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Comment by legohead | Hacker News Reader

From their website: A "recommended" 1 carat is ~$5000. Still way too much.

You can get a 1 carat moissanite for ~$400. They shine better, are nearly as hard, and nobody can tell the difference.

From the right sellers, actual lab diamonds are also vastly cheaper than this. I'm not sure if there are consumer sources yet, but the issue certainly isn't on the supply end.

It looks rather like the startup is trying to undercut mined diamond cartel prices, but keep a hefty cut of that markup while the artificial market is still low on competition.

Any ideas for a source for lab diamonds at wholesale price? I see lots of jewelry makers undercutting the mined prices but are still pricey.

Ironically, De Beers. They've promised a line of lab-grown diamonds this year at $800 for 1 carat, which is the lowest price I've seen. The line is starting with pink, blue, and white.

Colorless is still a pain, though - apparently 1 carat gem-quality colorless is still about $4,300 at market rates.

I.e. the mattress in a box business model.

Precisely.

And I should mention, I don't actually blame anyone for this - capturing some profit before the market reacts is exactly what promotes competition, and as a startup they're taking a nontrivial risk that would be much larger if they simultaneously tried to run at cost. Still, I won't be interested until prices drop a lot further.

Lab diamond are really not that cheaper at gem quality level. While industrial HPHT diamond are dime a dozen, gem quality is difficult to achieve even at lab environment.

Fair point. I had remembered $800 for 1 carat synthetics, which is apparently true for colored diamonds (including pink, which is popular). But colorless looks like its still >$4,000 synthetic, which is hardly cheap.

And for $5 you can get 1 carat CZ. It is softer ( while still more than hard enough ), it is optically closer to diamond than moissanite.

Moissanite is a great stone, but its price follow the same tactic as the diamond industry including ridiculous level of artificial scarcity. The biggest selling point they have over CS is that "surely you are not the kind of man that spend $5 for his fiancée"

My wife's engagement ring is cubic zirconia, it was like $120 (but that was the whole ring, not just the stone). I'm more then happy being the man that got his wife a cubic zirconia ring and a house downpayment... (House is, after all, a bit more useful then a diamond ring)

I completely agree with this as well. Also look into the alternative stones like ruby, sapphire, amethyst etc.

I've always told people if the girl is concerned about what type of stone you get her then that is a real cause for concern IMO.

From my rudimentary research you can get an optical-quality 1 carat polycrystal disk for $700. Only problem is that it's half a millimeter thick.

CVD diamonds all seem to come in the form of a very thin sheet/disk, so getting something thick enough to use as jewelry may actually approach that price

And you can get a fake Louis Vuitton purse too but that’s kind of missing the point.

Moissanite is not a 'fake diamond'. It's Moissanite, and it's nowhere near the same league as cubic zirconia.

If the fake LV is the same quality as the original, that is the point. (Most fakes are lower quality.)

> They shine better [...] and nobody can tell the difference.

I don't know much about gems, but this seems contradictory.

They appear to be a brighter cut than they actually are.

To know the difference you would need to examine one closely. They're pretty much identical on casual inspection, especially mounted in a ring.

It means that you can't tell whether it's a "higher grade of Type A" or a "lower grade of type B", because both shine the same, and you can't tell the underlying purity of either nor the type of the stone you are looking at.

Only if you know either the grade or the type (using high-tech instruments) can you infer the other from the observed shine.

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