaper option.

Yes, this is a form of signaling in social psychology, an interesting phenomenon that happens with originals versus "replicas."

The whole point is to spend money and to be an honest signal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory

In the event artificial diamonds are genuinely indistinguishable from natural ones they will all, natural and artificial, become worthless aside from practical applications.

Sylvester McMonkey McBean at work.

That's a really, really dim signal though, right? You literally need a microscope to see the signal.

A higher-end Rolex knockoff is indistinguishable from the real thing to the naked eye of a casual observer, and yet people still buy the real thing for 10 times the price.

Brands will make themselves known as the more expensive option. People don’t give cubic zirconia engagement rings as is because they’ll look cheap if they’re honest and be outed as a cheap fraud if it’s found out that it’s not a diamond when they pretended it was.

De Beers will find a way to make aspects of the jewellery other than the gem identifiably theirs. Then when you’re caught pretending a $100 lab diamond ring is a $6,000 natural diamond De fBeers ring you’ll be in just as much trouble as if you’ve given them a cubic zirconia.

But even that surely is less useful these days?

In the west we're no longer living in a time where most people get married and then start their lives together. People often cohabit for years before marriage, and with more women working and earning as well the "hey I've got money and I'm dedicating a chunk to you!" signal isn't so much of a thing.

The prints most certainly aren't better. Hand painted is not something that can't be defeated with a printer currently. Besides you pay for the history of the original not the paint. A natural diamond has essentially the same history as any other rock you can pick up anywhere for free. People pay for the feeling. That doesn't mean a synthetic diamond is physically superior in every way.

Except that with diamonds the authenticity is actual human suffering in virtually slave like conditions.

> People attach value to authenticity and originals and tradition, however they define that.

That (some) people might attach (some) value to those attributes does not guarantee that the monetary value will be preserved. Pre-20th century antique "brown" furniture is a notorious example - where market value has collapsed in the last few decades as fashion has shifted.

But something else - authentic mid-modern furniture like Eames chairs - took its place. Old furniture is still in very high demand (and expensive), it's just that the specific pieces have changed.

I never bought a diamond in my life and have zero intention of doing so, but I can see how to some people there would be the appeal of knowing that a diamond came from some rock where it had stayed untouched for millions of years vs. an artificial one made in some China lab last month.

I think the value of diamonds has always been their rarity and cost. Historically, for married women this allowed them some financial strength and safety net. Of course as time goes on that function becomes less useful, but the idea has still stuck around a bit.

I predict people will turn to other gemstones, or will stick to "natural" diamonds and maybe even get them certified and stuff, producing another artificial market to inflate their value.

Diamonds are already certified by GIA, so that you prove their clarity and quality and such (which no untrained observer would be able to differentiate)

You omit functional value referred somewhat euphemistically as "portable wealth." See also: why doesn't the US circulate 1000 dollar bills?

It's not, though. This is old, but it's a classic: https://archive.ph/VdR8C

The short version is that it's very tough to sell diamonds. You're much more likely to get fleeced or get arrested than you are to get a fair deal.

Having inherited a stupidly large rock that had been in my family since 1905,I moved immediately to divest, and it wasn't in any way hard to sell, just really costly. Even with step-up cost basis cancelling out huge capital gains, Sothebys bit off about 22% in commissions and fees for itself. I also explored selling through an individual jeweler, and was offered 6 figures cash in a briefcase, but the commission would have been about the same, just more camouflaged, and I had no reason to want to explain a six-figures-of-cash deposit to my bank I'd have had to make thereafter. Big high quality diamonds at least, are liquid these days. (Your link is from 1982!) Just expect considerable slippage when you sell, the inevitable middlemen have sharp teeth.

Was it ever that handy for it?

I mean, having something valuable as a safety net and then carrying it around day and night where it can get damaged or stolen doesn't really sound like the smartest thing.

Your use of "historically" in the context of diamonds only means the past 100 years. Prior to the marketing of diamonds, sapphire was most common.

Grab a shovel and dig down in your garden deep enough and you'll get hundreds of old rocks for free

> The natural ones will keep their price

But they haven't.

Given the moral conditions around natural diamonds it is artificial diamonds that should command a premium.

Basically you're paying extra money for the murdering at this point.

Seems like it would have the opposite effect from what you want

You want people to prefer artificial diamonds because they're cheaper, so it becomes less financially viable to sell natural diamonds, so the people involved in that immoral stuff you're mentioning go out of business

>> will keep their price

I think this is a bit of a strong prediction. It's already been interesting to watch the rhetoric switch from "Natural ones are stronger and more pure" to "Manufactured diamonds don't have the flaws that give character". Which itself is fairly short-sighted, we can already manufacture things like star-sapphires with specific impurities in them.

So in the end all that will be left is "this one is natural". It will be a 'veblen' type signal for some people... but maybe it'll start to be a signal of gullibility, and also of recklessness or callousness, because diamond mining has both environmental and human costs.

High-end watches are worse at telling the time than electronic watches, but they are visibly different and identifiable, so they can broadcast status.

Diamonds made by man or nature are now indistinguishable, except to highly trained experts (and even then, not always), so it's unclear why anyone would prefer the expensive kind.

> so they can broadcast status.

Ummmm no.

As a lover of clockwork, I couldn't give a toss what anyone else thinks of my clock or watch collection.

Did they? I can't think of many hand-crafted goods that survived a superior massed produced version.

Plus, the signal value is lost once the natural and manufactured versions become indistinguishable.

> Artificial diamonds, you mean.

Synthetic diamonds, you mean.

There is noting artificial about them! They are diamonds.

They were created by humans; therefore, "artificial", or "manufactured". Just because there is no practical way to distinguish them from the ones that appeared naturally doesn't mean they weren't created artificially.

"But this is a purely philosophical difference then!" Yes, it is. Humans still take such silly differences into an account, consider e.g. replicas of artwork made by the original artist themself. Are they genuine? Debatable!

artificial != manufactured

Artificial: made by people, often as a copy of something natural.

To manufacture: to produce goods in large numbers, usually in a factory using machines.

Seems pretty synonymous to me. Heck, Collins dictionary [0] straight up states they're synonyms.

[0] https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/artific...

I think large natural diamonds will exist as a market. Just expect large real gems to become much less common for the non-wealthy. And large gemstone jewelry to become more ubiquitous with the increasing spread of lab gems. Definitely a trend towards seeing more such gems paired with silver as the prices have gone down.

Sorry for the pedantry, but “real” isn't a synonym for “natural”. My phone is real and is as artificial an object as I can imagine.

> Within 10 years of today, I expect diamonds to lose almost all of their value. Moissanites have already become as near-worthless as synthetic rubies. This is going to open up new industrial uses for those gemstones.

And for jewelry too. I bought my wife a 2ct moissanite in 2012. There was no way we could have done that ring with a real diamond back then.

When I was shopping, I happened to see a girl at a conference who had many large moissanites on her ring. It was gorgeous, and well within the price range of upper-middle-class.

You said they are legit, does that mean you have them tested by an independent lab? I know that almost all shops in China (and India) show nice certificates for such purchases. But I also know from experience that many of these certificates are worthless as rubber stamps. Maybe you live in China and know more about such things? I'm thinking about buying and would like to know more from your perspective. Thanks!

I need diamonds to play my records! What do you think a record stylus ("needle") is made from?

Worthless (as in low monetary value) doesn't mean useless.

Funnily enough this concept is literally called the "diamond-water paradox".

Sure, but those aren't gem-grade. They're usually black and opaque (polycrystalline) or yellow. And in any case they're very small.

When I say new industrial uses, I'm thinking of things that haven't been done before and hinge on large bulk volumes of material: Windows, very large diamond anvil cells, high-performance heatsinks, and stuff like that. Lots of cool things are going to be developed.

Shibata needles always commanded a premium. Can they now be manufactured in that shape ? Can all vinyl lovers now get Shibata needles ? The great thing about them is that they go deeper in the record grooves, so even if your record has been played a lot using cheaper needles, a Shibata might find virgin vinyl. Which also means that on the first play with the Shibata, it will excavate a lot of gunk.

The moon-rock tipped styluses are vastly superior. /Zappa

> Moissanites have already become as near-worthless as synthetic rubies.

I've noticed that synthetic sapphires are (or were?) much more expensive than synthetic rubies. Do you know why?

I'm also curious about this. Especially since natural rubies and natural sapphires are the same type of gemstone, just in different colors. It sounds like the synthetic equivalents might not be similar at all!

The synthetic equivalents have to be similar, because they're the same thing as the natural stones, and the natural stones are similar.

A ruby is corundum with chromium coloring it; a sapphire is corundum with (most typically) iron coloring it.

Iron isn't rare, so either it affects the process used to make rubies, or there's no real reason for the price gap.

"No real" reason wouldn't shock me. Not a gemstone expert so I can't say, but if natural sapphires are more expensive/in higher demand than natural rubies (despite both being corundum) then it makes sense for that demand to map onto their synthetic counterparts. But with the synthetic stones, it's more obvious how arbitrary that demand/price difference is.

My impression was that natural rubies are generally more expensive than natural sapphires.

Iron is not enough for sapphires, it must be combined with titanium.

I do not know how this is done, but while the doping with chromium for rubies is simple, chromium will just substitute aluminum in the crystal lattice and it will provide a color determined by its concentration, for sapphires there may be necessary a more complex thermal treatment, so that the iron and titanium will form the right type of coupled defects in the crystal, in order to have the desired color.

This is just speculation, but assuming you're talking about gem-grade rubies and sapphires, perhaps there's more industrial uses for similar rubies and the gem industry sees the benefit.

I'm going to take a guess and say it's because of ruby lasers. They make massive synthetic ruby rods for lasers, but it needs to be one solid piece with very low impurities. A small defect will cause the rod to be entirely unusable for a laser, but there can still be large portions usable for other purposes with less stringent requirements. An example is ruby tipped 3D printer nozzles, used for abrasive filaments, which can be had for around $50.

Other mass-market uses for small rubies are for bearings in precision gear trains, and wear-resistant tips for precision measuring devices.

Why would those need to be red?

For those that bought into natural stuff at exhorbitant prices, what would you suggest the appropriate move is?

Keep it if you have sentimental feelings towards it. Sell it if the primary value is the price of the materials.

Cut your loses and chalk it up as a learning opportunity.

How big can you get?

Do they make olive sized ones (1-2 cm diameter)? How much would such one cost?

They make 150mm wafers in quantity, up to a couple mm thick, but I don't see why they shouldn't be about to go olive thick. Other than the slow growth, that is; I think it might take a couple months to grow optical grade that thick.

Awesome! This is how the free market works without government regulations.

200 USD is retail price, bulk purchase is even less than 100 USD

Yeah, these days when it comes to gems like diamond or moissanite meant for high quality beauty, the actual cost is in the time and skill it takes to properly cut one for optimal optical properties.

Mind you most people won’t be able to tell a difference unless you put the $5 cut next to a $500 cut.

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