If I were buying a diamond today, I’d be looking for a man-made one.
A colleague bought a large diamond ring for his fiance, and he was impressed enough by the cubic zirconium stones that the salesman threw in a matching cubic zirconium ring for “free”. He brought them both to the office, and it was interesting to compare. The CZ was clearer and whiter, and looked really good under bright lights. But it didn’t sparkle and create rainbows like the diamond did. Diamonds really are a valuable ornament. Maybe not to the extent they are priced, but they are pretty stones.
My bad. If I remember right, high refraction means that, if you cut the facets at the proper angles, it will send light back toward the viewer better than a mirror would?
You can make a near-perfect mirror using any transparent material, through a process called total internal reflection. But it only works at angles close to the mirror: You can’t do it for light coming in directly perpendicular to the mirror. By using a high-index material like diamond, you can come in at an angle that’s closer to perpendicular.
Diamond does have a very high index of refraction, higher than most other visibly-transparent materials. Cubic zirconia is one of the very few that’s higher. I expect that there are also a few materials with higher dispersion than diamond, but I don’t know what they are. And there might not be any materials whose dispersion and refraction are both higher than diamond.
DeBeers certainly understands marketing. Their first genius move was to largely make diamonds the cultural symbolic manifestation of eternal love, especially in the eyes of brides. Their second genius move was to advertise expectations in terms of salary, saying true love was surely worth X months of pay.
This is purely anecdotal: in 1967, I bought a 1K diamond engagement ring for my then-fiancee. I paid $1000 for it. Fifty six years later, you can buy a same quality 1K diamond ring for. . .wait for it. . .$1000. Probably the poorest investment a person can make.
Yes, but Bacardi doesn’t create a limited supply of Grey Goose. It sells for around $30 for a 750ML bottle, not that expensive. Buffalo Trace (maker of Pappy Van Winkle bourbon) will make Pappy in limited special edition runs (1,000 bottles), sell out at a retail price of $150 or $250 per bottle. It will then sell on secondary markets to bourbon collectors for over a $2,500 per bottle. There’s more whiskey in the rick-houses they could have produced 10,000 bottles instead of 1,000, but they choose not to.
Depends. i saw a 1 carat diamond advertised by a cut-rate jewelery chain for $C2,000 over 10 years ago. However, it was I2. Quality of the diamond (and cut) matters. Most jewelers will happily give you the literature explaining “cut, clarity, and colour” ratings.
De Beers‘ hold over the diamond market has diminished, but they’re adapting to the new times. For instance, they’re not trying to fight man-made diamonds; in fact, they started their own line of jewellery based on “lab-grown” (as they call them) stones under the Lightbox brand. But they’re marketing them differently: The idea is to have a more affordable supply of diamonds for the less formal occasion, whereas the big events such as engagements would still be reserved for natural diamonds. The idea is to make money on the man-made market without diluting the cachet of the real thing. It’s a brillant move (pun intended).
Few women with diamond rings in my circle have died, but my wife has a diamond ring passed down from her grandmother that she intends to give to her granddaughter. I’d be surprised if many families blithely bury their relatives wearing an obviously valuable heirloom like a diamond ring. A gold wedding band, which isn’t so ostentstiously valuable, perhaps. But a diamond?
According to NPR’s comedy quiz show, Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, because of the decline in the number of women getting engaged and married, some jewelry stores (maybe the idea originated with DeBeers?) are now trying to market diamonds as gifts between male friends.
And my mother gave her engagement ring to her grandson to give to an intended. So that’s two examples of rings not being buried. I haven’t heard of people being buried with engagement rings, personally, but I’m willing to believe that many families have that custom.
I’ve seen the jewelry industry claiming that giving “old” jewelry as a gift is tacky. And it’s so clearly a position that’s not based on tradition, just to encourage more sales.
I could see the family leaving the ring on for the sake of an open-casket viewing, but then removing the ring before burial to pass down to someone else.
I can’t imagine comfortably wearing a golf-ball-sized rock as jewelry. Where would you put it, besides maybe a headdress or tiara? It would be draggingly heavy even as a necklace (imagine it banging against your clavicle all night!) and earrings would be unthinkable.
That’s true of anything like that, really. Supply vs. demand is what determines the price.
In DeBeers’ case, they have managed to if not outright monopolize, at least control the mining and distribution of diamonds, and can (and do) curtail supply to manipulate prices. On top of that, they’ve spent boatloads of cash convincing the general public that a diamond is the prestige gemstone for weddings, etc…
So they’re basically working the problem from both ends to maximize their income. They can limit supply and at the same time drum up demand. An analogy might be if the auto manufacturers also owned the oil companies. They could both manipulate the supply of gas/oil, as well as manipulate the fuel efficiency of their cars at the same time, both of which would work in concert to drive oil prices through the roof.
Same thing is happening with diamonds, except that it’s basically ONE company doing all that.