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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This depends on whether you ask a scientist or a homeopathic practitioner.
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.
I refuse to give up hope!
Etymologically it means "made by skill."
But I understand the hesitation to use the word, as it gives an impression of "fake."
Why can’t you add impurities when manufacturing a diamond? “Doping”
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.
You might convince them that their diamonds are worthless, and that a better investment is cryptocurrency!
no guy ever wants to shell out $$$ for a useless rock
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.
Mechanical watches, perhaps.
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).
https://www.pricescope.com/diamond-prices/diamond-prices-cha...
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.
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.
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.
Ummmm no.
As a lover of clockwork, I couldn't give a toss what anyone else thinks of my clock or watch collection.
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.
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
But they haven't.
Plus, the signal value is lost once the natural and manufactured versions become indistinguishable.
Synthetic diamonds, you mean.
There is noting artificial about them! They are diamonds.
"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!
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...
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.
In the event artificial diamonds are genuinely indistinguishable from natural ones they will all, natural and artificial, become worthless aside from practical applications.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.