Diamonds lose their sparkle as prices come crashing down
Lab-grown rocks and fewer weddings have put a huge damper on the market. On the bright side, a big dazzler is now affordable for many
My wife is wears a .45 carat moissanite on her engagement ring. The stone cost 80 euros three years ago.
Thank goodness, maybe I’ll finally be able to buy a diamond pickaxe for what few emeralds I have. I’ve been having to use stone tools in this economy and I’d really like some obsidian for a nether portal.
if you want to go to hell, just wait.
I’d really like some obsidian for a nether portal.
Water and lava buckets, you peasent
They said they were using stone tools. You think they'd have spare iron lying around for a bucket?
Name checks out...
26% down from a wildly inflated peak isn’t all that earth shattering tbh.
However the growth in popularity and price drop with synthetic diamonds - that’s what’s newsworthy here.
It's clearly beginning of an end for diamond mining.
In the land of ever increasing red line, any stagnation is bad, any drop is catastrophic.
Bottom falls out on commodity made artifically rare through imperailism and corruption. Is this the part where I'm supposed to feel bad for De Beers?
To be fair, diamonds are indeed rare on earth. But what made diamond price come crashing is because we now managed to synthesise the diamonds. These "fake" diamonds flooded the market. This is good news so that we don't have to rely on exploitative extraction of the mineral.
Also because newer generations just aren't sold on diamonds being a luxury item anymore. Your average Joe just isn't paying their rent or more on a diamond engagement/wedding ring like they used to because, well, that's their rent payment or mortgage for something that's gonna lose value the second they walk out of the store.
They're not especially rare, not even gem-quality ones. For several generations, almost every married woman in a western country had a diamond on her finger of some size. They found plenty of them to serve that market. The mines created artificial scarcity by colluding together.
If lab grown had never happened, diamond mines might not have been able to serve industrial customers. Industrial customers don't care how it looks as long as it cuts, and so lab grown has been good enough for decades. Thus, you can get a two-pack 4.5 inch diamond angle grinder wheel at Home Depot for around twenty bucks.
The free market manages to solve a problem.
I wonder how much money it's going to cost the diamond lobby to un-solve it.
Good. Fuck rich people.
Good. Hope the whole industry goes bust.
Lab-grown rocks
When I was getting married a few years ago, I remember thinking fuck real diamonds lab-grown are literally the same thing. I remember getting some push back from some weirdos about how "real" diamonds are some how better or how people will think I'm a cheapskate or how people will feel bad for my wife...
Well, fast forward a few years and literally nobody cares, thinks about, or has said anything negative about my wife's ring. We are both 1000000% happy and satisfied with the decision to buy lab grown.
We said fuck diamonds entirely, even lab grown, and even had to go out of our way to find something that didnt have diamonds on it somehow
We have tattoos.
I got us bare tungsten carbide bands. If "Diamonds are forever", then tungsten carbide is 9.5/10ths of forever, and it's the whole band instead of just a small easily-detachable part of it. More practically, it won't get beat to hell like the white gold ring from my first marriage. Plus, if I ever need a really strong connector for jury-rigging something, I'm now carrying one with me at all times!
We decided on some cheap silver rings. We really didn't want to carry around something extremely valuable everywhere. Go swimming and lose 5000€ in the lake? Do some yard work and lose your diamond ring there? Getting mugged and the robber is getting something really expensive? No, thank you.
Expensive wedding rings & jewelery did make sense in the past when women were not allowed their own money, bank accounts etc. as a way to escape an abusive husband. Pawn your expensive wedding ring, get cash for the getaway. But we're not living in the 50s, my wife has her own bank account, is earning her own money, so no need for something like that.
We did the same. Some silver bands from a local artist.
Paid off when one was lost. The artist was still available for a new order.
We decided on some cheap silver rings. We really didn’t want to carry around something extremely valuable everywhere. Go swimming and lose 5000€ in the lake? Do some yard work and lose your diamond ring there? Getting mugged and the robber is getting something really expensive? No, thank you.
Yeah, on a similar note it is really nice to finally have a new phone, but I'll miss the fact that losing my old phone would only set me back $50.
I gave my wife an engagement ring with natural diamonds, but it belonged to my great-grandmother who died in the 1940s, so I didn't feel that there was an ethical issue.
I've unfortunately lost my wedding ring in palladium. My wife is planning to offer me a new one but this time I want a steel ring made by a local jeweler.
Not because it is cheaper but because I am using my money in the right place.
Precious metal/stones is a social flex saying "Look ! I can afford the labor of X African slaves that have worked in the mine to extract this mineral" (plus the ecological impact of mining)
I'd rather spend money to buy the labor of a local artisan than buy African slave labor through a myriad of intermediaries
Same. My SO's ring looks great and easily looks 20 to 50x what it actually costs. We get to spend the savings on a honey moon with no compromises.
I respect jewelers and stonesetters as an art, but the rock itself has negative value in my eyes.
There's nothing wrong with orderly carbon. There's more than a few things wrong with Debeers
Literal monopoly company should have been banned from imports to the US dozens of years ago.
The rock is quite useful as an industrial tool. It's when you cut it in to a fancy shape and wear it that it's pretty useless.
We use diamonds to test the hardness of materials, grind really hard things smaller, orient and locate specialized cutting tools, and cut through really hard things. Hell we sell garnet by the barrel to help cut through regular materials. Orderly carbon or, in many cases orderly aluminum oxide, is something we need a lot of. The price going down on those is actually good for manufacturing.
But the industrial rocks are 90% manmade, the stonesetter diamonds were mined with slave labour or close to it, and people probably died for them.
I own twns of thousands of diamonds. most of them are embedded in metal plates and I use them to sharpen chisels. A few are on little wheels I use to cut steel.
I'd buy more diamonds, but I spent all my money on avocado toast.
Finally, rocks might be worth what rocks are worth.
i never understood why a mined diamond has a bigger value than an artificially made one when the only difference is the suffering of the workers. ppl who like diamonds are stupid.
There is this idea that seems to be really pervasive that natural is always better. And it's not true so often. A common example I like to give is that natural almond extract contains cyanide and artificial almond extract does not. No, it isn't enough cyanide to kill you, but I would say no cyanide is better than some cyanide.
And a lot of those "natural is always better" people would happily take fentanyl over willow bark if they were in agony.
Same reason diamonds are valued in the first place. Marketing campaigns tricking the gullible majority and most of the rest conforming to not stand out and cause issues for themselves.
The first thing DeBeers tried was "artificial diamonds have imperfections, you want a real rock that's selected to be as perfect as possible". Then the artificial industry made diamonds so good that you could only tell the difference from the lack of imperfections. Then DeBeers marketing changed to "it's too perfect, you want something that has the small imperfections of a natural process".
For a long time (and maybe still currently I don't know) they weren't able to make diamonds bigger like people want. So for a small diamond it might not make any sense, but there was a point where ones we made weren't meeting what people wanted.
synthetic diamond sizes keep getting bigger, but it is much harder to make them I think
As of 2023 the heaviest synthetic diamond ever made weighs 30.18 ct (6.0 g); the heaviest natural diamond ever found weighs 3167 ct (633.4 g). Wikipedia
That would be 1.7 vs 181 cm3
Diamonds are worthless outside of industrial uses.
The same can be said for precious metals as well except precious metals can't be manufactured. Their natural scarcity gives them some value beyond their utility.
Diamonds however are not scarce.
I bet there still over priced.
No, I bet they are.
Fucking young people and their... lack of money!
Seriously! Fucking bums! Just borrow a few million from your parents FFS
Artificially expensive shiny rocks less valuable than advertised.
Fun fact, reputable pawn shops don't pay for gemstones because they're effectively worthless. They only pay for previous metals. If you sell a wedding ring they'll only pay you what the metals are worth.
Not really. They will pay you as little as they can get away with. Often that's the value of the metals.
That's basically what I said. But the diamond especially and other gemstone cartels (who set the prices) won't buy from the aftermarket. Which means you can basically only sell them to 3rd parties, such as pawn shops. They then have to convince people that they should buy second hand instead of custom or "official" merch, which I imagine is a tall order.
So without a precious metal value as a starting point, they usually won't bother. They won't usually buy a tungsten ring, for example, even with gemstones that cost the buyer hundreds of bucks, because it has no resale value to them. Worst comes to worst, they can always offload precious metals somewhere. The gemstones just give them an excuse to artificially inflate the resale price.
Of course as private businesses there's always exceptions, and maybe I'm wrong and on a nationwide scale it's different. But I doubt it.
Precious metals*
Lol
You know, it must be that food and rent are a bit higher priority than the pressure stones... especially when more and more people cant afford those... food and rent i mean.
Paying overprice for a lump of carbon is insane.
Fuck De Beers.
Prices are so bad that De Beers is for sale?! Wild.
Prices are so bad that De Beers is for sale?!
BHP's bid for Anglo American, which owns De Beers, is playing a role too.
Geoffrey Farrow at Raphael, a jeweller on the other side of the street, can only just bring himself to sell lab-grown diamonds. “They are synthetic,” he said. “Lab-grown sounds exotic, but it’s created – they make it by the buckets. There’s no history to it. The price is going to go down further and further.”
I find that a very interesting perspective. I prefer the idea of something we made with human ingenuity as opposed to some thing you dug out of the dirt, probably with a shoddily-hidden special history of slavery and tears, and before that, just sitting in the ground like a bunch of other boring things. The history of a lab-grown is entirely mine and my hypothetical partner's to create.
If I was a diamond person anyways. I'd be more worried about losing the expensive ring somehow and worrying over it, and would much rather buy the cheapest thing that can still socially function as "look, I am married, don't hit on me!" without having to wear some ugly shirt that says that. Ideally both me and my hypothetical partner would just forgo expensive rings (and don't get me wrong, I'm adamantly not a T-shirt and jeans person, I like to dress up, I have just never been a ring person) and spend it on something else we would both like.
For those who do not share my opinions on wedding rings, which is valid, I am also glad to hear lab-grown prices are down so people can still get that ring they love without breaking the bank and without supporting De Beers.
While violence behind diamond mines is real and should never be forgotten, don't be obtuse. It's not some thing you pulled from dirt.
It's still beautiful. It's still a gem. It's still something that naturally formed over millions of years in the crucible of fire and pressure beneath our crust. That history is astounding and something people can marvel at.
Don't begrudge Geoffrey Farrow his wonder at the world around him.
P.s. Fuck De Beers. Fuck the false scarcity. Fuck the slavery and violence and exploitation of nations the diamond trade relies on.
I suppose I'm probably the most anti-nature environmentalist. Protect this because we need it to live, and animals need it to live. But I really personally hate nature, it doesn't bring me pleasure. I have been to some of the wonders of the world and was not floored, breath not taken away. "Checks out, let's move on." (Why'd I go to see it then? Someone else with me wanted to see it :P I'm a lot more interested in history that directly involves humans or something once living. For me, dinosaurs and artifacts of early human civilization are cool, gems are not.) I don't marvel at it, and any reason to dismiss something made with cruelty is something I'll eagerly jump on, even if it's definitely not a popular perspective. To me it really is an overvalued thing you pulled out of the dirt, no matter the facts behind how it formed inside the dirt.
Disclaimer: I don't say this to be contrarian, I am really not the type. Popular ≠ bad and I'm not some special unique snowflake, I just have some quirks where I have a different opinion, as does everyone else! I don't like nature, others don't like chocolate. I think most people have at least one unpopular preference/dislike, this is mine.
My mother was always bitter that an anniversary ring my father gave her turned out to be synthetic, but I think back in the 80s lab grown diamonds went cloudy after a while.
She could also have been complaining about anything and Everything my father had done 24/7 once the separation and inevitable divorce were in effect.
Now this is my kind of uplifting news!
The longer I live, the clearer I see that the beliefs of my youth were just capitalist lies.
I'd like to see new uses for diamonds that take advantage of their material properties. For example, the thermal conductivity of diamonds is very high.
Diamond thermal paste is out there. It's okay, but like most thermal paste (besides liquid metal, which has its own issues), it doesn't give extraordinary results over anything else. People tend to really overthink thermal paste; it's going to give you maybe 4 extra degrees C, and that's already pushing it.
Graphene is an even better thermal conductor, and heat pipes are tons better than either. There's some work out there on enhancing heat pipes with graphene.
Industrial diamonds have always been on the cheap and that industry is far removed from the jewelry/gem industry, in fact a large majority of diamonds that are mined aren't gem grade, they're industrial grade. It's been growing and advancing despite the jewelry/gem market starting to fall.
and their hardness makes them useful in all saw-blades or drill-bits
All essentials are going up but at least some useless luxury items are coming down.
Good should never be so high. Artificially inflated prices. Due to one company holding the diamonds
We'd much rather spend money on fabulous vacations or boring mortgages.
Rolex, you're next
I like mechanical dive watches but I also like them cheap. Thanks Vostok.
It's interesting that people used to be like holy shit that person has a Rolex, it's like $500!! Now people working at McDonald's have a $800 Apple watch. Wild.
500!? Don't Rolex watches start at about 20x that? The cheapest price I saw was $10,200.
That's if I'm reading the info on this site correctly. But I think they're stupid and wasteful, and also don't wear a watch! If I had one, I'd sell it to put a down-payment on a home...
https://www.luxurybazaar.com/grey-market/rolex-prices-retail-vs-actual-market/
Nothing says "I love you" like a detonation nanodiamond
Thanks PRC
I like how they sparkle, but I would rather get a perfect diamond for that made in a lab.
I see the beauty in mathematically perfect lab-grown crystals and natural gems made over millions of years, so I don't really mind either kind.
You should mind the latter kind because it is extracted via human suffering and death.
Come crashing down
Crashing down
I wish.
Diamond coin! With a hologram of Trump doing Queen Victoria
I’ve been waiting for this for years.
Yay polyamory is taking off
If that was the case they would have pivoted towards selling polycule rings, they could sell N*M rings to a polycule with N males and M females
Or poly folks reject the concept of marriage wholesale?
... not really. that has been said since the 1970s, and it hasn't happened so far (on a larger basis). i put it somewhere between nuclear fusion and antimatter spaceflight.
It says marriages are on decline
