See how a lab-grown diamond is made
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Diamonds are pretty, but if you participate in this industry, you've been taken advantage of.
From the article:
> The Washington Post visited Austin-based Clarity Diamond, one of the few companies to make lab diamonds in the United States.
Here's a random De Beers ad campaign touting the supremacy of "natural diamonds" – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlapaTCpa78
> 'Worth the Wait' is a fresh, authentic campaign connecting the journeys of ‘Zillennial’ couples who are leading the engagement recovery. The campaign captures the incredible journey that natural diamonds take as the ultimate symbols of modern love.
I suppose it works for a specific kind of caveman.
De Beers sells lab-grown diamonds too.
Like what the actual fuck does Isabella O'Malley think your average South African, Australian, Botswanan or Russian diamond mine is powered by, and how much energy is required to dig out, move and crush tonnes of rock per carat found? And then dump the spoil in huge sterile mounds you can see from space. And how much was she paid to wring her hands about it?
And if all the rock moving sounds like a lot of energy, it is, around double what a lab grown takes. And it's a damn sight safer for the miners too.
Hey! I like my diamonds to be powered by coal from South Africa. They have that nice distinct scent of apartheid!
> To the naked eye, the lab-grown diamond looks identical to a natural stone. GIA, an education and standards nonprofit founded in 1931, uses the same criteria to grade both kinds of stones, said chief laboratory and research officer Tom Moses.
> But Moses *says* he can spot the difference using special equipment: Natural diamonds *often* have a different growth structure. They also *may* have trace amounts of nitrogen trapped inside.
> Surely diamonds are in demand beyond jewellery.
Synthetic industrial diamonds are already common, and have been for a while. But they don’t have any purity standard and are very small, so they are much quicker to grow.
> So making these machines at scale and reducing their cost could disrupt these "scammers"..
They are not that expensive but they are not going to disrupt the gemstone diamond business. However, synthetic moissanite is more interesting than industrial diamonds. It is similar to diamond from a structural point of view, but it is half silicon, half carbon instead of pure carbon. It is created using a similar process than diamond, and prices are currently about $10 for 1ct (give or take, clearer are more expensive). Some people prefer it because it is actually more sparkling than diamond. But even if it does not decrease demand for diamonds, it shows how low the prices can get.
Yes, of course, that's what diamond-tipped drills and saws are all about.
Industrial diamonds are already cheap. The machines already exist at large scale. Diamonds are important industrial tools.
And then we will go to (something that starts with w....) "Water Wednesday" (everybody goes swimming), "Tattoos Thursday" (self explanatory), "Flip-board Friday" (we have meetings at home) and so on.
Marketing works. Marketers/advertisers know how to trigger women (who make the vast majority of choices in purchasing). They fall for that shit all the time. Which guy wants to spend 1-2-3-10 salaries on a rock? Which guy wants to spend stupid amounts of money for decapitated/rotting heads of plants (aka flowers)? Flowers are beautiful, yes! Plant the thing, let it grow, see and smell it every day.
Stupid vanity and stupid emptiness!!
EDIT: what the hell is going on with Halloween in countries very unrelated to the custom??
De Beers isn't the only entity producing lab-grown diamonds. There's competition and hence prices of lab-grown diamonds have been divided by 3 in less than ten years.
The interest in diamonds and trying to recreated diamonds predates De Beers by centuries.
> Diamonds are pretty
Like gold. Shiny gold is pretty too. Cleopatra already fancied that. Humans are humans and like shiny things, especially females.
Females birds of paradise for example shall pick the male birds of paradise we humans tend to find the most harmonious color-wise. Go figure but it's everywhere in the animal kingdom.
Something something about evolution / mating / etc. Not everything is subjective.
> and a marketing campaign to buy a diamond ring for your marriage proposal
I see many single women with diamond ear rings. Diamonds inside their watch. Necklace. etc.
Something could be said too about consumption and all the throwaway items we have (like smartphones) vs one of the hardest known material on earth which can be passed down to your kids and then grand kids while still keeping some value and at the same time being... Shiny.
That's only true in the most useless technical sense you can imagine. The practice of giving a ring to your lover is well attested in traditional English ballads that predate the founding of De Beers.
Compare https://mainlynorfolk.info/peter.bellamy/songs/thedarkeyedsa... ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovay
Heck, the ring in Dark-Eyed Sailor is undescribed, but the ring in Sovay is called out as a diamond ring.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221111150414/http://ballads.bo...
My wife LOVED it. Additionally, she got major bragging rights in the informal "bigger is better" competition with friends and family members. Nobody knows it's lab-grown (nobody asked) and you can't tell the difference without unusual procedures or special equipment anyway.
literally they are looking for imperfections on the natural diamond.
as an engineer this is the difference between a hand sewn shirt and a machine sewn shirt, objectively, why would we pay more for worst quality?
de beers says it's about history and how long that gem stone have existed. but I personally, feel paying 10x for worst quality is a sucker thing to do
Basically any fine detail work, or and stitching meant to create a 3 dimensional shape will be superior when done by a skilled tailor than by a machine.
This of course costs more and doesn't matter for t-shirts or other informal garments.
I know there are sellers that claim to know the provenance of the diamonds (can trace them back to the mine), but that would be the best place to introduce them into the chain. For every truck that goes out half could come from another truck and half from the ground.
It sounds similar to paying for a knockoff Hermes bag
Natural diamonds typically emit blue fluorescence, while some lab-grown diamonds may show stronger, inconsistent, or different colors (e.g., orange, green, or yellow).
After turning off the UV light, observe if the diamond continues to glow (phosphorescence), natural diamonds don't.
Except some famous natural ones, like the Hope Diamond[1] do show phosphorescence.
[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-yo...