Geoffrey Farrow at Raphael, a jeweller on the other side of the street, can only just bring himself to sell lab-grown diamonds. “They are synthetic,” he said. “Lab-grown sounds exotic, but it’s created – they make it by the buckets. There’s no history to it. The price is going to go down further and further.
“It makes the stone that much cheaper, and people have the illusion that being big is something special. It’s not. It’s quality that you want.”
What the actual fuck is he talking about? Is it the suffering that gives it quality? They’re impossible to tell apart without a magnifying glass.
more difficult than that iirc
https://www.gia.edu/hpht-and-cvd-diamond-growth-processes
Jewelers use magnification to read the laser inscription on the rocks and trust what it says. Most jewelers don’t have the equipment to detect the trace gasses and impurities that identify mined rocks.
It’s possible to make lab grown gems with those impurities, but you end up with the shittier product that is mined diamonds
From that article (thanks for sharing, btw) it seems like there are a series of relatively simple tools to identify the different kinds of diamonds, the main problem being large assortments of small pieces.
It only mentions laser inscriptions in passing, how easy would it be to counterfeit one? Seems like there are many aspects that can be checked relatively easily to see whether the actual characteristics match those in the inscribed ID?
In the polarizer strain test, I’m not sure which one makes a better diamond, one with more or less stress lines. Since the main aspect of ornamental diamonds is the ability to bend light as many times as possible, would the extra stress lines help or hinder that?
Hey, some of us prefer only the bloodiest of diamonds. Still dripping if possible. /s
This is what monopoly sounds like when it’s dying. I frankly prefer Simon & Garfunkel.
This is about nothing more than artificial scarcity that is now fucked, and rich dudes aren’t happy.
The world would lose nothing if DeBeers went away, I think.
I need de beers to stay sane right now.
Must be a da bears fan.
You know what else used to be incredibly expensive, to the point of being more valuable than gold? Aluminum.
So cry me a river.
Yeah, but have you seen how many steps it takes in Factorio to have usable aluminum?
Kind of reflects the difficulty of refining aluminum ore. It’s much cheaper to recycle aluminum, which is why it’s one of the most looked for materials to recycle, and as more gets recycled the final price drops.
As a side note, falling electricity prices through solar could mean a lower (aluminum price/iron price) ratio. Just saying. This would mean that we would see more aluminum in place of iron.
An unbelievable waste of time and human effort. One of the world’s most useless rackets and that’s saying something.
I can’t not read that headline literally.
“Oh no! The diamonds have stopped sparkling! Who’s gonna want to buy a rock that isn’t sparkly?! Quick! Put the price back up!”
I will never understand jewelery.
That’s the road toward sanity.
The most abundant resource on the planet… it’s just hidden underneath the crust of the earth.