Congrats to Mrs. Bricker. Either way.
I’m just waiting for Apple to figure out how to make a synthetic diamond iPhone screen. I’m giving it 10 years, max.
As soon as that happens, DeBeers is toast.
I think the important thing to note in all this and perhaps of interest to someone looking to buy a diamond for their wife is:
Lab-created and mined diamonds are BOTH diamonds.
In every way shape or form you want to cut it a lab diamond IS a diamond. Chemically, physically, molecularly, atomically, quantumnly (made that up) whatever…a lab diamond is every bit as much a diamond as one from DeBeers except it lacks the dead/oppressed people who brought it to you.
Probably a little cheaper too if you do not care about dead/oppressed people (blood diamonds) getting you the stone so you are still better off.
If anything a lab diamond is more pure with fewer imperfections.
Mrs. Bricker will never know the difference and indeed she will get a better diamond for the money. You are not ripping her off or cheating her in any way, shape or form out of a diamond. This is not a CZ or Moissanite…it is a real diamond through and through.
Mrs. Raza’s birthday is coming up, and I am having a difficult time finding an online source for lab-created diamonds at retail that isn’t some variation of CZ. Any suggestions?
The Google keywords are cultured diamonds.
You might try here: https://www.shopapollo.com/
But there are plenty of other places. From what I can tell, cultured jewel quality stones are cheaper than mined diamonds, but not cheap. Cutting the diamonds and a nice setting isn’t any cheaper and these guys have a lot on money invested in the technology that they want to get back before the price on diamonds collapses. You might imagine what will happen to the prices after the Chinese get into the business.
Frankly putting money into diamonds, cultured or mined seems to be a bad investment to me.
IIRC, diamonds have interesting electrical properties. Diamond is an excellent thermal conductor and an electrical insulator. It will be important long after we get over decorating ourselves with shiny pebbles. I was reading about how in molecular nanotechnology, diamond will be an important construction material.
Thank you for posting that link. It’s a long article, but it’s fascinating and it answers a lot of the questions in the thread.
Since I used to work in the semiconductor industry, I found the discussion of diamond substrates for microprocessors especially interesting. One-inch diameter diamond wafers by year’s end, eh?
“Used” diamonds can be a great deal. A friend of mine was drinking at a local bar. The drunk woman he started a conversation with was in the process of leaving her husband, who she discovered was having an affair. They bought each other a few rounds of drinks. The woman ran out of cash, wanted to keep drinking, and offered my buddy her beautiful engagement ring for whatever cash he could scrape up.
My buddy got a large diamond that night for $45. Another hundred to get it placed in a necklace.
Note that that article is from 2003. So either we already have diamond wafers and they turned out to not be all that useful, or they turned out to be a lot harder to make than those companies’ press offices claimed.
Just because nobody is yet building monuments with them doesn’t mean they can’t make the bricks.
They are quite useful. Just takes a long time to bring the related products to market. We’ve been improving our knowledge base on how to work with Silicon since the 1960s. Combine that with Billion plus dollar fabs dedicated to Silicon, and Carbon based semiconductors have to compete against a huge head start. Like Germanium and Gallium Arsenide, you will only see diamond based chips in very high dollar applications where they have significant advantage over Silicon, at least at first. Many of those customers don’t permit advertising of what they are buying. Diamond based semiconductors are probably not going to come to a desktop or handset near you for at least a decade if ever.
If it’s anything like the other forms of carbon produced similarly, I’m guessing that latter. Most likely, the process was not at all scalable, but if you want to get funds to make the process scalable, you have to demonstrate progress.
But most of that knowledge base is directly transferable to carbon.
Whoops! I missed that.
Just to point out, not all mined diamonds are conflict diamonds. Last I checked, for example, Canada was neither killing nor opressing the people mining diamonds in our country.
And you know the mined diamonds you buy are not blood diamonds… how? By trusting the person who makes money selling them?
Better safe than sorry.
I know I am a spoilsport, but I would much prefer to have a lab created diamond or colored gemstone that was perfect and cheap, as I never intend to use a stupid rock to indicate anything, nor to use it as an investment. I want cheap shiny bling.
I do not measure my worth to mrAru by the bling he buys me, but in how he treats me.
We now interrupt this thread:
…And now back to your regularly scheduled thread
About 20 years ago my business partner was wanking about how his fiancee didn’t appreciate his grandmother’s diamond that he gave her. She wanted a much huger rock. We were starting to come into money, and I just laughed and completely predicted that sometime within our lives, manufactured gem quality diamonds would be way less expensive than mined ones. Of course, that technology was not available, so he had to suck it down and buy the big rock.
Fuck DeBeers. It’s all over for them.
That’s a pretty standard con. 
I agree, that story made me raise my eyebrow. I suspect the diamond was either fake or stolen.
Question: can one manufacture rubies and emeralds in labs? AFAIK there aren’t many mines for those stones anymore, and they’re actually more valuable than diamonds.
(I’d rather have a lab diamond personally, but I don’t have any gems at all because I’ve never wanted any that badly.)