Over the past 10 years, there has been an explosion in cheap lab diamond and moissanite producers in China and India. 10 years ago, it was hard to find quality lab diamonds at a reasonable price, and moissanite was still reasonably expensive at $400-600/ct.
Today, given cutthroat competition and "race to the bottom" pricing strategies, lab diamonds are ubiquitous, extremely high quality, and cheap. Less than $200/ct and sometimes much less: https://detail.1688.com/offer/751071300271.html
Within 10 years of today, I expect diamonds to lose almost all of their value. Moissanites have already become as near-worthless as synthetic rubies. This is going to open up new industrial uses for those gemstones.
I have to bring this up because a lot of people are talking as if this is the entirety of the reason for their decrease. But there's diamond files, diamond cutting blades/wheels/drills, you can make glass from it (really only used in labs that absolutely need them because the price), and many more uses. Many of these don't care about size, quality, or clarity. So instead of pulling from scrap material from jewelry making or rejected diamonds you could just make your own and ensure your own supply.
One of the things I've loved about synthetic diamond prices coming down is just how cheap and available diamond cutting wheels and filing tools have become. You can now get a set of diamond files on Amazon for under $10. That's crazy
Diamonds are just dirt cheap. You can buy a set of ten diamond needle files for $8 on Amazon, or less than $2 in wholesale quantities. I have hundreds of grams of diamond in my workshop in the form of lapping compound; if you're so inclined, you could buy half a kilo of loose diamonds for a couple of hundred bucks.
A wide range of very ordinary cutting tools are now tipped with big chunks of polycrystalline diamond - cutting tools for machining aluminium, inserts for rock drills, saw blades for cutting fibre cement boards. Even woodworkers are starting to use diamond saw blades and router bits, because the improved wear life over tungsten carbide gives a rapid return on investment.
I bought that exact set of red-dipped-handled cheapo rifflers 19 years ago (2005, I remember I was still at school, and I think they came from Maplins, possibly Rapid). They were cheap then too, probably about the same numerical price, perhaps £10 with the Maplins tax, and AliExpress shipping was just a gleam in Jack Ma's eye. Industrial-grade diamond dust has been pretty cheap for a long time.
Same. I even have that set from Amazon and am happy with it. It's not the best, but there's always uses for cheap files.
Also this is the first time I've tried to go to ali from my phone and holy hell are they aggressive in trying to get you to use the app. And express links require login? WTF. It crashed my browser
Considering that these are a niche product requiring a precisely shaped diamond insert made by a relatively small operation in the US, I think it's believable that a Chinese company could produce diamond files for ~$10, considering that it only needs diamond powder and has more space for mass production.
>> Link? I'm skeptical. It seems more likely someone is abusing the term "diamond", no?
The carat-cost curve is not linear, so it seems plausible. As carats go down, there is a huge supply of diamonds, especially those without beauty attributes (color, cut) which can be used for non-jewelry purposes.
They are very cheaply made, but as far as I can tell are actually diamond. They're good for shaping glass and ceramics. For metal, you're better off using hardened steel files, but these ones will work, just slowly and with less precision.
I actually have that exact set. Yeah, they aren't high quality, but as far as I can tell they are diamond. They have that hardness and the filing is omnidirectional as one would expect.
Of course you can get much better sets that will last longer and are much more expensive. But I remember as a kid that trying to buy a diamond bit was quite expensive but most Dremel kits come with one and a wheel now
And I'd be very happy to see the demise of De Beers. It's amazing that De Beers can thrive for more than 100 years, but still, using clever marketing and tight control of supply to artificially jack up the price of diamond is counter-productive.
They never had any value, apart from specialized ie glass cutting tool. Only when DeBeers realized they could push some fictious heavy marketing 'to prove your worth to woman you are asking to marry' for those shiny stones nobody wanted to buy, people who didn't know better got manipulated into buying them. They are supposedly very common in universe, and probably in deeper Earth too.
Correction is healthy and benefits mankind long term, there was nothing good coming from ie impact on Africa. Nobody cared about that, so things are fixed from another direction.
They had immense value in ancient world. They were valued much more than gold - due to their rarity. Southern India was the only known source for mining diamonds in ancient world [1]. They were used as currency and was valued higher than gold. In fact there were wars fought for diamonds.
There is a saying about Koh-i-Noor, one of the most famous Diamond - "If a strong man were to throw four stones – one north, one south, one east, one west, and a fifth stone up into the air – and if the space between them were to be filled with gold, all would not equal the value of the Koh-i-Noor" [2].
Good quality sapphires, rubies and emeralds are rarer and in some parts of history were considered more valuable. They’re not hyped to the extent that diamonds have been in the last 100 years.
The 5 stone gold comparison is utter BS (unless those 5 stones are like 5 stones heavy :P).
All the gold available to humans on earth right now fits into a ~20m cube, and that is most certainly worth orders of magnitude more than a single diamond in a historical artifact.
Diamonds where valued before DeBeers even existed, but diamonds in engagement rings (especially in the US) are (at least partially) from a heavy marketing push by them in the 20th century. Previously engagement rings tended to be colored gemstones.
Yes, I've read that in the early 20th century, other precious gemstones (like rubies & emeralds) had more than a third of the market for engagement rings.
> Who does not love diamonds? Where is there a mind in
> which the bare mention of them does not excite a
> pleasant emotion? Is there any one of rank too exalted
> to care for such baubles? The highest potentates of the
> earth esteem them as their choicest treasures, and
> kingdoms have been at war for their possession
From "Diamonds" by William Pole, published in 1861 [1] (27 years before the formation of the De Beers company)
The Europeans have encountered for the first time what are now called diamonds during the expedition of Alexander the Great in India, where they had been appreciated for jewelry for a long time.
This is why the Romans, e.g. Pliny the Elder, used for diamonds the name "Indian adamant". The name "adamant" without the "Indian" specifier had already been used for many hundreds of years (the oldest attestation is in Hesiod), but it had not been applied to a gem, but to nuggets of native osmium-iridium alloy, which can be found mixed with the nuggets of native gold in the alluvial deposits of gold (and which, unlike the gold with which they were mixed, could be neither melted nor forged, hence their name, "untameable"; "unconquerable", which is used in the article is a bad translation for "adamant").
Pliny the Elder described the "Indian adamant" as consisting of octahedral crystals, which is the most frequent form of the natural diamonds. It appears that at that time it was impossible to cut the diamonds, at most they might have been polished a little, so the crystals used in jewelry retained their native shape.
By the time of Pliny the Elder, the "Indian adamant" was the most expensive gem, surpassing even the noble opals, the pearls, the emeralds and the beryls, which were the next most expensive gems at that time. The Romans did not care much for transparent crystals, they appreciated much more the higher quality exemplars of noble opals or pearls, if those exhibited a nice play of colors.
Diamonds certainly have value as a material for jewelry -- essentially unscratchable jewelry is pretty awesome. They also don't get cloudy over time or anything. That's the cool part.
Who needs a house fire? A bit of quartz glass, a blow torch, and an oxygen supply, and you can convert your unused diamonds into carbon dioxide without losing the house*
I think diamonds are used in some lathes as cutting tools. So suprising thats not more common. I though diamonds strength and iirc its heat tolerance would be attractive to the folks who cut stuff.
Diamonds are excellent for cutting some materials, e.g. ceramics or some non-ferrous alloys, but they are bad for cutting metals that are good at dissolving carbon, e.g. iron, cobalt and nickel alloys.
So for the iron alloys, which are the material most frequently processed by machining, diamond is not suitable. Other hard crystals, like alumina a.k.a. corundum, are much better for this purpose, even if they are less hard than diamond.
They're not that heat tolerant. They're fantastic heat conductors, but they'll burn away into carbon dioxide (via carbon monoxide). The temperatures needed to do that are high, around 900C, but that's not that high. Angle grinder sparks can be hotter than 1000C, as can the edges of carbide tools.
The hardness is attractive but the poor heat resistance is a major problem for many uses. For a normal angle grinder you can use normal abrasive disc without paying much attention, but with a diamond-grit one you can easily burn the diamonds.
Anything rare does have value. So why not big enough diamonds. With big being critical part. The tiny stuff really is very stuff. The big is rare and thus rarity along reasonably brings some value.
Radio waves around me are just constant drumbeat from large jewelry stores about why its such a bad idea to buy a synthetic diamond as it wont hold its value. They already know what is coming.
> I expect diamonds to lose almost all of their value.
Artificial diamonds, you mean. The natural ones will keep their price, just as "hand-crafted" goods did (and, I suspect, as "human-produced" content in the future will); it's a matter of status and signalling that you can afford to buy an inferior, more expensive product.
In 2012, when I was shopping for an engagement ring, a natural 2ct diamond cost $250,000. (I bought a 2ct moissanite for much, much less, and my wife is very happy with it.)
When I looked in fall 2023, a natural 2ct diamond cost $20,000. That's a loss of over 90% of value, not counting inflation! (Now the supply of diamonds is much higher, and the demand for natural diamonds is much lower.)
I suspect that natural diamonds will be sold for a 40-300% premium over manufactured. I also wonder if impurities will become fashionable, just to show that a specific diamond is actually natural and can't be made in a lab.
> Artificial diamonds
BTW, there is no such thing as an artificial diamond. A manufactured diamond is 100% diamond, for all intents and purposes.
Quick note that a very nice 2ct stone has never cost $200,000.
Not sure who was trying to charge you that much in 2012 or why, but gem diamond prices haven't changed much in the past 30 years, although there was an uptick in the covid/inflationary years, and a reversion to trend more recently.
This is like arguing about somebody saying a car costs $25,000 when you’re talking about a Bentley. It’s expensive because it’s a Bentley not because it’s a car.
I take your point but theres a still a huge gap to make up for.
I went deep on this topic a couple of years before OP' 2012 date. An IF 2ct would not have exceeded ~80k usd. Not from Tiffany but from a national US shop. And the retailer shouldnt have mattered anyway.
The realities of this market have not hit the consumers. Even young people are still out there spending 5-6 figures on a rock and ascribing real value and aspirations towards eventually "upgrading" into said rocks from perhaps an existing synthetic alternative already set in the ring. Even if the supply side price argument is so perverted now, we still have a culture that wants to put a high value on this object for sentimental reasons. No one wants to hear that diamond rings are worthless. They want to spend money on it. Spending an appreciable amount of your savings on it is the entire significance of it, not really the value prospect.
Someone should market a synthetic diamond that has a crypto address etched onto it. It just had to be big enough that the augmented reality glasses can automatically pick it up to render the account balance.
AFAIU by the time of British colonisation in the Carribean / West Indies, sugar was cheap and afforded plentiful calories (and caries) to the working class.
Along with (relatively) inexpensive tea, the practice of serving boiled water-sugar solution greatly improved health (given the lack of water treatment at the time), reduced alcohol consumption, and provided additional food energy. And that was by the mid-to-late 18th century so far as I'm aware.
I'm not aware of any time or place where sugar was considered a luxury item, at least not for any substantial duration (say, excepting famine, economic recession, or war).
It's not useless as such, although certainly its use is exceedingly niche. My headcanon is that Cecil Rhodes saw something back in the 1880s, something which drove him to create a corporate engine which would continue to bend the culture centuries after his own death. Now, a hundred and fifty years later, an appreciable fraction of the population carries with them at all times an object capable of scratching everything. What he saw, I cannot say, but one day in our hour of need the population will be equipped.
bitcoin is the 21 century's diamond. Same useless string of cryptographically signed bytes, but for some reason the humanity agrees to assign some value just because of scarcity mindset.
Last I heard from the forefront of geology and ecology, "natural" televisions and tacos have yet to be found.
So I don't think the distinction is best analyzed with examples like that.
If something is normally created and nature, and humans find a way to reproduce it, it is common to call the human produced versions artificial even if the result is identical in principle.
Humans make lots of distinctions that fall apart if we get too pedantic, but have useful casual, cultural, or practical associations and meanings.
Burn hydrogen to make water. Is that artificial water? Or is it forever artificial water? Is all water that mixes with it artificial water? Is all water now artificial since it has mixed with human made water?
While the basic definition seems to be merely "man-made", I would say it holds there is some underlying distinction between the natural and artificial. Natural light vs artificial light -- the two are distinctly different. But are the photons produced by a light bulb artificial, or are they natural photons?
Artificial diamonds are more diamond than diamonds. The diamond portions are identical, regardless of origin.
Or maybe there are trapped gasses or other identifiers left in them that make them distinct. I don't really know about this point.
Anyhow, the natural vs artificial distinction really seems to break down when things are (literally) physically and chemically identical.
That's not what makes things artificial vs natural. Artificial vanillin is "more vanilla than real vanilla". A natural vanillin molecule is indistinguishable from fully synthetic vanillin from crude oil. The latter is still called "artificial flavor".
Artifical vanillin is not the whole package though, as there are other compounds in natural vanilla that make up the flavour, so it doesn't reflect the full product. "Natural" vanilla extract may also never have seen a vanilla bean, as it could be plant derived, or even from a beaver's ass.
Until the rise of synthetics the perfect diamond had no flaws or impurities. Now the language has changed and apparently it's all about just the right number of imperfections and impurities, though those will also be mimicked in short order (if they haven't been already).
There is a genuine physical reason to prefer 'real' vanilla extract over artificial. Not so much for diamonds.
You get them whether you want it or not, at least some of the time. Entropy and so forth. The synthetic ones with worse imperfections are cheaper.
It's probably possible to guess by inspection whether the imperfection properties imply mined vs lab grown, with some level of accuracy.
Source for the existence of imperfections is reading through lists of specific diamonds a few years ago. The synthetic ones didn't vary much in colour but did vary in number and distribution of inclusions.
This is Gary: his job is to give the machine a solid kick once a day and crack the vacuum seal on Fridays. Gary made us 120 million in imperfections last quarter.
> I also wonder if impurities will become fashionable, just to show that a specific diamond is actually natural and can't be made in a lab.
I hope that happens for purely aesthetic reasons too: natural "imperfections" add a lot of visual variety and interest that's otherwise missing in a lot of diamond jewellery—at least the sort that I've seen.
High-end watches are worse at telling the time than electronic watches, but they are visibly different and identifiable, so they can broadcast status.
Diamonds made by man or nature are now indistinguishable, except to highly trained experts (and even then, not always), so it's unclear why anyone would prefer the expensive kind.
I think this is a bit of a strong prediction. It's already been interesting to watch the rhetoric switch from "Natural ones are stronger and more pure" to "Manufactured diamonds don't have the flaws that give character". Which itself is fairly short-sighted, we can already manufacture things like star-sapphires with specific impurities in them.
So in the end all that will be left is "this one is natural". It will be a 'veblen' type signal for some people... but maybe it'll start to be a signal of gullibility, and also of recklessness or callousness, because diamond mining has both environmental and human costs.
Seems like it would have the opposite effect from what you want
You want people to prefer artificial diamonds because they're cheaper, so it becomes less financially viable to sell natural diamonds, so the people involved in that immoral stuff you're mentioning go out of business
Just like the "distressed wood" trend caused a booming business of making products that all have the exact same "distressed" pattern.
History doesn't repeat, but it certainly rhymes.
I know somebody that works in a wooden floor business. They take perfect new wood and move it through a cylinder that drops pebbles on it. They sell it for 2-3 times the price of undamaged wood.
They already do this with emeralds -- fake inclusions and flaws to make them look more like natural stones. If a natural emerald and a good synthetic emerald are distinguishable, it's often only because the synthetic one still looks too much better -- its color and overall clarity are still a little bit too good.
They were created by humans; therefore, "artificial", or "manufactured". Just because there is no practical way to distinguish them from the ones that appeared naturally doesn't mean they weren't created artificially.
"But this is a purely philosophical difference then!" Yes, it is. Humans still take such silly differences into an account, consider e.g. replicas of artwork made by the original artist themself. Are they genuine? Debatable!
For the same reason you can make a print of a classic painting, and digitally brighten and re-saturate the colors to counteract the darkening and yellowing of the original with age. Remove all of the cracking too.
And you'll still only be able to sell the print for tens of dollars, while the original is worth millions.
People attach value to authenticity and originals and tradition, however they define that.
In the event artificial diamonds are genuinely indistinguishable from natural ones they will all, natural and artificial, become worthless aside from practical applications.
A higher-end Rolex knockoff is indistinguishable from the real thing to the naked eye of a casual observer, and yet people still buy the real thing for 10 times the price.
Brands will make themselves known as the more expensive option. People don’t give cubic zirconia engagement rings as is because they’ll look cheap if they’re honest and be outed as a cheap fraud if it’s found out that it’s not a diamond when they pretended it was.
De Beers will find a way to make aspects of the jewellery other than the gem identifiably theirs. Then when you’re caught pretending a $100 lab diamond ring is a $6,000 natural diamond De fBeers ring you’ll be in just as much trouble as if you’ve given them a cubic zirconia.
In the west we're no longer living in a time where most people get married and then start their lives together. People often cohabit for years before marriage, and with more women working and earning as well the "hey I've got money and I'm dedicating a chunk to you!" signal isn't so much of a thing.
> People attach value to authenticity and originals and tradition, however they define that.
That (some) people might attach (some) value to those attributes does not guarantee that the monetary value will be preserved. Pre-20th century antique "brown" furniture is a notorious example - where market value has collapsed in the last few decades as fashion has shifted.
But something else - authentic mid-modern furniture like Eames chairs - took its place. Old furniture is still in very high demand (and expensive), it's just that the specific pieces have changed.
The prints most certainly aren't better. Hand painted is not something that can't be defeated with a printer currently. Besides you pay for the history of the original not the paint. A natural diamond has essentially the same history as any other rock you can pick up anywhere for free. People pay for the feeling. That doesn't mean a synthetic diamond is physically superior in every way.
I never bought a diamond in my life and have zero intention of doing so, but I can see how to some people there would be the appeal of knowing that a diamond came from some rock where it had stayed untouched for millions of years vs. an artificial one made in some China lab last month.
I think the value of diamonds has always been their rarity and cost. Historically, for married women this allowed them some financial strength and safety net. Of course as time goes on that function becomes less useful, but the idea has still stuck around a bit.
I predict people will turn to other gemstones, or will stick to "natural" diamonds and maybe even get them certified and stuff, producing another artificial market to inflate their value.
Having inherited a stupidly large rock that had been in my family since 1905,I moved immediately to divest, and it wasn't in any way hard to sell, just really costly.
Even with step-up cost basis cancelling out huge capital gains, Sothebys bit off about 22% in commissions and fees for itself.
I also explored selling through an individual jeweler, and was offered 6 figures cash in a briefcase, but the commission would have been about the same, just more camouflaged, and I had no reason to want to explain a six-figures-of-cash deposit to my bank I'd have had to make thereafter.
Big high quality diamonds at least, are liquid these days. (Your link is from 1982!) Just expect considerable slippage when you sell, the inevitable middlemen have sharp teeth.
Diamonds are already certified by GIA, so that you prove their clarity and quality and such (which no untrained observer would be able to differentiate)
I mean, having something valuable as a safety net and then carrying it around day and night where it can get damaged or stolen doesn't really sound like the smartest thing.
I think large natural diamonds will exist as a market. Just expect large real gems to become much less common for the non-wealthy. And large gemstone jewelry to become more ubiquitous with the increasing spread of lab gems. Definitely a trend towards seeing more such gems paired with silver as the prices have gone down.
> Within 10 years of today, I expect diamonds to lose almost all of their value. Moissanites have already become as near-worthless as synthetic rubies. This is going to open up new industrial uses for those gemstones.
And for jewelry too. I bought my wife a 2ct moissanite in 2012. There was no way we could have done that ring with a real diamond back then.
When I was shopping, I happened to see a girl at a conference who had many large moissanites on her ring. It was gorgeous, and well within the price range of upper-middle-class.
You said they are legit, does that mean you have them tested by an independent lab? I know that almost all shops in China (and India) show nice certificates for such purchases. But I also know from experience that many of these certificates are worthless as rubber stamps. Maybe you live in China and know more about such things? I'm thinking about buying and would like to know more from your perspective. Thanks!
Sure, but those aren't gem-grade. They're usually black and opaque (polycrystalline) or yellow. And in any case they're very small.
When I say new industrial uses, I'm thinking of things that haven't been done before and hinge on large bulk volumes of material: Windows, very large diamond anvil cells, high-performance heatsinks, and stuff like that. Lots of cool things are going to be developed.
Shibata needles always commanded a premium. Can they now be manufactured in that shape ? Can all vinyl lovers now get Shibata needles ? The great thing about them is that they go deeper in the record grooves, so even if your record has been played a lot using cheaper needles, a Shibata might find virgin vinyl. Which also means that on the first play with the Shibata, it will excavate a lot of gunk.
I'm going to take a guess and say it's because of ruby lasers. They make massive synthetic ruby rods for lasers, but it needs to be one solid piece with very low impurities. A small defect will cause the rod to be entirely unusable for a laser, but there can still be large portions usable for other purposes with less stringent requirements. An example is ruby tipped 3D printer nozzles, used for abrasive filaments, which can be had for around $50.
I'm also curious about this. Especially since natural rubies and natural sapphires are the same type of gemstone, just in different colors. It sounds like the synthetic equivalents might not be similar at all!
Iron is not enough for sapphires, it must be combined with titanium.
I do not know how this is done, but while the doping with chromium for rubies is simple, chromium will just substitute aluminum in the crystal lattice and it will provide a color determined by its concentration, for sapphires there may be necessary a more complex thermal treatment, so that the iron and titanium will form the right type of coupled defects in the crystal, in order to have the desired color.
"No real" reason wouldn't shock me. Not a gemstone expert so I can't say, but if natural sapphires are more expensive/in higher demand than natural rubies (despite both being corundum) then it makes sense for that demand to map onto their synthetic counterparts. But with the synthetic stones, it's more obvious how arbitrary that demand/price difference is.
This is just speculation, but assuming you're talking about gem-grade rubies and sapphires, perhaps there's more industrial uses for similar rubies and the gem industry sees the benefit.
They make 150mm wafers in quantity, up to a couple mm thick, but I don't see why they shouldn't be about to go olive thick. Other than the slow growth, that is; I think it might take a couple months to grow optical grade that thick.
Yeah, these days when it comes to gems like diamond or moissanite meant for high quality beauty, the actual cost is in the time and skill it takes to properly cut one for optimal optical properties.
Mind you most people won’t be able to tell a difference unless you put the $5 cut next to a $500 cut.
Today, given cutthroat competition and "race to the bottom" pricing strategies, lab diamonds are ubiquitous, extremely high quality, and cheap. Less than $200/ct and sometimes much less: https://detail.1688.com/offer/751071300271.html
Moissanites are now less than $5/carat at retail: https://detail.1688.com/offer/586468555080.html
These are legit. I've bought some.
Within 10 years of today, I expect diamonds to lose almost all of their value. Moissanites have already become as near-worthless as synthetic rubies. This is going to open up new industrial uses for those gemstones.