Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

The diamond industry got into this mess by insisting that the best diamonds were "flawless". This put them into competition with the semiconductor materials industry, which routinely manufactures crystals with lattice defect levels well below anything seen in natural diamonds. The best synthetic diamonds now have below 1 part per billion atoms in the wrong place.[1] Those are for radiation detectors, quantum electronics, and such. Nobody needs a jewel that flawless.

De Beers tried to squelch the first US startup to turn out gemstones in production by intimidating the founder. The founder was a retired US Army brigadier general (2 silver stars earned in combat) and wasn't intimidated. That was back in 2011, and since then it's been all downhill for natural diamonds.

De Beers later tried building synthetic diamond detectors. There are simple detectors for detecting cubic zirconia and such, but separating synthetic and natural diamonds is tough. The current approach is to hit the diamond with a burst of UV, turn off the UV and then capture an image. The spectrum of the afterglow indicates impurities in the diamond. The latest De Beers testing machine [2] is looking for nitrogen atoms embedded in the diamond, which is seen more in natural diamonds than synthetics. The synthetics are better than the naturals. Presumably synthetic manufacturers could add some nitrogen if they wanted to bother. This is the latest De Beers machine in their losing battle against synthetics. They've had DiamondScan, DiamondView, DiamondSure, SynthDetect, and now DiamondProof. Even the most elaborate devices have a false alarm rate of about 5%.[3]

[1] https://e6-prd-cdn-01.azureedge.net/mediacontainer/medialibr...

[2] https://verification.debeersgroup.com/instrument/diamondproo...

[3] https://www.naturaldiamonds.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/A...

>De Beers tried to squelch the first US startup to turn out gemstones in production by intimidating the founder. The founder was a retired US Army brigadier general (2 silver stars earned in combat) and wasn't intimidated.

Hahaha, this is amazing. All of the US ex-military I worked with was super chill but had zero tolerance for bullshit, I can't even imagine somebody trying to pull it off and thinking it's a good idea.

You'd be surprised how few people even read a resume before turning to intimidation - legal, physical, political or otherwise. It's amazing how often managers think they can bully someone, and then find out that their opponent discovered kryptonite a long time ago.

Probably because it works 99% of times you never hear about.

Monster Cable went after Blue Jeans Cable, a small boutique audio cable manufacturer in Seattle, threatening basically patent-driven extortion and licensing.

Except the guy that founded BJC was an ex-corporate lawyer. His response letter (https://www.bluejeanscable.com/legal/mcp/response041408.pdf) is full of zingers, but most appropriate for this exact point is this:

> After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1985, I spent nineteen years in litigation practice, with a focus upon federal litigation involving large damages and complex issues. My first seven years were spent primarily on the defense side, where I developed an intense frustration with insurance carriers who would settle meritless claims for nuisance value when the better long-term view would have been to fight against vexatious litigation asa matter of principle...

> If you sue me, the case will go to judgment, and I will hold the court's attention upon the merits of your claims--or, to speak more precisely, the absence of merit from your claims--from start to finish. Not only am I unintimidated by litigation; I sometimes rather miss it.

Thank you for sharing this, my smile got wider the more I read.

Loved this:

"RE: Your letter, received April Fools' day"

>Not only am I unintimidated by litigation; I sometimes rather miss it.

Oh, this is just great.

Here's the story, from Wired, back in 2003.[1]

[1] https://www.wired.com/2003/09/diamond/

Jewels don’t appeal to me or my partner at all. De Beers diamonds are a scam. After reading this, those diamonds grown in Boston sounds so friggin cool though. The amount of technological innovation behind it is incredible. Maybe I’m just wooed by science and human innovation.

Shoot, if I was in the unlikely fictional scenario where I even wore a diamond and someone asked about it, I would be THRILLED to get into the science of how it was grown in a lab. What a cool story. Instead of just going “yeah, thanks, it cost a fortune and three kids died pulling it out of the dirt”.

The nice thing about the DeBeers machines is that they will confirm you have a genuine synthetic diamond.

The blood detector.

Do I understand that correctly: "natural diamond" businesses pushed hype towards purity of their product, yet now they can only prove it's and actual natural diamond by confirming it's much less pure than their "competitors"?

Amusing.

Good, de beers is highly amoral business and there is no way around it. Blood diamonds and lies around them, artificially elevating diamond prices, making up the classic PR campaign that somehow inserted equation wedding=big diamond into minds of mostly US population for few generations.

When I see somebody with diamonds and check with them that they are naturals, its pretty clear what kind of person I am dealing with. To be kind and polite here, its not a nice evaluation and it ends up very precise. I let them know what's the general consensus on morality regarding those stones, its sometimes funny to watch their reactions and at least now they know something and can't anymore argue they didn't. What they do with that info is up to them.

China and Africa are destroying the DeBeers diamond cartel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7tGZzwe4mQ

PS Question : Who is stealing the content idea from whom? Is it possible that the article author saw this video and decided to write abou it?

There was also a recent article on the topic in the WSJ, with an interview from the DeBeers CEO:

https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/de-beers-diamonds-price-...

In it he calls lab grown diamonds a "huge con", though doesn't really explain why...

What they're terrified of is circumstances developing to the point where certain parties are strong enough to start demanding reparations.

See also: France and Nigerien uranium.

I wonder where these diamonds are laundered. probably some country with a comparatively high gdp that is a big time diamond exporter despite having zero diamond mines I imagine.

I do the same thing with friends who use IP TV that gets it's from a friend of a friend of a friend.

I’m pretty sure the death knell for the industry is changing tastes. Who is going to innovate in marketing?

Certainly this is an approach, get a bunch of nerds engaged with the product, co opted into marketing it. You’re quite literally storytelling. But something tells me that “CTO” is not the fashion industry’s most lucrative demo. And for better or worse, no matter how you’re making you’re diamond, you’re focusing on 18-45yo rich women seeking experiences, and I don’t see how the diamond’s origin, even if everything you say is 100% true, factors into the retail journey at Tiffany’s.

Like the parent comment says, there will still be demand for high-quality diamonds whether or not they're considered a luxury. It's more that the marginal utility of a diamond has plummeted, compared to cheaper and easily mass-produced iPhones or Labubu dolls. Hardly surprising that diamonds are unpopular to a generation of Americans who are overwhelmingly unlikely to ever own a house.

It's not the 1950s anymore, and blue-collar workers don't want to piss away 3 months salary to buy a depreciating asset. It's really only marketable if you lie to the customer.

All right on, but your comment reminded me that they are innovating in the marketing space, or at least trying — last spring, they ran a sizeable ad campaign on Reddit for https://www.naturaldiamonds.com/natural-diamond-types-and-al...

As someone who’s already cynical about the ”natural”(/extractive) diamond “industry”(/cartel), the points made on that site are hilarious and absurd — highly recommend a scroll for anyone interested in how desperate they are to attack the new tech. Just from that comparison page, my favorite argument is probably “lab grown diamonds are from (dirty, evil) India and China, whereas natural diamonds are from ~nature~”, although “lab grown diamonds are so perfect that they’re all the same grade, and therefore boring” is a close runner up.

The fact that they’re now publishing a magazine devoted entirely to this topic tells me they haven’t slowed down, just improved their ad spend so that it’s not wasted on me! Something tells me there’s quite a mountain of financial instruments secured by the warehouses of diamonds they have to keep supply tight, so I can only see this ramping up in the short term.

Funniest thing I saw a few years was this:

https://www.diamondstandard.co

Commoditized diamonds.... In essence artificial products where multiple diamonds are packaged inside plastic container... Somehow making them more investible ala NFT or crypto... Not to forget fractional market with tokens...

The death knell for the industry is the redefinition of the unit of American society.

The unit at the time of DaBeers smashing 1947 "Diamonds are Forever" campaign, in 1947, was the -family-. It wasn't too long after women's suffrage, and still women were expected to be barefoot and pregnant, after all, birth control wouldn't come for another 20 years. Families were the operative entity messaging targeted, and the campaign was successful because the diamond was a sort of foundation for the foundation of the family, the marriage, not dissimilar in spirit from long held human societal norms of dowries and such.

The sexual and hippie revolution of the 1960s shook the whole thing up. Women didn't need families, there was birth control, women could work, a revolution carrying forth to the 1980s shark killer business woman to today where in fact many universities have become female majority. The modern unit of american society is the individual, not the unit, making the diamond an anachronistic echo of a once proud culture, now seen as a bit dated, a bit weird, a bit unsettling and paternalistic, instilling the same feelings in a person that an old Playboy magazine might.

No, the industry grew over that period as diamonds were increasingly purchased for more than wedding rings and stones on rings became larger and more ornate. Over this period, a wider variety of retailers began to sell jewelry, increasing accessibility and price variance. The social trend you identified, in correlation with others, increased available discretionary income which was good for the fashion industries.

Nitrogen Vacancy (diamond) magnetometers are a relatively recent development. As I understand it, the substrate is typically formed via ion bombardment of synthetic diamonds

Quoting myself from elsewhere, but I would like to make a legislation proposal: all natural gems must be marketed as "crude" due to impurities not present in their synthetic counterparts.

This would end the De Beers cartel basically overnight by smashing the "appeal to nature" fallacy that "natural gem" marketing and pricing relies on.

Pretty effing hilarious the argument your diamond is worth less because it isn't full flaws and defects.

who was the retired US Army brigadier general?

I don't know anything about the industry, but I thought it would be a good test for the state of AI. I put Animats' comment and your question into DeepSeek R1 and it said (I think correctly) that the company was Gemesis and the retiree was Carter Clarke Jr: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemesis.

Carter Clarke. See this article: https://www.wired.com/2003/09/diamond/

For anyone else googling this like I just did, Carter Clarke Jr. is the Gemesis founder.

Took me longer than I care to admit reading the Wikipedia page for Carter Clarke Sr. (also a brigadier general) who led a pretty interesting life of his own (e.g. leading the War Department investigation of Pearl Harbor intelligence failures) before I realized I had the wrong generation of Clarkes.

I just found my new AI startup idea.

How do you intend to obtain data?

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