Diamond Age Coming Soon

Roland Piquepaille writes "In 'The many facets of man-made diamonds,' Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN) writes that synthetic diamonds are getting bigger and cheaper. An example: for Valentine's Day, you can buy a yellow colored man-made diamond, visibly indistinguishable from a natural one, for $4,000 per carat. This is a 30% discount when compared with a natural diamond. This very long article also says that if synthetic diamond makers are targeting the jewelry market first, these new products will have an impact on many other industries. Not only is it now possible to grow bigger diamonds, you also can choose their color. 'Colored diamonds, which are valuable and very rare, can be created by introducing carefully controlled elemental impurities into the stone,' says C&EN. For instance, nitrogen produces a yellow stone. Infusing boron into the growing diamond produces a blue gem. This overview contains some details, references and photos of men-made diamonds, but read the original article for even more technical explanations if you have the time."

Re:If diamonds weren't a monopoly

[AoT]

wow, and insightful first post.
and you are so right. A few wars might stop as well if the price wasn't so artificially inflated.

Possible regulation?

[glpierce]

The diamond industry (mining, cutting, and selling) is quite large. Is it possible they can convince governments to regulate the man-made ones, and have them somehow marked to allow people to note the difference? It may seem a bit out-there, but there's a lot of money at stake for a lot of people.

Machine shop changes

[jhines]

I visited a friend's workplace last week, a machine shop.

He said that diamond tooling has made a big change in his workplace, allowing heat treated steel to be machined rather than ground.

Re:huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that what you would pay? Or what it would appraise as? I know I always here those diamond stores saying their stones are guarenteed to appraise for twice what you pay. If those appraisals meant anything I should be able to make a mint that way...

Re:If diamonds weren't a monopoly

[km790816]

Wired had a great article about this in September: The New Diamond Age [wired.com]

The diamond industry is scared. It's interesting.

(Check out the cover [wired.com] from this issue...Damn!)

Then inform your girlfriend that her 'real' ones

[Anonymous Coward]

are likely mined in poor Africian countries with DeBeer's cartel has control of the government and will turn the other way when that government forces children into the state militias. Many of the natural diamonds floating around the market were born out of murder.

a morbid turn

[pytheron]

Trust us Brits to come up with this [guardian.co.uk] - we had a news article on TV a while back about getting the ashes of your cremated loved ones turned into yellow diamonds ! The coloration comes from the nitrogen content of the ashes apparently.

10 billion trillion trillion-carat diamond

[Johnso]

These new diamonds are nothing compared to BPM 37093 [sacbee.com].

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Re:If diamonds weren't a monopoly

[BuckaBooBob]

I keep hearing stories about Debeers Dumping tonnes into the ocean to cut thier warehousing costs on the overstock of diamonds they have that no-one is suposed to know about to keep costs high..

I am sure once someone puts man-made diamonds in the mainstream Debeers will just start flooding the market to maintain their "monopoly" on the diamond market safe... But its good to see stuff like this because the man-made ones can still one-up natural ones with colours ect..

Re:Spotting a natural diamond is possible

[Tassach]

Also the flaws are noticably different -- synthetic gemstone flaws are usually symmetrical bubbles, whereas natural stones have different kinds of flaws which look more, well, natural.

Coke and Pepsi

[tepples]

DeBeers will still sell their own "natural" rocks based purely on marketing.

Likewise, Coca-Cola had a monopoly on cola soft drinks until Pepsi and RC came around. Some people will always prefer De Beers's conflict diamonds, but others will prefer Apollo brand cultured products, and competition will drive prices down until the bottom falls out of the market in 2023 when Apollo's patents run out.

De Beers monopoly

[debrain]

For those of you who haven't followed diamonds for a while, De Beers is arguably the largest and most prolific monopoly in the world, having survived, among other incidents, an American anti-trust inquiry with its reputation, and vicariously that of diamonds, entirely unscathed.

There are several forms of producing synthetic diamonds, and the closer these synthetic diamonds are to real ones, the more likely the company will be bought and all its intellectual property dissolved.

One company is Apollo Diamond [apollodiamond.com], I recall. From what I understand, their research is conducted in the back of a pharamacy in an undisclosed mall somewhere in the USA.

Apparently, threatening to undermine a multi-billion dollar industry is very risky. I seem to recall there have been numerous coincidental deaths related to diamonds, diamond mines, and synthetic diamonds. Like all things involving enormous economics, life, liberty, and security of person are hardly the most important.

Won't last

[DumbSwede]

So where is all the high value aluminum trinkets not obtained through bauxite processing? Aluminum use to be a precious metal, and now it isn't. I'm sure naturally occurring aluminum has some crystalline properties that processed aluminum doesn't, and yet there is no market for "natural aluminum".

The resorting of finding ways to distinguish crystalline properties, is just a stalling tactic on the part of the diamond industry. I doubt the public cares about minute differences in the crystalline structure if all other properties are identical (which is not the case for say cubic-zirconium).

Should the public care, then eventually technology will find a way to make the diamonds the same on even this level. More likely synthetic diamonds will exceed natural diamonds in purity and regularity of structure. The diamond cartel will try to convince the public (unsuccessfully) that they want inferior natural diamonds, and the whole thing will collapse.

For a while the two may exist side by side, much like the cultured pearl industry and natural pearls, but it will have a depressive effect on the price of natural diamonds.

The writing is on the wall my friend.

Diamonds are no longer a GIRLS best friend

[Linuxathome]

The interesting point about that Wired article is that the owner of one of the companies is not really interested in making money in diamonds via selling it as jewelry. Rather, he may be selling some as jewelry to bankroll more research in developing diamonds that are large enough to supplant silicon in creating new types of computer processors. The semiconductor business is where the money's at. In fact, that's how he originally made his fortune, as an engineer in Silicon Valley developing chips. When he dropped everything and pursued diamonds, many thought he was a kook. Both heads of the companies fear for their lives, I'd imagine, and rightly so -- you don't know how ruthless DeBeers can be.

Re:If diamonds weren't a monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI:

If you were to talk to your grandparents parents or grandparents, they would have no concept of giving a diamond to someone. For a very long time saphires were the wedding stone of choice, but DeBeers has crafted quite an amazing artificial scarcity, monopoly and hugely successful marketing campaign that just proves that people are f***ing stupid, period.

Re:Diamond branding

[mekkab]

They only use laser etching on the really perfect ones for identification purposes. The ones with lots of inclusions are, for the most part, unique (like finger prints) and can easily be matched to their cert.

And unless things have changed since I've been diamond shopping, they're just an Identification number. But given the IP/Trademark lawsuits I've seen on the net, I wouldn't be surprised if DeBeers had a "method for imprinting an identification code on a diamond" patent! ;)

Re:huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just had the pleasure of closing down a bank account for one of these, and you can see different shades of yellow between the top colorless diamonds (D-G) with the naked eye. Usually, it isn't as apparent unless the loose stones are sitting next to each other (the color of a setting tends to downplay the diamond coloration). Maybe that fancy jewelry-store light has something to do with it too....

Re:*YAWN*

[geekoid]

emeralds are 19 times rarer the diamonds.
Why are the cheaper?
could DeBeers and others be in collusion?

Not sold for guns

[m1kesm1th]

Gemesis have a gallery [gemesis.com] showing the usage of their stones in jewellery (also it seems some are from the Accendo Collection,

Accendo Collection [accendocollection.com] a reseller of cultured diamonds also make jewellery [accendocollection.com] and also a loose stone [accendocollection.com] inventory and pricelist.

Or alternatively (if you have the cash) there are other authorised retailers [gemesis.com]

It is probably wise to bear in mind, that unless the manufacturers can keep the prices close to mined diamond prices, there is no incentive to buy. If I believe a cultured diamond I will buy will produced at a lower price in a few months, I will feel disappointed to put it lightly. However, regardless of cost. I'd prefer a manufactured diamond to a mined diamond. The history surrounding most areas involved in diamond trade and companies involvement in it does not endear me to them.

Personally however I'd like one of these diamonds, however I've never really liked Yellow, regardless of its fancy nature. I prefer blue or black.

Down with de Beers

[Rick Zeman]

Anything that helps destroy their hegemony I'm all in favor of; they're worse than Microsoft and Wal-Mart together in my book.
Luckily for the me, the wifal unit doesn't hates diamonds so I've never had to buy one.

Re:If diamonds weren't a monopoly

[stevejsmith]

Miners...UNION!? They employ migrant child labor in South Africa. I doubt that they get so much as a lunch break. In fact, I think the only thing they get in addition to a few pennies a day is a full rectal exam each day after leaving the mine.

Debeers is one of the most cruel and devious corporations in the world. Their tactics are desicable, yet oh-so-creative. They've successfully stopped Australian and Russian diamonds from being so much as marketed in the United States with these tactics, and I'm sure it'll only take their executives a small amount of time to figure out how to keep these artificial diamonds out of the market.

You know their slogan, "a diamond is forever"? Yes, forever. Meaning you keep it forever. Meaning you don't sell it. Meaning there is no second-hand market. They really are good at eliminating markets, no?

Re:I HATE IT when people think small...

[ChaoticLimbs]

A diamond tank wouldn't be desireable. Diamond is HARD, not strong. Steel is strong, and (kind of) hard. The strength is what's really needed- however, if we could make thin layers of diamond and laminate them with layers of steel, who knows what the results would be like?

Re:Some musings on Diamond as a metastable materia

[dbIII]

Er, I suspect diamonds are *very* stable. They've been in the ground for around a billion years

Tranformation occurs on free surfaces (the atoms can't move easily within the crystal, there is a lot of stress in the strusture, which is what makes diamond so hard), not instantly through the entire crystal - so you gradually lose bits from the surface over time. If you increase the temperature you decrease the time. The word "metastable" can be interpreted as stable for all practical purposes. A few hundred thousand years in the hot sun isn't going to do anything measureable, but heat it up to a few hundred degrees and diffusion can happen a lot faster and the crystal structure can change into graphite in rates measured in millimetres per second. Diamond conducts well so the whole thing needs to be hot.

anything that hard is likely to have very strong and stable bonds

The majority of things that are very hard are not stable materials, like quenched steel - give it enough temperature and it will go into a more stable and softer state. If there's a lot of stress in the structure caused by atoms that really want to be somewhere else then we need to overcome that extra stress before we can break the material - hence we have a stronger or harder material.

Re:Human rights benefits.

[afeeney]

I so wish that this would send DeBeers and the diamond cartel down.

Unfortunately, history suggests otherwise.

Synthetic rubies and sapphires go for less than a dollar per carat wholesale. Natural ones are still more expensive, even ugly, flawed, tiny ones. The high-quality stones still go for hundres per carat, rising into the thousands as the size increases.

The synthetics are used mostly for industrial use, class rings, and similar very cheap jewelry (except where it's passed off as the real thing).

I don't see anything indicating that this is going to change, unfortunately, not until consumers decide that the DeBeers syndicate is just too dirty, and either insist on stones from outside the syndicate (Canada is producing some very nice ones) or choose diamond alternatives.