The market for natural diamonds will cease to exist when you can buy lab-grown versions for a couple bucks.
They wanted to differentiate between natural and lab-grown versions with the former being much more expensive. But that train has left the station since there's little to no difference in quality between the two. In fact, I once predicted there'd be huge scams where lab-grown ones would be repackaged and sold as natural ones and that would ruin customers' trust in natural diamonds.
But it now seems that isn't going to happen because customers are voting with their feet and leaving natural diamonds behind.
> there's little to no difference in quality between the two
Lab grown can be way better quality. To me it was a no-brainer considering the ethical concerns, then add in the cost difference. The only argument I've heard for natural is "I like the imperfections". Sounds like brainwashing to me. They're chemically identical
I personally find lab grown much more beautiful, in that they’re an amazing accomplishment of mankind’s science and technology. So a tree got squeezed underground until it turned into a crystal? Cool, I guess, but big deal. Humans learned enough about how matter works to recreate those conditions at industrial scale? That’s amazing!
I’d much rather wear a monument to our cleverness than a dinosaur mashed under a rock.
I've never been that interested in gemstones of any sort, but my understanding (from geology classes decades ago) is that natural diamonds on the surface of the earth result from some rather exotic processes.
First, they form deep down in the mantle around 100 miles down. The only way they get up here is through rare and violent high velocity eruption events that bring mantle material up to the surface. Most are very old, too; greater than a billion years old.
I don't recall the source of the carbon they're made from, but it's certainly not any sort of organic material like coal or dinosaurs. ;)
Or I could be totally wrong. I really have no interest in these things beyond the geology behind them and it's possible the science has uncovered new stuff since I last studied them.
Likewise, I have no idea how these synthetic diamonds are being made nowadays, but I bet that's pretty cool, too.
This is a more honest and realistic take than most on the thread. Note that either way it's the provenance behind the gem that you find attractive, much more than any instantaneous quality of it like chemistry, lack/presence of defects, etc. It's the story.
It’s not only that. Lab diamonds are superior in every way I’ve heard of. The emotional appeal of their provenance is the sole remaining reason I’ve heard people claim that slave diamonds are superior. I contend that they’re worse there, too. In fact, the only reason I can imagine someone preferring mined diamonds is that they genuinely value the human suffering that goes into them.
If you ignore the ethical issues, and you shouldn't (!!!), there is an appeal to mined diamonds, and it is exactly what you say above. The idea that some dinosaur or tree or whatever got mushed down is really interesting too.
China.
A recent look on alibaba showed a warehouse with row after row of new diamond foundrys, big ugly and cheap ones, but that has no effect on the quality of diamonds and other precsios stones they are making.
As to the mining industry, it is dying, again, China. Electric mining equipment is bieng introduced at a ferocios rate, and has contributed the largest share to Chinas astonishing 9% reduction in oil use so far this year, and an equaly astonishing reduction in CO2, in spite of an increase in overall energy use.Mad, fully fucking mad good news.
Here in Canada the copper mine in Sudbury just went all electric, and a significant amount of the steel in the electric mining equipment is carbon free through a Volvo subsidiary.
There is talk now that electrification/solar is pushing ahead so fast that we have actualy passed peak oil durring this episode in the oil wars and that oil will experience a demand collapse.
My spouse lost the main stone on their ring. We were able to get another that was twice the size and WAAAY better clarity and quality for about half of the price of the first one.
It's astonishing that it has taken this long to have this kind of impact.
I knew someone who was an economist for a major jewelry company and he said ~15 years ago that the writing was on the wall that lab grown diamonds were going to decimate their sales. He wanted them to start promoting them and be the more ethical and green alternative. He did not last long there.
Since the company itself didn’t mine diamonds and basically just took the market rate, his estimate was that they could achieve even better profit margins with lab-grown diamonds and would be positioned well even with eventual market competition. Given some other stories he had about the company, it sounds like they were more interested in not rocking the boat than long-term profits.
Well the privet to luxury was due to quartz watches taking their core business, and now Chinese superclones are in the early days of threatening their luxury business. At a certain point it’s hard to care about the residual difference.
Mechanical watches are a luxury item where the intricate craftsmanship is highly valued, even though they're completely obsolete compared to even the simplest quartz movement.
That analogy doesn't hold for natural diamonds and the comparison therefore falls flat on its face.
The quartz watches are (way) better at time keeping.
And the rest is just a matter of paying for luxury.
The main reason the analogy doesn't really help is that the mechanical watch market absolutely cratered, and it's only being propped up by enthusiasts of cool machines.
Diamonds can't really have that. They've already scammed the general population into using slave diamonds at monopoly prices for 30 years longer than they needed to, but no one is _passionate_ about slave diamonds.
It's a poor analogy because mechanical watches and quartz watches aren't perfect substitutes and aren't purchased for the same reasons. Everybody's phone keeps better time than a watch; absolute accuracy isn't the exclusive measure.
Lab diamonds and mined diamonds are literally identical products.
Yes, that's his point. Quartz watches have eaten the market for "I need a cheap portable time piece", like artificial diamonds did for "I need diamonds for tooling".
Both mechanical watches and natural diamonds have therefore been pushed into a niche market of posers and the easily-influenced, who buy them for different reasons than the mass market.
> Lab diamonds and mined diamonds are literally identical products.
No, mined diamonds are inferior for any industrial task due to their flaws and weaknesses.
Now a days the imperfections themselves in the rings are what are valued in natural diamonds.
People from India, thailand, Myanmar etc have not and probably won’t for a very long time abandon a strong preference for natural diamonds, regardless of how much “better” the lab grown ones are.
I am sure the market will be smaller but I don't think it'll go away.
I would segment the "diamond ring" market into two: those who "feel obligated" to give/receive a diamond ring because of peer pressure, and those who genuinely find some meaning in the idea of an expensive engagement token.
Personally I thought I was in group 1 but turns out in my own life I am group two. So it never appealed to me to get a lab ring, and I know my wife would be put off by it. Meanwhile my best friend and his wife got the same size lab stone for somewhat cheaper and are happy with that. Group 1 and that's great.
So yes I agree with you the market will shrink because those who were never inherently interested in a high value stone will all go for lab - but perhaps the diminished supply of natural stones (this story) will keep the value of them higher for those who care.
Not only that, but why buy diamonds when Moissanite exists? Not as hard as diamond (by a tiny amount) but much less brittle and much more sparkle. Also even more “rare” than diamond since the only natural occurring ones are microscopic. Plus they come in colors! It took a while to talk my wife down off of the diamond industry’s hype, but she loves lab grown stones now.
Given the infamous conditions of diamond mining, to me that reads like “won’t someone think of the jobless slaves?” Someone no longer being forced to slave away in the mines is not exactly a great loss to workers rights.
“De Beers: Because the tears of children make it sparkle!”
WSJ is almost never rated center-left on any media bias charts based on any objective standards (eg. Ad Fontes media chart). They always fall into center-right.
I've never heard of WJS being center-left. But then I don't read it, I only come across what is occasionally shared online, most of which sounds insane.
so DeBeers just buys up all the labs that grow them and still have a monopoly. Lower the price competition appears and raise the price when competition goes bankrupt. Sort of like Amazon.
The process to make diamonds is open to anyone and has a lot of industrial uses apart from jewelry so not possible for Debeers to monopolize the market they can crash the prices but increasing prices won't be possible.
Well, they have at least one way to extend their market's lifespan at this point. They can double down on the provenance and openly claim the flag "product of artisanal slavery".
I'm sure there are enough hard-right wingers who will happily flaunt their wealth and disdain for other human beings.
Honestly it seems like they knew this would happen, but they managed to really make the most of it. If anything it is an example of how important marketing is in influencing culture and choices
What isn’t mentioned here is that the reason De Beers isn’t able to sustain a monopoly anymore is because of a US anti-monopoly ruling from the 90s AND because they’re unable to monopolise the huge synthetic diamond industry that has grown in China.
I wonder if diamonds become cheap enough, and we are growing the crystal anyway, if we can introduce dopants and get interesting electrical properties.
This has been researched for decades, but progress is very slow.
Other wide bandgap semiconductors, i.e. silicon carbide (a.k.a. "moissanite" in jewelry) and gallium nitride are well on their way to make silicon completely obsolete for power semiconductor devices, but they are still many years away from reaching their full potential, in good part because their crystals have still too many defects in comparison with the crystals that can be grown from silicon. Because of too many crystal defects, for now the only commercial SiC devices are MOSFETs and Schottky diodes, despite the fact that SiC thyristors have exceptional properties for working with very high voltages, but bipolar semiconductor devices are much more sensitive to crystal defects, so their mass production is waiting for improvements in crystal growing.
Besides SiC and GaN, there are a few other semiconductors that have greater chances than diamond to become useful for semiconductor devices, e.g. gallium oxide or the sulfides of molybdenum and tungsten.
In diamond, there is not only the problem of crystal defects, but also the currently known dopants have various undesirable properties, like becoming active only at high temperatures, so some diamond electronic devices could be made to work in an oven or on the Venus surface, but not at room temperature.
While the use of diamond as a semiconductor is far in the future and there is no certainty that it will ever become able to replace silicon carbide, if artificial diamonds become cheap enough they might be used much more frequently for heatsinks, including in computers, as the material with the best thermal conductivity.
Diamond heatsinks are already in use, but only in niche applications where price is irrelevant.
Brutal news for Botswana which was really breaking new ground in raising Sub Saharan living standards. 30% of their GDP and a huge portion of government revenues are diamond exports. And they had gotten to 100% formalized and child labor free supply lines
I'm not trying to read your comment as whataboutism, but it did get me wondering: From a moral or ethical standpoint, if there is a gradient route from "very immoral to moral", but it involves first going from "very immoral" to just plain old regular immoral - do we view it as an improvement or a deficiency? Is there a route that involves going from very immoral to moral in one direct step?
For example, exploitation is bad, but child exploitation is worse. So moving from just child exploitation to adult exploitation is a positive move that still results in an abhorrent status quo. On the other hand I can't think of an example where we went from child exploitation --> no exploitation of any kind...
I think that the key could be that getting rid of child labor is meant to trick people into thinking that they were not immoral to purchase. However, that doesn't work if they just switched to a different kind of slavery.
Botswana's diamond mining industry is exactly one company: Debswana, a 50/50 joint venture between the government of Botswana and De Beers.
Which means, when you think about it, that half of one subsidiary of De Beers is effectively producing ~one third of Botswana's GDP. Really puts into perspective how exploitative De Beers is.
This is a difficult conclusion to draw given that the implied counterfactual is the assumption that Botswana could have had similar results sans De Beers. I don't think that's at all obvious. If my problem was that I had raw diamonds a few hundred meters underground and wanted to turn them into dollars, I'd probably call the preeminent experts on mining, refining, and marketing diamonds as well.
The venture began in 1969 and as difficult as the economic situation there is now, subsaharan africa was an even worse place then. So I think your counterfactual needs put into perspective. Additionally in 2013, the state created the 100% owned Okavango Diamond Company to export diamonds using the institutional knowledge they'd gathered over the decades.
> The venture began in 1969 and as difficult as the economic situation there is now, subsaharan africa was an even worse place then.
False. The sixties were one of the better decades (economically) in sub Saharan Africa. The region was richer than much of Asia, with the exception of a few places like Congo and Ghana.
> the assumption that Botswana could have had similar results sans De Beers.
De Beers was created by Cecil Rhodes, who essentially guided the British to establish the Bechuanaland Protectorate. The British economically ravaged the area and left it one of the poorest places on the planet. It's wild to say they wouldn't have done it without De Beers when they were essentially guaranteed they couldn't do it without De Beers by the guy who founded De Beers, literally less than a century before Debswana was created.
Anything in the 21st century doesn't change the fact that one private entity has extracted more value from a desperate country than they deserve for decades. Had the British, I don't know, left Botswana with such luxuries as "paved roads" maybe they would have had more economic leverage in 1969.
De Beers was founded by the guy whose colonial governance helped make the region as economically depressed as it was. When Debswana was founded, De Beers was taking something like 85% of the profits from Botswana's natural resources. That's like if I burned your house and farm down, then a few later I discovered oil on your land and offered to help you drill for it in exchange for a little over an eighth of the profit. What choice do you have?
Hopefully, the have foreseen this and they have diversified adequately. Relying on a single source for most of your income is never good. Whether that is diamonds or oil. Hopefully they got their own sovereign fund up and running/
The first person hedged their statement with "I heard once" so it's likely true regardless of whether the rest is accurate.
In a similar vein it has been said (by me, just now) that DeBeers is actually already out of diamonds and manufactures then de novo from the compressed ashes of orphans.
Well, I heard it was the Epstein-Trump Boating School For Children, which taught vulnerable youngsters how to get away from Epstein’s child-rape island.
I'll provide a citation since I'm in this industry and watch it closely.
De Beers currently has about 2 billion worth of diamond stock in its holds. This equates to about... 5-6 months of sales volume. It used to be worth more but lab-grown and other re-valuing initiatives have dropped the worth of their hoard.
If we want to maintain having economic flex be an essential part of courtship lategame, let’s have new tradition should be donating two months pay to a non-profit to get some sort of well made certificate in her name.
And then if she says “yeah I want you to donate to the Enslave African Children to Plunder the Earth For Frivolous Baubles Foundation,” you know, hopefully that’s a fucking bullet the guy just dodged.
True, but it's also the case that in some places and subcultures we're already at a point where meat with certain qualifications in some contexts is a Veblen good, and the rhetoric around it is very much a quasi-mystical blend of notions of purity and vitalism (see e.g. paleo/primal/ancestral diet influencers). That edge, almost by definition, can't be produced in a lab, and if we were really being purely rational/utilitarian about these things, I doubt we'd be eating as much meat as we are today.
I love a good cheeseburger. I’ve enjoyed ones from Michelin restaurants and from local holes in the wall; I’m not choosy. To me, the taste and texture of a cheeseburger is one of the best testing things on the planet.
I do not eat cheeseburgers to feel manly or dominant. I eat them because they are delicious. If I could have a plant-based or otherwise non-meat burger that tastes as good as the real thing, I’d eat it. Impossible burgers are getting close and I’ve had my fair share of them, but they’re not there yet. They’re near enough that I’m confident we’ll get there soon.
why substantially cheaper? Break-even would be fine too, no? And as a plus, lab-grown meat is much more ethical.
I also think that replacing 'cheap' meat like ground beef would already be sufficient and would make a huge impact, there is really no need make it difficult for ourselves and try to replace rib-eye.
For me, it would have to be mass produced and about an order of magnitude cheaper.
I'd rather not be testing/tasting experimental lab stuff. And mass production bringing down the price with economies of scale is the real proof that the technology is ready.
The test of 'identical' to me is going to be mass production with economies of scale. I surely don't have the equipment to test whether it's identical, nor would I trust the marketing.
What does that have to do with the price? If it's mass produced, widely available, thoroughly tested, and the same price as regular meat, why wouldn't you prefer it?
Are you implying that the meat industry as it is currently, producing nearly 400 million tonnes of meat annually, isn't mass production? Why would we assume that lab grown meat, even if it's mass produced, would be much cheaper than that well oiled machine?
Because it wouldn't involve handling live animals, could be significantly more automated, would not need as much real estate, would eliminate wastage of the parts we don't really consume, could be done at larger scales in a more centralized way where energy is cheaper, the stages could be pipelined with processing/packing/etc happening at the same place.
I'm sure there are a dozen other reasons I didn't immediately think of.
Expect the meat industry to lobby against being allowed to call it meat, if it didn't involve real living animals.
In Europe they managed to get words like burger, nugget and sausage to only be legally applicable to meat. They'll definitely do the same for words for actual meat.
I don't think most people are going to grab lab grown out of the grocer fridge if normal beef is available for the same price. I know I would not. But if its 25% cheaper I'm happy to try it
Agree, as long as it's meat. Lab grown meat from cells is meat.
The reason impossible never worked was becuase it wasn't meat.
Very few people are going to trade meat for soy and vegetables
Yeah impossible was targeting a weird small niche.
The intersection of 'vegan by all means', 'loves the taste of meat', 'does not care about ultra processed food', 'enough money to go for the expensive option'.
Even though I do eat meat I still enjoy black bean burger patties far more than Impossible because a black bean patty is tasty in its own way and not trying to replicate meat.
A black bean patty or similar is a tasty bit of food that works well in a burger form.
I like meat but not every meal I eat needs to have meat in it. Give me tasty (and cheaper) alternatives to meat and I’ll eat them in place of meat sometimes.
Where do you find those patties ? If you haven’t, recommend you to try tempeh as well, works very well in burgers but in everything else as well. Quite easy to find in big cities where I live but HN crowd often talk about those beans patties and I don’t see them in shops.
Truthfully, it’s very hard to find them these days, in my experience. Around 2005-2015 they seemed to be everywhere and were tasty options on their own merits. Every once in a while I’ll still find them in the grocery store but it’s hard.
These days all I can find in groceries stores is various “plant protein” meat-wannabes.
I do make tempeh from time to time, but the flavor just isn’t quite right for me. It’s good, but not my preferred option.
IDK what "never worked" means here, the market cap for Impossible/Beyond alone is still over a billion dollars. You can still get an Impossible Whopper at any Burger King in the US.
There's plenty of issues with selling meat alternatives, I don't think you're the person to speak to them for some reason...
On the topic of replacing meat with fake meat, yeah it kind of does invite comparison, because they are essentially entirely competing industries at that point
Hopefully most people here getting ribeyes aren’t getting them from the same factory farms that supply McDonald’s and sell other cheap kinds of beef. A ribeye is an occasional luxury and best bought from the farmer.
A better target would be the oil and gas industry. When you look at this diamond situation it looks like in approximately one generation, demand for natural diamonds dropped low enough that the effort to mine new diamonds became uneconomical.
This happened because the ease of obtaining lab-grown diamonds that could be much higher quality, made lab-grown diamonds more attractive because buyers, who may already have been squeezed by other unfavorable economic realities found no reason to purchase natural diamonds at a higher price point.
If we could see a shift like that in energy source preference from one generation then perhaps we could destroy the incentive to produce more oil and gas or make it so uneconomical for use a motor vehicle fuel that it became a specialty product that was produced only to supply a niche product line.
We have a similar opportunity now with electric vehicles, solar panels, battery storage, etc that we can make a large dent in the volume of crude oil and natural gas required to power our economies. Developing nations have an advantage in a way because they have less legacy infrastructure to support that requires oil and gas. They can adopt the new big thing and just roll with that saving their citizens lots of money and environmental consequences associated with use of hydrocarbons fuels.
More than 35 years in the oil and gas industry. This is what I learned.
We should invest in developing nations to bring them up to speed with best available technologies. If we waste too much time we will see continents like Africa with 56 (?) nations become a flash-point for the next round of resource wars (oil and gas conflicts) that will be pushed on them by foreign operators attempting to make as much of the O&G money as possible before the world gets the message and abandons their destructive products permanently. We are already seeing some of this today. Millions of lives are in the crossfire. We have an opportunity to make a difference and we should take it. Old and young in developed nations should adopt next-gen tech ASAP so that kill these dino-corps before they kill too many more of us.
the demand for diamonds is artificial, the demand for meat is very much organic. the only thing stopping most people from consuming more of it is the cost -- driven by demand.
How will we survive without the safe and wholesome diamond mines? I guess we'll all have to be okay with the much superior and cheaper lab diamonds...
The picture subtitle says everything that needs to be said about this: "Miners like De Beers have positioned diamonds as synonymous with love and devotion."
Yes. And there are a ton of companies that sell just loose stones, so you can take it to a locally owned shop for the ring and setting, thereby keeping more of the money in your own community.
Literally everyone I know is enlightened about this but still spent $5k on a natural diamond ring myself included. There something about it (probably just the high cost) that makes the ladies very happy even though they are “enlightened”/rational as well.
That's true, but hear me out. I wear reasonably priced, "nice" watch — a Seiko 5 GMT. Quartz watches tell time better. I wear this one because I think it's a good looking watch and like the way it looks and feels on me. Although quite practical as far as such things go, it's definitely in the "jewelry" category. I paid more than a well-working quartz digital costs purely because I found it attractive, not because it's an objectively amazing watch. I get the appeal of jewely.
So... instead of spending $5k on that blood diamond, spend that much on a larger, prettier, flashier, objectively better lab diamond. Now you or your lady friend can enjoy a bigger, nicer, even more luxurious diamond for the same price. You can still spend $5k if you wish, but end up with something more mind-blowing.
We are being deprived of future Elon Musks as we speak. This needs to be curbed ASAP. The Elon Musk pipeline must be sustained. Our futures depend on it.
Its not gonna be just diamonds, pretty much every gemstone is subject to the lab grown stuff.
Im into gem cutting as a hobby so its been great for me to find stuff like these cheap ruby roughs[1] but yea, its gonna fuck up anyone selling the natural stuff.
Not ridiculously cheap, but probably within the realm of most people on this forums budget if they want to get into it.
Another plus side of the lab grown gems is that they are usually uniform in quality. Natural stones can have a lot of variance in hardness and cracks that make them need a more nuanced hand on.
If anyone running across this comment thread gets interested, the material you are looking for is "lab grown ${gemstone you care about} rough"
They wanted to differentiate between natural and lab-grown versions with the former being much more expensive. But that train has left the station since there's little to no difference in quality between the two. In fact, I once predicted there'd be huge scams where lab-grown ones would be repackaged and sold as natural ones and that would ruin customers' trust in natural diamonds.
But it now seems that isn't going to happen because customers are voting with their feet and leaving natural diamonds behind.
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