De Beers To Sell Diamonds Made In a Lab (bloomberg.com) 415
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: De Beers, which almost single-handedly created the allure of diamonds as rare, expensive and the symbol of eternal love, now wants to sell you some party jewelry that is anything but. The company announced today that it will start selling man-made diamond jewelry at a fraction of the price of mined gems, marking a historic shift for the world's biggest diamond miner, which vowed for years that it wouldn't sell stones created in laboratories. The strategy is designed to undercut rival lab-diamond makers, who having been trying to make inroads into the $80 billion gem industry. De Beers will target younger spenders with its new diamond brand and try to capture customers that have been resistant to splurging on expensive jewelry. The company is betting that it can split the market -- with mined gems in luxury settings and engagement rings at the top, and lab-made fashion jewelry aimed at millennials at the bottom. "Lab grown are not special, they're not real, they're not unique. You can make exactly the same one again and again," Bruce Cleaver, chief executive officer of De Beers, said in an interview Tuesday. De Beers says the man-made diamonds will not compete with mined stones. It's so adamant about this that it will not grade them in the traditional way. "We're not grading our lab-grown diamonds because we don't think they deserve to be graded," Cleaver said. "They're all the same."
As for pricing, "The lab diamonds from De Beers will sell for about $800 a carat," reports Bloomberg. "A 1-carat man-made diamond sells for about $4,000 and a similar natural diamond fetches roughly $8,000."
As for pricing, "The lab diamonds from De Beers will sell for about $800 a carat," reports Bloomberg. "A 1-carat man-made diamond sells for about $4,000 and a similar natural diamond fetches roughly $8,000."
Scam (Score:4, Insightful)
They're as special and real as any other diamond (ie not special but equally real). The diamond business is a scam and they know it. There's a reason this product is deliberately targeted at women...
Re:Scam (Score:5, Interesting)
I love watching nonsense industries die because my generation couldn't care less.
This clown won't grade them because they are superior - but the reality is there is no shortage of mined ones either.
He's desperately trying to gaslight everyone and it's...not....workiiiiing.......
Re: Scam (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Scam (Score:4)
I'm actually pleased with some of the younger generation that I talk too. A great deal of them do not see gold and gems purely for their monetary value. For example my son sees an ouch of gold and the first thing he asked me was how much gold wire could be made out of that for cpu's.
Personally my favorite gem is a ruby. I think that stems from the time I was 8 years old and wondering how I could get a hold of one big enough to make a ruby laser out of. I saw the designs in a comic book.
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Yeah, lets run with that till i come up with something better.
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Actually it's very dependent on the manufacturing process - there's lots of ways to make synthetic diamonds, most of which introduce lots of impurities and/or lattice imperfections. It's only in the last few decades that we've worked out how to make flawless carbon-only diamonds, and those processes are mostly both more expensive (at least for now) and at least some are slower to scale due to physical limits of a cumulative process.
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After all, if even one of the (100s of) millions of transistors in a CPU core malfunctions, the whole core is relatively much useless
Non-sense. I have a "defective" cpu core encased acrylic sitting here on my desk. Even with "malfunctioning" transistors is perfectly suited to holding down the bleached and pressed tree remains from being relocated by the oscillating air movement device that I sometime employ to reallocate the rooms thermodynamic properties. :)
make them out of monkey poop (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously, you can make diamonds out of any carbon source. So if the goal is to debase lab grown diamonds as low cost and therefore low value, make them out of literal monkey poop. Here you go honey, a 1 carat diamond, I got it cheap because it's made from monkey poop.
Re:make them out of monkey poop (Score:5, Interesting)
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It would be ironic if the non-carbon impurities in monkeyshit actually made diamonds of a brilliant and exotic color, otherwise unattainable. Think of Kopi Luwak -- maybe they'd be equally valuable.
It's all in marketing. From everything I've read- there is no better flavor with Kopi Luwak, it's just the marketing as something harder to comeby and exclusive that has made it sell for more. If you could make the same excuse with monkeypoo and market it as rare and exceptionally important you could run the same racket as the Kopi Luwak sellers do.
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Why not? DeBeers already did it with diamonds themselves. What a racket, take control of the worlds supply of extra hard-and-sparkly gravel so that you can artificially restrict the supply, and then convince people all over the world that it's extremely valuable.
Only the best, the brightest, the most quality diamonds are made from Monkey poo. All other diamonds are lacking the special Monkey Poo glow. If you love the lady in your life, you won't settle for anything less than a monkey poo diamond from DeBeers. No other gemsmith has the patent for making genuine monkey poo stones. Don't be fooled by cow poo diamonds produced by lesser gemsmiths. Don't lose her to another man, give her a monkey poo diamond today!
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Oh, and you'd be able to market them like "The Le Vian" does. You could have the "Le Simian", or the "Le Avian"
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So would you at that point say that yes, in fact you CAN polish a turd?
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Re:make them out of monkey poop (Score:5, Funny)
Better yet, what about diamonds literally made of part of the husband's penis? "Look honey, I gave up the remainder of my foreskin to make this ring for you!"
It would bring new meaning to "the family jewels".
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Health, sanitation, and disease prevention aren't legitimate reasons?
This statement was correct 100+ years ago; or if you currently live in a third world country without access to basic sanitation (i.e. clean bath/shower and soap).
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It's male genital mutilation. Don't try to pass it off as 'healthy'.
There are health advantages -- and disadvantages -- that are quite well-documented. Just saying that "it's wrong" doesn't make those go away, you know, and is not going to be a strong argument in convincing people that don't share your belief that it's wrong.
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Just saying that "it's wrong" doesn't make those go away, you know, and is not going to be a strong argument in convincing people that don't share your belief that it's wrong.
Don't some folks also say that about female genital mutilation?
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There's already a company that will convert human ashes into diamond.
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De Beers brews diamonds. That headline would be something special though.
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I disagree with the negative mods, but maybe I'm just too far out of context. Not an interesting enough topic to risk disturbing the AC trolls. Whoops, got that backwards: To risk being disturbed.
In short, diamonds are nice and pretty close to forever, but people ain't and our opinions of the value of diamonds are transient and usually ridiculous.
I only have two minor technical questions about the topic: (1) Have manufacturing costs declined enough to flood the market? (2) Are they deliberately flawing thes
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It'd certainly be easy to add flawing to the process, and it certainly may have already happened (from De Beers new position, i'd say it has... this shift is fairly seismic), but natural diamonds are not all that scarce. De Beers has made them that way through market share of mine ownersh
Re:Scam (Score:4, Informative)
It'd certainly be easy to add flawing to the process, and it certainly may have already happened (from De Beers new position, i'd say it has... this shift is fairly seismic), but natural diamonds are not all that scarce.
A few years back, the way De Beers was marketing their diamonds was due to the flaws that natural diamonds didn't have!
10 years ago, it was easy to make a diamond by submitting any form of carbon (plus a small seed diamond) to a very high pressure and temperature (graphite being the best one, since there's not a lot of impurities). This results in flawed diamonds. If the diamond grows slowly it tends to form an almost perfect crystalline structure. But if a diamond grows fast different parts of the diamond grow independently and you have lots of fractures where the different crystalline sections merge. A consequence of these different crystalline sections interacting is a different behavior, when exposed to UV light. Artificial colorless diamonds would shine under UV light, whereas the real ones wouldn't (owing to the single crystal form, which dissipated all the UV energy).
Then, some guys discovered the holy grail of diamond making, the exact conditions for chemical vapor deposition. You basically start with a seed diamond and a mixture of gases (typically methane and hydrogen). In this process, the artificial diamond is grown atom by atom, from the seed diamond. The process is slow (a growth of micrometers per hour), but you get perfect diamonds, because each added atom conforms to the structure of the existing diamond.
So, as De Beers as done in the past, they're changing their marketing strategy and saying that, after all, flaws are awesome. It's business as usual for them...
Diamond tech (Score:4)
(1) Have manufacturing costs declined enough to flood the market?
They are much more cheaper to produce in a lab than extract from the ground.
But they haven't been flooding the market, because marking/PR has managed to make the target audience think that even if the same carbon atoms(*) are in the same place, somehow it's only "the real deal" if some child slave did dig it from the ground, not if some white lab coat put them together.
You can buy them, for a lower price than "real" diamond. But interest is lower. Some girls insist in having child slavery-produced lumps of carbon on their engagement ring, for whatever reason...
On the other hand industry simply LOVES them : you get the exact same properties as "real" diamond, but you get them much cheaper and you have better control on the impurities and flaws.
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(*) : As opposed to say diamond simulant - gems that look supperficially alike but have completely different composition (Zirkon, etc.)
(2) Are they deliberately flawing these synthetic diamonds
Yes, technique has evolved to let you control the impurities that get inside the lab grown diamond, because some have interesting properties that are desirable...
to pass them for the natural thing,
...diamond are very heavily tracked (they are micro etched, they come with certificates) in order to enable tracking of the origin (e.g.: to try to avoid "blood" diamonds)
Of course conterfeits *are* a thing also in diamond land.
But that means somebody is going to find out that more diamond are tracked back to a given mine that said mine is producing.
since natural diamonds are truly scarce?
Actually, even the "real" diamond aren't *that* scares. It's simply DeBeers trying to release them into the market in a controlled fashison to keep them even more scare and keep their price higher.
As they still have a sizeable chunk of the diamond market, they can still manage to pull some influence this way.
If the answer to either question is "Yes", then the value of the diamond market will collapse soon.
Currently no, the market doesn't collapse (outside of the industry), because marketing/PR has managed to put a spin that the child slave labor is a necessity to make it "real" even if the same carbon atoms are in the same position as when a white lab coat does it.
The industry doesn't give a fuck, and there, the market for De Beers has evaporated as better techniques have evolved to progressively produce more of what the industry craves for.
Re:Scam (Score:5, Informative)
The other lab grown diamond manufacturers have gotten in the business and sold so high because the costs of mined diamonds is so high it's like honey to a bear.
Yes, they are all just as real and special, and often the lab diamonds have less inclusions than the mined diamonds, which is considered a better diamond. Of course DeBeers is fighting that because they control the bulk of mined diamonds and don't want to lose their ultra premium profits.
Unless you have an imperfect mined diamond, or recognize the serial number markings, even a jeweler can't tell mined from lab diamonds because the only thing different from them is age and origin.
You know, having the consistency of lab diamonds is considered a big boon for anyone making jewelry needing matched stones.
DeBeers is just freaking out because they are slowly (maybe not so slowly now) losing control over a market they've had a near monopoly on for over a century.
[Insert laugh track and applause here]
Re:Scam (Score:4, Interesting)
DeBeers already holds back the majority of the supply of diamonds to artificially inflate the cost. They do plenty of other things to do that as well.
The other lab grown diamond manufacturers have gotten in the business and sold so high because the costs of mined diamonds is so high it's like honey to a bear.
Yes, they are all just as real and special, and often the lab diamonds have less inclusions than the mined diamonds, which is considered a better diamond. Of course DeBeers is fighting that because they control the bulk of mined diamonds and don't want to lose their ultra premium profits.
Unless you have an imperfect mined diamond, or recognize the serial number markings, even a jeweler can't tell mined from lab diamonds because the only thing different from them is age and origin.
You know, having the consistency of lab diamonds is considered a big boon for anyone making jewelry needing matched stones.
DeBeers is just freaking out because they are slowly (maybe not so slowly now) losing control over a market they've had a near monopoly on for over a century.
[Insert laugh track and applause here]
Exactly +1
For those interested, Adam Ruins Everything make an episode about it [youtube.com]
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This guy is a fool. They are just as real as anything you can pull out of the ground. I, for one, will not shed a tear when this diamond jewelry thing crazy BS is dead and buried. The sooner the better.
Fake beers (Score:2, Funny)
Sincerely hope other fake diamond makers run these fuckers out of business.
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Hell, they will sell the lab diamonds at a loss in order to maintain profits in the real ones. Monopoly abuse to be sure, but that hasn't stopped them yet!
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No kidding. De Beers is like the worst caricatures of evil capitalists. They have no interest in anything aside from their bottom line, they will and have done nearly anything and everything rotten and immoral to maintain their monopoly.
The EU is seemingly hell-bent to extort money from every other big business, they should turn their ire in De Beers and wipe it out, they richly deserve it.
Re:Fake beers (Score:5, Informative)
No kidding. De Beers is like the worst caricatures of evil capitalists.
They are not "like" a caricature of evil. They are evil. The very essence of violent, monopolistic corruption [youtu.be]. They do not tolerate competition. They invented the modern perception of diamonds as rare, valuable objects synonymous with "love" and they mean to guard that perception like a saber-tooth mother hen. It's a crystallized piece of carbon. DeBeers has huge warehouses filled with raw diamonds. They restrict the supply to keep prices high.
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I doubt even Switzerland has banks large enough to store those huge mountains of gravel
This is not the first time I've heard De'beers diamond hoard compared to road gravel. A documentary I watched on the diamond industry stated that if it was for the artificial scarcity diamonds would be plentiful enough to cheaply gravel your driveway with.
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They are not "like" a caricature of evil. They are evil.
Well, to be fair, it's not like people are starving because they can't afford diamonds.
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Maybe not starving because they can't afford diamonds. But they certainly are starving because they can't sell the diamonds they mine with out being apart of the "system." We won't talk about people being killed mining the damn things, or the wars that are being financed by them.
Still a fucking racket... (Score:5, Interesting)
The diamond industry for wedding rings is bullshit -- it was created in by US advertisers in the 1930s to prop up South Africa's failing economy. Don't buy into the hype. Real or synthetic, it's still BS.
Give a nice wedding ring, but not expensive. Maybe something that's been in the family for a few generations. Doesn't have to be diamond either -- non-diamond engagement rings are quite common outside the US.
Open your minds.
Re:Still a fucking racket... (Score:5, Informative)
There's even more to that story. In the 1950s, the diamond industry did research that showed that when the prospective bride was involved in the purchase of the engagement ring, they actually picked a smaller, less expensive diamond. So, the industry, led by De Beers, started a campaign pushing the idea that men were supposed to surprise their bride-to-be with an engagement ring, thus cutting the more frugal woman out of the picture. You know that iconic image of the man pulling out the little ring box, and the blushing bride squealing with delight? It's all some made up corporate horseshit like Santa Claus or Trump University.
It's bad enough that the De Beers family is covered in blood, but they've constructed a string of lies to sell their despicable merchandise.
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Rings can be resized.
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That actually happened to me. I got on one knee, pulled out the ring, proposed, and then couldn’t put the ring on her finger. I had ordered the right size, as attested to by my receipt and the jewler’s notes, but the jeweler had a brain fart and made it a full size too small (i.e. she could only wear it on her smallest finger), and neither they nor I had thought to check it before I proposed. They were able to rush a quick resizing of it over the weekend though, so other than being a funny littl
Re:Still a fucking racket... (Score:4)
Or a real rock.
A good story I heard from a friend that a geologist at his university proposed to another geologist with a special ring. It contained a rock, a real honest to god rock.
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This part of the scam I didn't know yet. Do you have some sources to read up on the details?
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I read the story just this weekend. It was in a reputable publication, but I can't find it now. Let me continue looking at get back to you.
I remember showing my wife the story, since something similar happened to us. When we got engaged, I went out and spent a bunch on a gaudy ring. After we were engaged, she told me she felt funny wearing it and would I mind exchanging it for something smaller. I still remembe
Re:Still a fucking racket... (Score:5, Informative)
OK, I found it. The first mention I could find of the story was in a Wall Street Journal article from 2009 (behind a paywall).
https://www.wsj.com/articles/S... [wsj.com]
It was referenced again on the Mental Floss blog (written by some writers from This American Life and other places). It seems to be taken from the Wall Street Journal story.
http://mentalfloss.com/article... [mentalfloss.com]
Re:Still a fucking racket... (Score:4)
Couldn't resist it could you? You where actually making sense and sounding sane till you TDS kicked in.
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But by continuing to 'profit' from the spilled blood there is an argument that you are at least partially culpable.
Similarly, by wearing and showing a diamond ring, you contribute to making them appealing, acceptable, or similar and hence have a second order influence on other people purchasing 'blood diamonds'. If it's OK to wear family jewellery, is it OK to wear 2nd hand jewellry seeing as the blood has already been spilled, and if that's OK, does that mean you're creating a market for others to buy and
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That is actually pretty brilliant, sneaky, but brilliant.
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Give a nice wedding ring, but not expensive.
I think you are preaching to the wrong audience.
Love the sales strategy here (Score:5, Funny)
"This product sucks. It's garbage. You don't want it. It's for losers. Embarrassingly bad. Don't be caught dead with one. Come get 'em, half off everybody! We got lots!"
Re:Love the sales strategy here (Score:5, Insightful)
They aren't looking at selling them for profit.
They are looking at tarnishing the image of other man made diamonds. While they were arguing that their 'natural' diamonds were better it was an 'us vs them' argument. Supposed scarcity vs perfection. If they manufacture man-made diamonds, but refuse to grade them, drop the price to the point where they become almost disposable fashion items, then they can make other man-made diamonds seem similar. If they can manage to drive several manufacturers out of business by undercutting them then that's a bonus.
Ugly, nasty and abusive.
Re:Love the sales strategy here (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a brilliant business strategy. They basically control the natural diamond supply, and the best way to continue to artificially prop up their value is by ensuring everyone perceives artificial diamonds as an inferior product. One way to do that is through pricing.
We all know that lab made diamonds can be pretty much identical to mined diamonds. Different defects creep into both, but the lab ones usually have fewer defects.
By De Beers claiming all lab-grown diamonds are the same and not worth grading, they're marketing how each of their mined diamonds are unique and special. By selling the lab ones for a tenth the cost of a mined one, they're not only crushing the competition that sells them for 5 times as much, but marketing that these are inferior and too cheap to be a replacement for a true mined diamond for an engagement ring, etc.
Of course, the marketing is all hot garbage, but... so is the idea that diamonds are rare valuable stones to begin with. De Beers is king of manipulation here. If De Beers is selling these lab ones at near cost, the lab market might crash and burn from lack of profit leaving De Beers as the only lab grown seller as well.
Re:Love the sales strategy here (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder if it helps prop up the price of smaller natural diamonds.
If good and big man-made diamonds become relatively cheap, it seems like they would become a natural alternative for the type of person who judges quality by quantity. So now you have "low class" people sporting large diamonds, creating the social association of big diamonds with the trailer park crowd.
Your high-class moneyed crowd who previously might have liked making a statement with a 2 carat ring now finds themselves unable to impress anyone with a large diamond, or worse, gets mistaken for the wrong social class.
So they revert to small natural diamonds -- since nobody would buy a small man-made diamond when you could buy a big one, now expensive and small diamonds are seen as a statement of wealth.
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Lab grown diamonds are poised to destroy the debeers monopoly so they are engaged in a misinformation and propaganda campaign. Go to diamond foundry and look at the prices on lab created diamonds, you can get a 1 carat round stone with good color and VVS2 for about $1K, that's about 1/6th the price debeers charges and that's with a nice huge markup by the lab to cover their equipment costs. This is nothing more than marketing, I doubt they have any intention of selling lab stones, I'd put higher odds they w
Other words (Score:5, Insightful)
Lab grown are not special, they're not real, they're not unique. You can make exactly the same one again and again
He means that the ones they dig out of the ground are flawed in different ways, but the manufactured diamonds are perfect.
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those same flaws are also easily replicated in a lab. especially colour and their is no reason each lab one can't be unique as well.
Coming soon - fractally-flawed manufactured diamonds.
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Re:Other words (Score:5, Insightful)
It's funny how they were all about flawless diamonds with perfect clarity until people figured out how to make perfect synthetic diamonds. Now they're all about the natural beauty of flawed natural diamonds.
Lab grown are not special, they're not real? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The good part will come when someone starts selling flawed lab-grown diamonds that look more like natural diamonds. Thank goodness too. The obsession for a diamond as an engagement ring is ridiculous.
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Finding out that diamond engangement rings (Score:2)
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Clearly you need to date either: :D
(1) European women who give less of a fuck about marriage in general and its trappings. Cohabitation and low-key civil weddings are quite common.
(2) Enlightened women who care about social justice issues, and maybe have been to Africa and seen the corrosive effects of the industry
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Oh dear god, you just made diamonds seem cheap in comparison.. the horror.
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They may say they're lab grown... (Score:4, Interesting)
Most likely they will simply start liquidating their massive stocks of real diamonds as "lab grown" because they're running out of vault space.
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DeBeers has literally trillions of carats of diamonds in their vaults
Given peak historic production of ~175 million carats/year [diamondshades.com], order of magnitude citation badly needed.
grading (Score:2)
"We're not grading our lab-grown diamonds because we don't think they deserve to be graded," Cleaver said. "They're all the same."
Also because it would make the successful scam you are running transparent.
Diamonds are neither rare nor valuable. There's just an artificial shortage and monopoly to prop them up. Small diamonds especially are almost worthless. If you go to a diamond producing country, they are not graded or even individually weighted. You just buy a small shovel full, price by grams. (yes, grams, not carat)
Let's keep traditions (Score:5, Funny)
and at least have children working at these new labs.
$800 a carat or $4000 a carat? Lab vs man-made? (Score:5, Funny)
"The lab diamonds from De Beers will sell for about $800 a carat," reports Bloomberg. "A 1-carat man-made diamond sells for about
$4,000...". So, a lab diamond is $800 a carat and a man-made diamond is $4000 a carat? What's the difference between a lab diamond and a man-made diamond?
I thought Bloomberg was rich enough to hire copy editors.
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Not so different from bitcoin (Score:2)
I read this headline as... (Score:2)
How long before virtual diamonds? (Score:2)
There is a great use for defunct bitcoin miners. "Bit-monds are forever!"
Next: C14 battteries and blinky jewels? (Score:5, Interesting)
So as long as they're making synthetic diamonds, I wonder if they'll make Carbon 14 diamond batteries [wikipedia.org].
And once you've got a radioactive diamond inside a layer of non-radioactive diamond acting as a semiconductor and collecting power, how about using that power to run semiconductor circuitry in the surrounding diamond?
Blinky-light diamond jewelry. Little computerized devices networking with a protocol like Bluetooth Low Energy (which gets by on miniscule amounts of power by mostly sleeping at microwatt levels until it's time to listen or talk.)
The possibiliies are endless. Also tacky.
they are betting on people thinking natural==bette (Score:3)
DeBeers is an evil company (Score:4, Interesting)
Lab grown are not special, they're not real, they're not unique.
That's a complete crock of shit. Digging a rock out of the ground doesn't make it special. I don't even get the "not real" comment aside from being a bunch of marketing bullshit. It's a diamond chemically no different from any other diamond in any way that actually matters. And they are every bit as unique as a diamond you dig out of the ground and in fact can be made to have specific desired properties.
De Beers says the man-made diamonds will not compete with mined stones. It's so adamant about this that it will not grade them in the traditional way. "We're not grading our lab-grown diamonds because we don't think they deserve to be graded," Cleaver said. "They're all the same."
This is basically an admission that the lab made stones are every bit as good as the ones they dig up so they need to pretend that they are different somehow. Making diamonds in a lab is functionally identical to opening a new diamond mine. It increases supply. DeBeers has had a monopoly on distribution for ages because they controlled the supply of diamonds. They literally keep huge numbers of them out of circulation to prop up prices. The problem for them is that they cannot control supply if anyone can make a diamond so they are trying to create an artificial distinction between dug up diamonds versus lab made ones. If you actually buy this malarkey you are an idiot.
If someone is smart what they will do is label lab made diamonds as "conflict free lab grade pure diamond" as opposed to dirty dug up diamonds so you can be sure that they aren't supporting terrorism, oppression, etc.
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Re:Glass diamond? (Score:5, Interesting)
Diamond is so spectacular because of its high refractive index. If you want a fake diamond, cubic zirconia or silicon carbide are the favoured ways to go. Refractive indices: diamond 2.42; cubic zirconia 2.15; silicon carbide 2.65; fused silica glass 1.46.
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A second important part of what makes them so spectacular is the shape (the cut) of the final gemstone. Since the index of refraction is a function of both frequency and of the angle of incidence (of the light ray into or out of the diamond), extreme angular cuts of the gem will cause the colors "in" the white light to be spatially separated enough to be resolvable by the human eye. That's why we see all the flashes of colors as the gem is rotated around.
Thus, part of the cost of the finished gem is the ski
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Glass diamond? (Score:5, Informative)
I proposed with silicon carbide (moissanite). Indeed more brilliant than a diamond, and my wife loved both the fact that it was not a blood diamond and also that silicon carbide in nature is found in meteorites. So it is a lab grown alien gem basically, more spectacular than a diamond at around $500/carat.
The thing is, diamonds are quite common in nature, their scarcity is artificial. So you are paying through the nose for something that is abundant just because of the De Beers racket.
Re:Glass diamond? (Score:4, Informative)
moissanite is the mineral form of silicon carbide they listed
Diamond, the cubic carbon crystal, is special. (Score:2)
It has a better hardness than pretty much anything else, so wont wear and soften like glass will. It has a refractive index greater that most other things, so sparkles with more color. It is also impervious to oils, so won't become dull like cheaper clear stones like cubic zirconia.
However, Mossanite is a good alternative. A higher refractive index than diamond, so you can see the difference because they sparkle more brilliantly than diamond. It is also harder than almost anything else, (except diamond) s
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OP Here. /. crowd would have the maturity to understand my comment. Sigh!
Didn't think
Just for the record, Married >15 years, never divorced, 3 kids, all very happy.
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Wealth signaling. Throwing resources away into something highly visible but otherwise pointless is a way to proclaim that you are so well-off, you can afford to.
It's basically the human version of a peacock's tail. Just less attractive.
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Shallow people (Score:3)
Shallow women chase men with wealth.
FTFY. And shallow men chase women with implants so let's not pretend that men have any moral high ground here.
The ones that don't are outliers.
Actually they aren't. Most people chase wealth, men and women. The only difference is in the tactics employed.
If you think your wife loves you, just wait till she is propositioned by a wealthy and powerful man. We're all only human.
If you marry such a shallow cunt you deserve to have her leave you.
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So just tell her upfront? "Yeah... I don't like supporting slavery, so this is a lab diamond instead." (Still requires not buying from DeBeers. Get your lab diamond somewhere else.) If she'd rather have a natural diamond in the face of that, I'd suggest reviewing how well you know her.
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So just tell her upfront? "Yeah... I don't like supporting slavery, so this is a lab diamond instead." (Still requires not buying from DeBeers. Get your lab diamond somewhere else.) If she'd rather have a natural diamond in the face of that, I'd suggest reviewing how well you know her.
Indeed, how can you even trust DeBeers claim that their lab diamond really was formed in a lab and not just taken from their pile of probably blood diamonds, but here's a piece of paper that says these particular ones are "conflict free".
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she wants the man to hurt. Not in a punitive way, but in a show me a sacrifice that gives me a tangible proof of your love way.
I guess it also means if you're rich enough, the man and the sacrifice doesn't have to be you/rs [brilliantearth.com].
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Actually, my wife prefers amethyst.
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I couldn't see the value in this little stone but believe me it creates tangible value to her.
If you look a bit harder, you could find something that has value for you both.