Diamonds Keep Getting Cheaper
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
The marketing is too strong.
Now, imagine that the diamond is cheaper. It is no longer an expensive signal. Therefore, although the diamond is the same, it no longer serves the same purpose. So, the cheaper diamonds get, the less demand there is from prospective brides, even if only marginally. This fuels further declines, although that is probably already happening due to better industrial diamonds.
This takes time, of course. But that also means it has a lot of momentum. As the price decline continues, and the word of that spreads, it will accelerate.
Having a diamond wedding ring is like having a turkey for thanksgiving. That's just the way it's done. It's a part of the culture, maybe you could even say there are religious elements to it.
And that was achieved through marketing.
To elaborate: The "tradition" of diamond engagement rings only dates back to the 1930s, invented almost whole cloth by the DeBeers cartel to sell diamonds. For that reason, I think saying it's a "part of the culture" overstates things. This is not a long tradition that connects us to our ancestors.
My wife is a practical, pragmatic person. But she wanted a diamond ring. She felt sheepish about wanting one.
The expense wasn't the appeal, and she's never been interested in signaling consumer goods otherwise like clothes, purses, fashion, jewelry, cars etc. If I had gotten a rarer, more expensive stone that was not a diamond, she would not have liked it as much. The cultural element of the diamond ring was a big part of the appeal.
I'd love to see the market change, to support more diversity in what's normative. But it is too late for us. My wife loves her ring but it was kind of a surprising reaction for her to deal with. She's said that if it were any other jewelry she'd be fine with something other than diamond. She also in retrospect wishes she had been accepting of moissanite. But it was what it was.
But she loves her ring and has never spent a day without it. She will happily wear faux silver earrings but the ring is non negotiable.
Gold is famous for holding its resale value; so a gift of gold can in theory be unwound to recover the money spent. It is a signal of wealth.
Diamonds cannot be resold, the money may as well have been burned. It is a signal of wealth and commitment. There is also the added bonus that a diamond is not going to be stolen.
I wasn't aware of this. What's the rationale?
I wonder how much money you'd have to actually burn to extract enough carbon to create a decently sized diamond from it
"Thou Art Godshatter".[1] Long-term fitness-increasing Machiavellian plots are encoded as simple human desires. Indeed, social plays like this one work much better if the host thinks it's something they "just want" rather than some grim manipulative scheme to prove your loyalty.
1: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cSXZpvqpa9vbGGLtG/thou-art-g...
Diamonds aren't "small gifts"; they're absurdly expensive ornaments. Their primary purpose is so American women can show off to other women how much money their husbands have. It's a bit like having a really expensive luxury car: it's a signal to others to show you're rich, not a way for someone to show affection to another.
Edit: About Asian cultures, I'll also add, it's just just lovers. Coworkers will frequently get each other small gifts, or gifts for everyone on the team. This is usually small food items, not anything at all expensive. They might do this if they travel somewhere. I had an Asian (i.e., he had just moved from SE Asia for this job) coworker once give everyone on our team some nice variety of tea, for instance.
I'm baffled that you're baffled. Gift-giving is common in every culture, country, and religion in the world.
it really is marketing, since the value signalling could just occur by wiring your wife $20k or whatever, no need to violate overseas human rights
Suddenly Padmé agreeing to marry a guy who slaughtered an entire village of Sand People and monologued to her about it makes a lot more sense.
While she knew that diamonds are more or less worthless logically, the marketing and social drivers kept it in her head that she needed one - the emotional need was very very high. But the more she read about the human cost the more in conflict the social worth of the things became.
Ultimately she decided that the moral cost aligned with her logical mind and that's what finally overrode her emotional desire to get one. She still wanted a sparkly thing and after spending some time looking in to lab grown diamonds, she coudn't get over the basic worthlessness of having an expensive sparkly thing and ended up just getting a modest lab grown moissanite ring -- on sale and with a discount coupon.
Congrats to having such a smart wife.
It doesn't outwardly seem pragmatic if she's happy to forego expense which provide a service or experience, but not a piece of stone that weighs less than a gram and serves no function other than to display wealth. You'd be better spending that money on a fancy sports car - at least you'd get some fun out of it and a fair resale value.
People are willing to give something up for proof of effort; a personal union, or something else of value.
Whenever someone tells me bitcoin is a scam and has no intrinsic value, I ask them about diamonds, expensive art, etc. Most people cannot reconcile bitcoin and diamonds (as jewelery) in the same value frame.
Diamonds do have some functional uses of course, as does gold. But their price is wholly determined by the belief (whether justified or not) that they cannot easily be manufactured on demand. Just like bitcoin.
I really like that, bitcoin as the diamond of yesteryear. Effectively finite, has to be mined, only has value/importance because a group of people assign it one, has limited practical use (diamonds as abrasives mostly, bitcoin as a cookie crumb record of transactions) is seen as foolish/wasteful by others, you can't use either for practical trade as the vast majority of individuals/companies don't accept either for trade and both could easily be rendered worthless by a technological advancement or social change.
This is literally what my sister responded with when I asked her why she liked diamonds so much:
https://pics.me.me/hello-everybody-sparkle-sparkle-15208126....
Bitcoins aren’t pretty. Sparkling, finely cut specific rocks are. Sometimes it’s as simple as that.
Does your sister have a preference for diamonds over finely cut zirconium (or even glass)? It’s likely not as simple as that, even if you and her try to rationalize it that way.
Unlike gold, there's no way to sell 1% of a diamond.
Diamonds only prove that in a very narrow sense, namely in that some gemstone expert (that you need to trust) can subject the diamond to a battery of sophisticated tests in order to testify to its genuine, non-counterfeit nature.
Bitcoin's Proof of Work is trivially verifiable in comparison.
Also the worth of bitcoin is (kinda) backed by the worth of the electricty which is used to mine blocks (and consequently new bitcoins).
That's the point: signal to peers that you've found a great partner that's willing to throw this kind of money away just for your status.
These things are symbols that ascribe value to a person and a relationship. Getting it made out of plastic rather than gold goes not carry the same symbolism.
That’s not true. The far greater purpose is for the man to signal commitment to his bride. By spending a lot of money, especially if it’s not easy for you to afford it, you signal to her that you are seriously committed to her. You signal that you trust her with something very expensive that would not be easy for you to replace.
You can’t bypass that sort of thing. If the price of diamonds collapsed completely then we’d need to find something else to replace them.
Also, we can bypass this kind of thing and did up until the last century. Further, certain couples bypass this type of thing all the time routinely. You don't see gay male couples giving each other diamond engagement rings and yet their marriages aren't exploding in spectacular fashion.
It doesn't even make sense from a financial penalty standpoint. Anyone who is on an upward trajectory would be able to bounce back from losing a month or two of salary relatively quickly in which case it's not really forcing long term commitment.
There is no real point to this ritual other than showing off. The guy gets to show off how much cash he has and the woman gets to show off to everyone else that she has a guy with a lot of financial resources. It is completely arbitrary and we have arbitrarily converged on a diamond as a mechanism to do this. Sure giving rings makes people feel good; receiving and gifting any present makes people feel good; but it's absolutely not a necessary requirement for a healthy relationship.
This isn't quite true.
1) Who's "we"? Outside the US, no one really cares that much about diamonds. Outside the US, western Europe, and Japan, no one does. It's largely an American phenomenon.
2) People didn't just "arbitrarily coverge" on diamonds; this was engineered by DeBeers almost a century ago, in what's probably the most successful marketing campaign in human history.
>If we are talking about financial commitment and signaling to a partner, why not gift a house, a car, a long term bond, cash, expensive clothing, a watch, literally any other piece of jewelry, etc?
This is literally what's done in other cultures, and has been for ages. Though usually, it's the bride's family who has to pony up all this largesse, in what's called a "dowry".
>Why does it have to be the guy that does it; shouldn't the wife also signal equal levels of commitment or is she incapable of that?
This is a very good question, because again, in other cultures, it has traditionally been the bride (or rather, her family) who had to provide a dowry to get a decent man to marry her. This of course has, in more recent times, driven families to abort their unborn female children in favor of male children.
Is committing to spending your life with someone not trusting them with something that wouldn't be easy for you to replace? What's more irreplaceable than the years of your own life? Not every couple gets a diamond engagement ring or precious metal wedding rings (the prevalence is trending downward) and I've heard no studies that establish correlation between successful marriages and diamond engagement rings. Your line of thought is very lucrative for corporations like deBeers, however.
And how does she know you’re committed if you’re not willing to risk anything up front? You can say “well she knows me! We’ve been dating for years!” but then you balk at trusting her with something valuable? Maybe she doesn’t really know you. Maybe things are great now, when nobody has committed anything of value, but will it work when things get tough?
Of course a diamond’s no guarantee of that. It’s only a starting point.
What's more irreplaceable than the years of your own life
We’re talking about the beginning of a married relationship: the engagement. When people talk about engagement rings, they don’t look at dollar figures, they look at number of weeks salary. That is the point! You’re putting time into the relationship up front. Think of it like putting a down payment on a house.
Your line of thought is very lucrative for corporations like deBeers, however
There are plenty of other diamond sources besides deBeers. Lots of people are buying diamonds mined in the Canadian arctic, for example. They have the added benefit that you know they aren’t conflict diamonds.
People do this research when buying diamonds these days! When your fiancée is showing the ring to her friends, if she can tell them a story about all of this research you put into it, then it means even more to her.
Perhaps we could replace them with healthy relationships?
(/s)
Q: Any actual evidence that cash is any kind of reliable signal for commitment to a relationship? There would appear to be plenty of celebrity divorce counter-examples.
[In the spirit of full disclosure: my wife didn't want - or get - an engagement ring]
The social context mutated yet the artifact remained - mostly out of the resistance to thinking known as tradition and the desire to sell overpriced baubles.
I agree with this, and it even makes rational sense. I just wish we could "spend a lot of money" on something else like gold, or a house downpayment. At least those are assets - you aren't simply throwing your money away. Even a charitable trust would be a more impactful way of demonstrating commitment through sacrifice - spending money on diamonds is like throwing it away.
Why is that important? Maybe it’s less important today, but if you turn on her and she has to strike out on her own, then her engagement ring becomes a bit of wealth she has access to in an emergency. In that regard it may seem rather silly (why not a bank account?) but in the past, women didn’t have bank accounts or other easy ways to access wealth.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314
I used to feel that same way as you, but I've changed my opinion over time. It's just one of those community norms that (for me, anyway) makes HN an interesting place.
The spouse is not okay with this, and makes only token efforts to hide disdain, but I am stubborn enough to die before giving a single penny to some parasitic international diamond cartel, just for a little bit more refractive index, hardness, and thermal conductivity.
We're still not a diamond-free household, though. Some have been inherited from more foolish ancestors.
We have also "mined" natural corundums at a touristy dirt-washing operation in western North Carolina. This, of course, led immediately to talk about digging up yellow/brown rough diamonds in Crater of Diamonds (Arkansas) State Park, which immediately informed me that the venomous DeBeers brain-hooks were still set. It just makes me hate the cartel more.
I think what irritates me most is that their marketing is so effective. You can show an entire feature film, starring A-list actors, about people getting brutally murdered over the diamond trade, and people will unabashedly say they still want diamond jewelry after watching. Hell, you can watch Marathon Man, and hear, "I'm afraid of dentists now, but I would also like to keep all the diamonds I can eat." They have somehow made diamonds bypass all reason, and link directly to the emotional center of the psyche, with nothing more than decades of persistent advertising.
Diamonds do not make you look great. Or, at minimum, they do not make you look better than cheaper, non-cartelized clear gemstones, such as moissanite, cubic zirconia, clear sapphire, clear beryl (goshenite), clear topaz, or even clear quartz.
Think about why you would rather have a diamond than any other mineral. Think about why a synthetic carbon allotrope sells at such a large premium over its actual cost of synthesis. They're still riding along on the coattails of DeBeers' 9 decades of unrelenting marketing.
If I were getting a pure carbon allotrope jewelry centerpiece, I would very much prefer a single graphene molecule, 235 km long, rolled up into a spiral 1 cm thick--preferably oriented to be most conductive along the axis. Now that would be something worth wearing!
Except that the literature has shown that people generally find greater happiness using their money to buy experiences rather than things. From a researcher who wrote (the) book on happiness:
> "Shifting from buying stuff to buying experiences, and from spending on yourself to spending on others, can have a dramatic impact on happiness," writes Dunn and her co-author Michael Norton.
* https://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/happiness-is-buying-exp...
* http://www.amazon.com/Happy-Money-Science-Happier-Spending/d...
If, per Aristotle, happiness is the supreme good, it would objectively be better to spend your limited resources on things that are more likely to give it to you.
* https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hide-and-seek/201301/ar...
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2013/01/feel-happier-talk-a...
(It's fun to have this conversation with gender-neutral pronouns.)
this sounds like the opposite of a true marriage to me.
*But of course I have no idea about your lives and wish you the very best.
I've been married three times, and the issue of diamond rings never came up.
But then, I would never have married someone who raised the issue.
Edit: In case it's not obvious, the "diamonds for women" thing is blatantly sexist. And it's a flag for other attitudes.
Story 1. Both my and my wife’s wedding rings were stolen. The wedding bands were my parents’ and had been in the family for the better part of a hundred years. Though they were extremely simple, plain gold rings with very little value (prob got $50 at a pawn shop if that). We replaced them with similar rings just because we wanted them.
Story 2. My wife had a ring that had belonged to her grandmother. It was very ornate and had many kinds of jewel including diamonds and Ruby’s. It was very old school in design but was quite pretty. It was also stolen. I found a similar one for about $14,000 online and offered to buy it for my wife who was devastated at the loss but she refused because it “wasn’t the same” which I of course understood.
So there’s more than just the dollar value of the thing is what I’m saying.
I don't know if was the marketing, just wanted the commitment in dollars before telling everyone she's engaged or the status symbol to show off to other people but it had to be a significant diamond. One of the things that surprised me was man made diamonds at the size and quality she wanted weren't actually cheaper.
Ideal world, both of them feel free to express their wants clearly and early. Equality in being shamed for wants is a bad equality.
Someone pragmatic would be happy with "any" kind of ring, when I see those big diamonds it reminds me of those dumb people showing off their ring to friends in TV shows.
I'm not sure for other countries but diamond is a very US thing.
My wife wants to upgrade her diamond and I think she is convinced that moissanite is a good substitute.
But I find that moissanite is still far more expensive than I expected (for 1.5 carats, it wasn't 2% of the price of a diamond).
But maybe I'm looking in the wrong places.
If you don't mind me asking. Where did you find yours?
These patents only expired in the last few years, and as recently as 2018 in Mexico.
Spending too much on a diamond ring is common though
It's possible this changed between 09-13 because of the recession, but I'd bet it's very common now that the economy is doing really well.
This might not be a mortgage, in the sense of being a lifetime payment. But it's a (semi-)secured loan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory#Sexual_selec...
If you can use math to explain physics, physics to explain chemistry, chemistry to explain biology, biology to explain psychology, psychology to explain sociology, and sociology (plus history) to explain culture, then it would be fair to say you could use math to explain culture.
Of course, there's a lot of big gaps here, but the point is: trying to tie culture to biology is not without merit.
IMO, males and females both run on instinct through chaos crafted channels of superstition we call "culture". Like water running down a mountain in streams, it's not the channels which explain the waters movement downward (that's gravity), they just define the means through which it happens.
Implies that <people> have no agency and run on instinct: see psychology, marketing theory
Why not?
FWIW, my wife has a $600 artificial diamond ring that she picked out at Walmart.com. It's one of her most prized possessions (not because of the cost, but because of what it symbolizes) and she frequently points out to people how inexpensive it was.
I distinctly remember her saying that if I were to pay 2 months salary for a ring it would be a sign that I was too dumb to marry. For that kind of money she'd rather have a new car.
We're quite happy with them.
A decade ago, I bought a $4K diamond as an engagement ring for my now-wife (I didn't know about moissanite then), and my colleagues gave me so much shit since I was spending significantly less than 3X monthly salary. Thankfully, my wife agreed with me. We remain happily married :)
It is extremely easy to distinguish a moissanite from a diamond using a reliable, low-tech test: the moissanite can't scratch a diamond, but a diamond will scratch the moissanite.
The problem, if you're a jeweler talking to a customer, is that this will damage the moissanite.
Indeed, my fiance was completely happy with sterling silver and a white sapphire. It's a hand-carved design (lost wax) and it cost me less than our recent trip to the zoo and in her own words "I don't have to worry about being nervous about losing some dumb expensive ring, this one is perfect".
Sure, over time the sapphire will scratch a lot easier and get cloudy but we're talking about a few dollar stone. It can easily be replaced.
Huh? The sapphire will scratch easier... if you spend a lot of time rubbing your hand against diamonds.
Sapphire is one of the hardest stones there is. It's the 9th point on the (ordinal) 10-point Mohs scale, with 10 being diamond.
Remember, precious and semi-precious stones are just fancy chemical compounds.
Here's a similar story: https://hackaday.com/2013/05/20/adding-leds-to-an-engagement...
After a discussion with my fiancee I did end up finding a earth/natural diamond(I know). I did end up using the same site to help me find a good deal and seemed to save a chunk of change.
Our main motivation was actually social justice over price, though - my wife is big into a number of social justice causes, and couldn't justify killing villagers in the Congo so she could have a diamond engagement ring. We looked into lab-grown diamonds as well, but just found that we liked the look of moissanite more. You can totally tell the difference if you have a trained eye, but to mine moissanite is better in basically every respect you would care about: it sparkles more, has more defined facets, and tends to be clearer with a brighter light.
Moissanite has a higher refractive index and higher 'fire' than a diamond. Any jeweler worth their salt should be able to discern between them with only a visual inspection.
https://i.imgur.com/Cm6gwyL.jpg - I design and make jewelry, from scratch, as a hobby. I can just look at a stone and tell you if CZ/Goshenite/Moissanite/Diamond/Glass. The differences in the stones when cut is quite apparent.
Anyway, I imagine no jeweler when asked to clean a stone, is going to blurt out "That's not a diamond!" No positive customer reaction possible there.
Moissanite - https://www.dhresource.com/0x0/f2/albu/g9/M01/71/E4/rBVaVVy8... Higher RI than diamond but less than rutile. Still great fire.
Diamond - http://img.fruugo.com/product/1/70/74615701_max.jpg Pretty plain and dull. Hardly any prismatic/chromatic display. Even CZ has more 'fire' than this.
This makes the cachet that diamonds possess even more ridiculous. They're literally orders of magnitude more expensive, for something that's objectively worse in terms of the properties that actually matter for a gemstone.
to be fair, it probably always was.
Of course maybe there is a noticable difference but often people see/taste/hear/smell/feel something that's not there if they already know which is A and which is B.
I don't think any of this stuff really matters, btw, just get what looks good to you.
https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/8pb8d5/i_grow_diamond...
Almost every car, fridge, and radio from the 1950s has long been destroyed, but virtually every diamond bought in the 1950s has the exact same utility today. Those diamonds are about to flood the market, in significantly more quantities than lab diamonds ever will.
There is a joke in the diamond industry that the biggest diamond mine in the world is in Florida and Arizona, but the mine is the pawn shops, not the Earth.
EDIT: formatting
So the insurance value for diamonds is their replacement cost, not their 'value'. Since if you can't sell it, it's got a hard time establishing a number for value.
This seems like a great arbitrage situation.
Where would one find these diamonds that no one wants to buy?
I hear these stories, but it seems like everyone that is selling a used diamond is still asking top price for it.
I see used jewelry for sale at small shops, festivals, pawn shops, and flea markets. It's really likely that any small town with a used bookshop also has a used jewelry store. The ones I've been to sell a variety of other pieces as well.
I think the OP is getting at the fact that people don't buy used jewelry from randos off of Craigslist. That doesn't mean there's no market for used jewelry, just that people are much more comfortable buying from a store or vendor, probably due to perceived reputability and maybe the fact that they may not immediately realize that it's used. This is especially true with pawn shops, where they may sell wholesale jewelry along side their walk-in acquisition pieces.
https://www.quora.com/Why-don-t-pawn-shops-pay-for-the-diamo...
When my partner and I were married over 10 years ago, I bought her a ring and diamond for ~$7k. We were younger, and not so wise. With time comes wisdom. It now sits in a fire safe to be made into a pendant for our daughter; my partner now wears a $20 platinum band from Amazon, and I (occasionally) wear the $10 tungsten ring we bought when we were married (which is bookmarked for easy replacement if damaged or lost). Life is short, don't expend effort on something that doesn't matter. Take a trip together you'll both remember for a lifetime instead.
Part of me would be very interested in hearing about the result, along with variations on it (For instance, I know I've made this very restrictive, specifying the brand, which greatly limits the options).
Another part of me think this would just provide more proof of something we all know: that the market for diamonds, the entire thing, is so utterly bizarre, and yet it has such a grip on the US and a few other places, it's so odd. The results of the experiment I just described, well, it would probably just confirm "yep, this makes no sense".
One big challenge, I'd guess, is ensuring that you bought what you believe you bought (is it really a ~1ct Tiffany diamond)... but then again, that also just underscores the absurdity of what you've done, that it is extremely difficult to tell if you actually got what you intended to buy, when there's as much as a 100x difference in price. So again, back to "yep, makes no sense"
It's not like metal that can be melted down and re-cast.
Jewelry prices, for reasons I don't entirely understand, are sort of like car values...once you drive it off the lot, so to speak, the price plummets.
So when I got married I did not ask for a diamond, as I knew it was basically worthless -- except to the jeweler.
But, if you buy wholesale/used the buy/sell will be closer together. The issue is people think "used" stones are tainted for some reason. Divorced? Bad luck!
It's like a gold band. It might cost $600 in the store. But, really the cost is the weight of the gold (~$50). But, you can buy/sell it at $50 all day.
I mean, if you just have a plain, unadorned ring, those costs are pretty low. But if it's got interesting designs on it, or is multiple materials, that's going to cause it to be more expensive.
Looking at Zales' website, they've got a 4mm 14K plain men's wedding band for $225. That's probably around 5 grams in weight, with an actual gold content probably around 3 grams. a gram of gold is ~$50 right now, so they're only getting $75 at most in profit from that ring.
https://priceonomics.com/post/45768546804/diamonds-are-bulls...
The second purchases metal [with a % chance of being re-sold again as sentimentality]
https://e6cvd.com/us/application/thermal/tm100-10x10-mm-0-50...
I believe that the article refer to the jewellery (diamond) industry; people, like you, interested in its physical properties already use synthetic diamonds or imperfect mined diamonds that would not be usable for jewels.
Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-yo...
Diamonds are insulators (apart from boron-doped blue diamonds, which can be semiconductors).
1. show the full price range in the Y axis. I'll have none of this clipping off the bottom half of the scale nonsene, please.
2. use a logarithmic scale so a unit of length always equals a percentage change.
3. adjust the price data for inflation. I don't want to compare apples to oranges, bananas, nectarines, and grapes! Give me a single value to consider. Ad 2002 dollar is a different beast from a 2018 dollar.
Death to bad charts!
Look at the language used:
> "lower prices and a glut of the type of stones ... have pushed the global diamond trade into crisis ... struggling to make profits"
They've literally managed to paint DeBeers diamonds as a victim! The level of self serving propaganda from Bloomberg is amazing.
(It was her idea before anyone asks. I suggested we get non-diamond or lab grown, and was pleasantly surprised when I learned she also thought rings are dumb)
My fiance, whom I believe is fairly reasonable and frugal in all aspects considered, also learned (thanks to the movie, Blood Diamond) that diamonds are not worth the price and unethical. But she still wanted me to spend some amount on rings. So I had to buy decently priced wedding bands (cost about $1700 each). Otherwise, I am sure my fiance wouldn't be too happy (thinking that I married her for cheap). I really was surprised when I first heard my fiance complaining about me not planning to buy rings for our wedding. The marketing and brainwashing of women about rings and wedding culture really work.
My current spouse and I just skipped it all entirely. It all feels like ownership.
I've also never had a proper wedding - both times I got married at a courthouse. With this one, I had a small wedding/going away party (I moved overseas upon marriage). I definitely do not think I've missed anything.
>Companies producing such stones have sprung up all over China, churning out an estimated 160,000 to 200,000 carats of gem-quality diamonds every month. That’s enough to propel the country to the world’s top spot in terms of synthetic production, industry insiders believe.
https://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/2076225/de-b...
From March 2017. The production of carbon face-centered cubic crystals has continued to grow.
As for who manufactures them there's a list[2], and most of these companies are not Chinese.
But maybe the more important point is; Why is it a problem that the De Beers diamond mining company is having some competition. De Beers has a _very_ questionable business history[3], and personally I think the world would be better without their exploitation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_diamond#GE_diamond_p...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_synthetic_diamond_manu...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Beers#Relocation_of_indigen...
AFAIK, some of the earliest gem-quality synthetic diamonds were Russian. The Chinese are important because they can evade DeBeers and its influence over the diamond cutting and distribution establishment.
I'm all in favor of synthetic gemstones. Carbon is carbon, mined or not.
[0] https://www.debeersgroup.com/media/company-news/2018/de-beer...
Skewed wealth distribution is creating demand for 'premium' products where prices far outstrip the practical value of such items. Everything else becomes commoditized as much as possible.
To me, at my professional salary level, $15-18k for the set was worth it for what they meant to us together. It's ok if the diamond has horrible resale or in 10 years that stone will be worth 5k. We can always upgrade and move that stone to earrings or whatever.. Although any near term purchases of jewelry will definitely be "mossy" as they are called by some in the trade.
IF the couple has paid their student debt, and IF they own their cars and house outright, and IF they have 50 to 100x the price of the purchase in the bank as savings, I say enjoy your money. As long as you aren't putting yourself in a position to become a slave to your debts over silly shinny objects, great for you.
Otherwise, I don't think such extravagant spending outside of this scenario would not pass muster of any rational, analytic reasoning, say, a la 'Judge Judy' or 'Suze Orman' (as she appears on TV when not talking about issues where she has a conflict of interest, just her regular advice)
Is there reason to believe this is not the case?
As an aside, has anyone ever purchased a lab grown diamond? What was your experience? Where did you purchase it?
They sell extremely cheap lab growns with a lot of funny marketing around how "artificial" diamonds are for "light" occasions.
That's because Lightbox is run by De Beers and it's a PR campaign to flood the market with cheap lab grown diamonds with accompanying marketing to push the message that "real" diamonds are more valuable.
Funny thing is, I don't think millenials care about whether the diamond is lab grown. To them it's just a cheaper diamond that is literally the same as one from the ground and doesn't have any conflict diamond associations. De Beers think they're doing something clever but really are just shooting themselves in the foot by not understanding the younger market and giving us access to cheaper diamonds.
I'm a big fan of lab grown. Science is science, I don't need a poor teenager clawing a rock out of the dirt to make it real.
Bought it at a local helzberg store.
HN Discussion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12944464
I'd take a stone that's a beautiful color over a diamond any day.
"Hello? Is that the Tiny Musical Instrument Company? I'd like to make a bulk purchase of violins."
LPT (maybe) anyone: If you married someone who insists on a new diamond ring (first of all, I'm sorry), just buy secondhand, buy a jeweler's box off eBay, and if she's going to want to see the receipt, use all the money you saved to buy a thermal printer (though I wonder if there's a service that will print thermal paper and mail it to you...)
You can say you sold your gold/guns/whatever, hide it somewhere, and if you get divorced (you did marry someone who wanted this absurdity after all), those assets are now out of the picture because you sold them.
/joke, please don't break the law
In community property states, only assets acquired after the marriage are divided in half upon divorce.
Maybe making a fake receipt is illegal? But if it's for a fictitious jeweler, it would not be.
And yet based on some quick googling, diamond prices exceed US inflation when comparing year 2000 to 2016. The reported diamond price of $30925 exceeds inflation calculation of $21045.[1][2]
[ Screenshot in case Statistica puts graph behind paywall: https://imgur.com/a/pOgsyy5 ]
There seems to be a fundamental flaw of in the mental model of everyone predicting that diamond prices will crash. It would be interesting to hear a theory on why it never happened. I don't think the answer is as simple as "DeBeers marketing and supply restrictions" because there are a many diamond supply chains they don't control.
[0] past discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=sell+a+diamond
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/279053/worldwide-sales-o...
I would guess the flaw is the same as in the theory that bitcoin will crash to zero.
If you ask me to formulate the flaw based on my way too cynical worldview, it would be something like "massively underestimating the amount of people who have zero clue about what they actually are buying"
It also seems to be a market that is mostly based on marketing, so it is maybe more similar to something like designer items where the name on it provides the perceived value, and not the material.
Even an apparent drop in physical value mainstays like gold and diamonds may be coexistent with a corresponding drop in Dollar Value, negating some or all of the loss in value, so long as the investor keeps his/her investment valued in dollars (as is the case for most US investors).
These are all things you’re not supposed to know.
Weddings are full of such rituals; European weddings typically had seed cakes (fertility, get it?) dating at least from Roman times. Victoria had a big white cake and a big white dress and that set the fashion not just for Europe and North America but many parts of the world too.
My mother has a diamond ring -- my parents were married in the era of breach of promise suits -- but more interestingly I have seen the gold she was wearing in her wedding (in a wedding sari not white dress): it is so pure (soft) it could only be worn that one time and was given as wedding gifts also as a hedge against financial misfortune.
I remember as a kid jewelry was bought and sold entirely by weight -- the workmanship was free! (Obviously nobody in my family was buying gems or I would have learned how they interacted with this system.) I have no idea if this is still the case as I am not a good boyfriend/husband in this regard.
This completely misses the point, Diamond is Beautiful. We human, especially female likes beautiful things. It is no coincidence that humans around the globe, hundreds of different cultures over different continents all settles on similar gems stones. For whatever physiological reason we humans like Shiny Object.
And moissanite stone, as far as I have seen are no diamonds, may be to those who are less demanding, the colour and shines are slightly different. And to those who demands quality, once you have seen a beautiful diamond, you can not unseen it. There is a reason why Tiffany and Cartier still command a premium.
Obviously the diamond trade is terrible and is built on the backs of suffering, but a lot of the people I know IRL who literally used the movie blood diamond (or material talking about the benefits of artificial diamonds) to convince their fiance to go for an artificial diamond. But when trying to discuss the ethics of electronic production they literally just do not give a shit. Maybe it's just a classic case of people can only care about so many things, and these people just made the diamond trade their thing to care about, but to me, it came off like they only acted like they gave a shit about the diamond trade to save a few thousand on a ring without pissing off their fiance.
They said "manufactured" not "mined"
People will call it "virtue signaling" or whatever, but ultimately a lot of diamond mines around the world are run on blood (war, slavery, abuse, dangerous work conditions, etc) and they want no part of that, and are happy to let others know they made that choices.
So the diamond industry is getting squeezed from three sides. Customers too poor, inexpensive lab grown out of China, and a customer base who would rather not be associated with this: https://time.com/blood-diamonds/
EDIT: wow, quiet a few downvotes (was expecting). Anyways, allow me to clarify --
I could go ahead and demonize chocolate (cocoa) or coffee (coffee farming is no field of dreams for workers) but more realistic approach is to see:
(1) The companies such as DeBeers have stopped trading (or at least try their best) blood diamonds
(2) Governments have banned blood diamonds -- at least countries like Canada has.
(3) Diamonds may be symbol of decadence and Masonite maybe the logical answer but you can argue same thing about wanting to drive an expensive sports car where a humble cheap sedan would do the job.
(4) People are complex - there are ladies who don't like or are against diamonds or they realize it is not worth the cost, etc. Then there are ladies who want diamond, PERIOD. Who am I to rule against them knowing there are people who want horseback riding or equally wasteful activity such as wearing designer shoes or buying the latest iPhone.
Point is, not everything is so black and white, right and wrong. There needs to be a fine balance and we should not follow a herd mentality in either extreme (criticizing or encouraging).
This comparison would be accurate if a Toyota and a Ferrari were virtually identical, with the easiest way to tell them apart being that the Toyota was perfect and the Ferrari had imperfections in the interior because the leather was hand stitched. And if the hand stitching was historically done by slaves.