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Calling them "lab-grown" is part of the propaganda against them.

Like they're alive or there's some weird chemicals involved.

It's not silly stories when evil corporations with deep pockets are outright lying, like ads with doctors smoking.

Again, I'm all for lab grown diamonds for both consumer and industrial use.

I think "lab-grown" is a pretty neutral term, and it is also scientifically accurate in the case of CVD and other diamonds where the process really is "growing" the diamonds. There are certainly other terms for them that sound more derogatory such as "synthetic" or "artificial" diamond.

On the radio, they advertise them as artisan-crafted diamonds.

Crafted diamonds sounds great.

Maybe it's my engineer-brain talking, but "lab-grown" actually biases me towards the diamonds. Feels precise and futuristic.

My wife wanted a sapphire and we met during Ph D research. It's straight up not possible to pay more then like, a dollar for a synthetic sapphire so that's what's in her ring.

I like my scintillator crystals.. they're purpose built to be very fluorescent

If you wanted you could even diy your own sapphires and rubies. It isn't a complicated process, but im sure its finicky to get everything perfect.

where do you buy them at that price?

I thought the process used to grow them in a lab was somewhat different than the process used in nature. Labs use Chemical Vapor Deposition while nature uses high pressure and high temperature. The lab grows the diamond crystal while nature squeezes a lump of carbon into one.

Jewelry diamonds are made in a press.

Synthetic diamonds definitely need a marketing glow up. Current names are man-made, lab grown, and synthetic diamonds. Instead we could lean into how cool the HPHT and CVD processes are and have - giga forged diamonds (gigapascal pressure of HPHT), plasma coalesced diamonds (CVD process), or even human forged diamonds (highlighting technological triumph required to achieve these).

Call them vegan diamonds. :D

This would sell. Vegan leather lol

Vegan leather made out of fungi has been a thing for a while.

Next stop is the self-repairing vegan leather also made of the mycelium: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/vegan-leather-fungi-repa...

I think they should just call them natural diamonds because they’re indistinguishable from any other diamond.

Should just call them diamonds, deBeers only benefit when they're allowed to frame the discussion in such a way anyone cares enough to discriminate.

You just know they want to get the receiving partner on their side of "I'm worth the waste of money for a "real" diamond"

perfect lattice diamonds

They could call them perfected diamonds.

Who wouldn’t want artisanal diamonds rather than found diamonds?

Dirt diamonds instead of found diamonds.

Organic

Forge is a cool word but ... forgery?

Humans seem to have a bias against "unnatural" language. Synthetic, artificial, man-made, these all evoke negative emotions in most people unfortunately.

> Calling them "lab-grown" is part of the propaganda against them.

Indeed: Even the article perpetuates this:

"Whereas a two-carat real diamond engagement ring might cost $35,000, Oymakas says a two-carat lab-grown diamond with the same clarity and colour could only be about $3,500."

Sorry - they're both real diamonds.

Well it is common terminology to say "grow crystals".

Lab-grown meat is not true meat. It doesn't matter people would be willing to put a lab-grown organ inside their body if saves life.

>That's just part and parcel of being human.

Also part and parcel of being a human being is logic and empathy. Anyone who possesses one of these traits, never mind both of them, should find it easy to choose the product that isn't literally the product of human suffering an exploitation.

Blood diamonds are terrible, but the overwhelming majority of diamonds produced these days are not blood diamonds relying on slave labor, they're mass-mined products relying on colossal-scale industrial machinery. That's why Russia is #1 and Canada is #3 in worldwide diamond production today: even the world's largest diamond mines have 1-3k employees vs. massive production.

That's not to paper over the issues with the industry (environmental, poor working conditions, poor pay etc) - but those are more generally applied to any mined product. I'd be willing to bet that your average set of modern electronics cause far more suffering than your average diamond: see conflict resources such as tantalum, tin, tungsten, gold.

> wanting a mined diamond. The whole idea behind a diamond engagement ring is a marketing exercise backed up by a cartel,

> That's just part and parcel of being human.

Yes, but what kind of human?

Isn't industrial diamond use already a lot higher than jewelry use? It seems unlikely that consumers switching to lab-grown would "drive volume up and prices down" in any meaningful way - except perhaps for the jewelry grade stones themselves.

That includes stuff like diamond grit. You don’t care about the color or clarity of grit. Tenth of a carat on up? You care about that for jewelry use. And that translates into better non-grit industrial diamonds as well.

Is your company in abrasives or machining? I'm curious because I assume that lab-grown is actually preferred over mined because the crystalline structure may be more homogenous.

I can't go into too much detail, but there are actually a few things: our main use is machining and one of our other uses is for the extreme thermal conductivity. Diamond is an incredible material period.

I am not an expert so take this with a grain of salt, but for what I do I have seen no difference between flawless natural diamond and flawless lab grown diamond, the difference is that the flawless natural diamonds are almost always far more expensive.

If I was shopping for a near flawless diamond engagement ring and someone was offering me the lab-made version.

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.

In my opinion, diamonds really are the best jewel for a engagement ring. They are really the only gem that will really never chip, fade, or cloud over time. Alternatives like moissanite are great, don’t get me wrong, but they’re just not quite as good on the longevity scale. When you buy someone a diamond, they could literally do zero maintenance on it and 100 years later they still have a diamond that looks basically exactly the same.

Diamonds definitely chip.

Sure, but so does everything, and a typical user won’t really see chipping unless they bang it really hard against the tough surface in a weird way