The natural diamond industry is getting rocked. Thank the lab-grown variety

Took me longer than I care to admit reading the Wikipedia page for Carter Clarke Sr. (also a brigadier general) who led a pretty interesting life of his own (e.g. leading the War Department investigation of Pearl Harbor intelligence failures) before I realized I had the wrong generation of Clarkes.

Except the guy that founded BJC was an ex-corporate lawyer. His response letter (https://www.bluejeanscable.com/legal/mcp/response041408.pdf) is full of zingers, but most appropriate for this exact point is this:

> After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1985, I spent nineteen years in litigation practice, with a focus upon federal litigation involving large damages and complex issues. My first seven years were spent primarily on the defense side, where I developed an intense frustration with insurance carriers who would settle meritless claims for nuisance value when the better long-term view would have been to fight against vexatious litigation asa matter of principle...

> If you sue me, the case will go to judgment, and I will hold the court's attention upon the merits of your claims--or, to speak more precisely, the absence of merit from your claims--from start to finish. Not only am I unintimidated by litigation; I sometimes rather miss it.

Shoot, if I was in the unlikely fictional scenario where I even wore a diamond and someone asked about it, I would be THRILLED to get into the science of how it was grown in a lab. What a cool story. Instead of just going “yeah, thanks, it cost a fortune and three kids died pulling it out of the dirt”.

https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/de-beers-diamonds-price-...

In it he calls lab grown diamonds a "huge con", though doesn't really explain why...

See also: France and Nigerien uranium.

https://www.diamondstandard.co

Commoditized diamonds.... In essence artificial products where multiple diamonds are packaged inside plastic container... Somehow making them more investible ala NFT or crypto... Not to forget fractional market with tokens...

Now sure, this concept was manufactured to a great extent through marketing, and it can be replaced or just fall out of favor. But established culture changes very slowly, and there's no "other gemstones cartel" to throw money at this the way DeBeers did to establish the diamond engagement ring in the first place.

As your quote points out, synthetic industrial diamonds have been available for many decades. But it is only recently that synthetic diamond gems have achieved popularity and price advantage for jewelry.

one of the victims said she had doubted the ring he gave her was real, but he just scratched a mirror with it to prove it was real. Then she said "it was only later after he left that I found cz can also scratch glass"

Getting married is less common which in of itself is a huge reduction to diamond jewelry demand. Of course there’s probably some town that marriage is at an all time high.

So is our conclusion "People talk a big game but their morality clearly fails based on how the market has played out" or "People want things but the market has competing forces and sometimes takes a long time to find ways to provide people what they want?"

My rephrasing to your statement is "It took the mass market decades to figure out how to deliver consumers the solar/electric cars they wanted at a price they could afford."

Also, points in the general direction of the established energy providers I think these assholes had some incentive not to let the market get out from under them and make sure they were the ones who continued to profit from it.

Doesn't that show younger generations have a markable improvement in "being good"?

I was a center-left socialist as a kid and I'm a full blown anarchist in my 40's so, idk, "people aren't a monolith"?

Some of us old-heads got pushed much farther left as a result of this. I used to be a Democrat, blue and blue. These days I'm much more like, "The Dems will sell me out to make a buck, I gotta go out and actually be the change I want to see in the world."

Young folks who are experiencing disillusion -- don't give in to despair. You can make a meaningful difference in lives. Build communities, engage in mutual aid, whatever.

https://www.stlouisfed.org/community-development/publication...

People accumulate wealth over a life time of work. It would be entirely expect that younger generations have less wealth than older generations.

Most of it is earned over time.

Check with the recipient beforehand, of course. You're not the one who has to wear it, and no amount of logic is going to change a mind that wants a brand new, natural diamond.

The DeBeers campaign that boosted the already significant popularity of diamond engagement rings was in 1947. I don't think diamonds or other gemstones on wedding (as opposed to engagement) rings have ever been a major thing (though I'm sure some people do that.)

Tiffany, I think, did a big push a few decades before that did a lot for the popularity of diamond engagement rings among the middle class, and diamond engagement rings had been popular among the upper class since something like the Victorian era.

No one wants to buy used diamonds.

I think I’d be quite swayed towards the lab ones knowing that there were engineers who used them for industrial use and found them exactly the same.

Also being much cheaper, I’d likely spend money towards getting a better grade lab-grown diamond than I could afford with a mined diamond.

If I was the lab-grown industry I’d also be actively attempting to shift the narrative around the term real, and say ones mined one is lab made, both are real. But that’s its own fight I’m sure.

Need to look into the differences so I can be precise when debating these things.

New metaphors: "What trim level of capitalism have we got?" "`class ImperfectCapitalism implements Capitalism`" "RNG capitalism modifiers"

Jewelry is the pinnacle of “just monetary value”. Unlike almost any other possession, a car, a house, clothes, etc. jewelry serves no practical purpose, only shows the willingness or ability to spend for it. The more you spend, the more valuable the gesture, the more you cared to please the recipient.

Materialistic people have the same feelings you have. Those just happened to be triggered by different values than yours.

The entire point of using diamonds in wedding rings is for the male to signal how committed he is to the marriage by expending a large amount of money on both the ring and the wedding itself. It then acts as a way for the wife to signal her status to other women by showing off how much her husband was willing and able to spend on the ring.

It is a hold-out from the tradition that the male is a provider and the female is a caregiver. If you reject traditional gender roles, you should also reject expensive diamond rings regardless whether they are mined or grown. Otherwise, embrace the shiny, but make no mistake: the cost is entirely the point.

Wired: we will put a soul in this rock for $10,000

Natural diamonds won't always fluoresce but the ones that do will do so in a variety of colors, and sometimes change depending on what wavelength is irradiating them.

Walter Benjamin called it "aura" - something a physical original has, but a reproduction doesn't.

It explains why collectors pay $$$$$ for a guitar played by [famous musician], even though they can't play.

There's no objective way to look at any one guitar and divine its history. Without provenance or physical customisation, any Rickenbacker or Les Paul is indistinguishable from any other of the same production run.

But we believe in sympathetic magic. Objects are charged with mysterious non-physical manna through proximity to wealth and status. Owning these special objects confers that manna on us, and perhaps our fortune will increase.

It's the logic of witchcraft lurking at the heart of capitalism.

One of the fun things about AI is that it deconstructs this while reinforcing it. Huge collections of high status manna are now inside a machine, and available for free, or near as.

Do we still believe in magic, or not?

We can talk about "anima", in latin, the same inside "animal" or "animation" to apply it to a wider concept of living beings.

We can go further in time to the greek concept "daimon", devils, allude to supernatural powers or spirits to start applying it to things.

Then we could apply De Boers sociopaths concept that goes back to using the Christian concept to rocks again.

The only "soul" those rocks have is the one of the millions of African people that died in wars, the women that were raped and the kids that were traumatised being forced to kill their family members so a woman can look at beautiful iridescence in her finger.

Disclaimer: I have worked as a volunteer helping refugees, mostly from Congo, so I am biased a lot.

https://ai-art-turing-test.com/

Yes, you can buy a man-made diamond the same you can buy counterfeit branded clothes. That only shows that you’re tasteless and that you can’t afford the real thing.

My screenshots of NFTs are pixel accurate, but not exactly as valuable as the real thing.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Miluxas-Women-s-Glitter-Tennis-Sn...

(I don’t know if color gradients are even desirable in the market.)

Not only that, imagine this scenario: something terrible happens. Your wife has to sell her jewelry to take care of herself and your child. Would you rather have bought her a $20000 ring that can maybe be sold for $3000? Or a ring with actual intrinsic value that might actually be worth more than what you paid, but at least fetch 80%.

When I think of how that would feel for her to know that I paid a foolish amount for something of inflated symbolic bling rather than a something of value, I get embarrassed just imagining it. To me that is an abdication of duty.

That’s the difference between diamonds and actual precious stones, or at lower price points a nice heavy gold ring with an inexpensive, lab grown gem.

For beauty, silicon carbide beats diamond hands down. If you want value and natural origins, a quality ruby or emerald is spectacular and actually rare and rationally market-priced. Gold is nice.

Until you get into very large and actually rare stones, diamonds are a scam, pure and simple. The value of a near flawless 1 carat stone at the mine is about two hundred dollars. Cutting costs about half that. To buy it, that stone might fetch $7000. To sell it, you might get $1000 if you’re lucky. That is not a store of value. It’s a symbol of gullibility or a boast that I have so much money that I can burn it without being irresponsible. The kind of boast that if you can’t back it up IRl makes you impossible to take seriously.

If you just really, really like diamonds, knock yourself out. But don’t delude yourself into believing they are valuable. Better yet, go get one yourself, smuggled out of a mine or otherwise at the source. Get it cut and polished, or better yet do it yourself. That I totally respect and has character, integrity, and value baked in.

As for status or something like that, I suppose there is a case to be made that it symbolizes a burnt offering. So that makes sense, but only against a backdrop of demonstrative excess. If you have a diamond ring and a loan of any kind that is anything other than strategic tax planning, that means your kids are worse off for your vanity. If you’ve got more money than god and you want to show that you can waste cash and it doesn’t matter, wear that ring studded with sub-museum grade diamonds a all day long, you’re making your point. It’s vulgar, but you’re making your point. I can see it. It’s like the track suit.

Otherwise, you may as well lace up your clown shoes.

But, that’s just my opinion. In all reality it’s a useful social signal, like certain religious expression.

Personally disagree. That whole "3 months' salary that will last forever" thing? A lab diamond will last just as forever as a mined one. I'd personally rather have one from a lab than one dug out of the earth by some African dude who spends his days sweating underground.

Cost of living can only go up if people are willing to pay more. People are paying more for what we deem living expenses because what they consider "nice" has changed.

In the past people would spend more on a diamond and less on a house because they were out and about all day and wanted others to see the diamond. Now, they stay home to scroll through TikTok (or post on HN), so they would rather spend more on a house instead.

If diamonds, or something like it, became more interesting to people again, they'll soon start turning their sending in that direction — away from where they are currently directing it.