If the new manmade (for want of a better word) diamonds are now being made quite easily, why has the price of diamonds not been forced down and why are they not yet easily available. Experts apparently can’t tell the difference, they are exactly the same in their make-up and as far as I know, the main people who would be really upset with this would be the Deboers who control the release and price of nearly all diamonds.
Actually, they can sort of tell the difference, because the manmade ones are too chemically pure and flawless. There is, I believe, a UV test which can often discriminate manmade for natural diamonds.
I believe it is still more expensive to make a diamond than to mine one, and because of what Q.E.D. said.
Minerals and gems made in nature will always be more apealing to people than “imitations.”
Ice is a mineral, but you wouldn’t perceive an ice cube from your freezer the same way you’d perceive glacial ice.
If manmade diamonds ever become commonplace, it will be the chemical impurities and flaws within natural diamonds which will help them retain their value.
The price will fall if a lot of people decide they don’t care how it was made, and that they’re willing to get “cultured” diamonds for around half the price (an incredible markup even at that price).
I started a topic on fatwallet about buying cultured diamonds. Like cultured pearls, they should effect prices soon. A canary cultured diamond, one of the rarest forms, is $3,250 per one carat online, compared to about five times that for a natural one. Only those made from a seed can be detected at this time, the other kind cannot-yet.
Actually, Q.E.D haven’t the Russians come up with a way to defeat the UV test? I remember reading a really long article - not the Wired one - about the many steps and trials the Russians went through to make diamonds. And because of their success, DeBeers is now laser-etching their diamonds, because (so the article said) only about a dozen people in the world could tell them apart.
Wired Magazine – The New Diamond Age
The article linked above will tell you most everything you’ll want to know about man-made diamonds.
They are difficult to detect except that they are maybe ‘too’ perfect. DeBeers is spending a fortune building machines that will detect man-made diamonds and are giving the machines away for free to jewelers. DeBeers has also had a law passed that mandates that man-made diamonds are not simply called ‘diamonds’. The man-made diamond industry chose to go with cultured diamonds to distinguish their product. They hope that the cultured pearl idea will rub off on them as cultured pearls are considered superior to natural pearls. Man-made diamonds (at least the ones discussed in the article) are honest-to-god diamonds in every sense of the word and maybe better than natural due to their flawless nature.
Man-made diamonds used to be more expensive than simply mining them but no longer. DeBeers is rightly worried at this new product and I for one hope to see DeBeers go down the crapper. The price hasn’t dropped yet because they are only barely coming on the market. when they do it will still take awhile for prices to drop. There is a huge jewelry industry very interested in seeing prices stay high. In addition there are huge stocks of diamonds purchased at inflated prices that need to be gotten rid of. Finally, the man-made diamonds will milk the market while prices are high and while undercutting DeBeers’ prices they will still sell for a lot. Eventually though market forces should drive the prices down. Unless DeBeers manages to market ‘natural’ diamonds as the preferred diamond at a much higher price the article suggests prices could go as low as $5/carat. I don’t expect DeBeers will have much luck though. As someone on the article mentioned (at loeast to this effect) they can’t imagine a woman turning down a flawless, 2-carat diamond in favor of a smaller, more expensive, flawedf 1-carat diamond.
Ice is a mineral???
Yep. It’s just one with a very low melting point
Also see this thread I started in GD:
Ice is only a mineral if it forms naturally. If you stick water in your freezer, you are making “synthetic ice”. Obviously, this sounds absurd but the definition of a mineral is:
- Naturally occurring
- Homogenous solid
- Specific, although not fixed, chemical composition
- Definite, ordered internal structure.
Glacial Ice, snow, etc., meet all of these criteria (see below). Freezer Ice meets #2-4, but fails #1. Similarly, because man-made diamonds may meet the latter three criteria, but fail the first we do not consider them minerals, but “synthetic minerals”. So, “diamond” implies natural processes and “synthetic diamond” implies synthetic processes–and strictly speaking, “ice” refers only to naturally-formed ice whereas your freezer does not produce natural ice the mineral, but synthetic ice the not-really-a-mineral (or “synthetic mineral”).
“Ice” has a composition of H[sub]2[/sub]O and crystallizes in the Hexagonal crystal system and 6/m2/m2/m crystal class (which it is). [See for example: http://webmineral.com/data/Ice.shtml]
Pantellerite (a mineralogist/petologist)
Sorry for the strange sentence structure in places. That was edited down from a much longer, much more boring post.
Here’s another related link, just so’s this post ain’t only about my bad grammar:
That’s entirely possible. So goes the neverending cycle of counterfeiting-anticounterfeiting technology. Doubtless someone will find a way to duplicate the laser-etching, eventually.
I disagree with you Pantellerite. I think that putting water in the freezer and having it come out as ice is a completely natural process.
SPD
Yeah, cause GE top-freezer refrigerators are sooo common in nature. :rolleyes:
I was ready to debate ice too but I can’t. My webster’s stated that a mineral can be synthetic if it has the properties of a naturally occuring mineral. Hey, the mineral deposits on my faucet are as valid as the stalagtites in Carlsbad caverns.
Cultured diamonds, .3 carat to 1.75 carat, you can shop online & see what they cost by cut, clarity, Etc.
I’m kind of confused as to why cultured diamonds come in varying clarities. Do they intentionally introduce flaws into the diamond? I can’t imagine why they’d want to add flaws. Perversely I’d think adding flaws would actually cost more to produce than just growing a flawless diamond (they’d have to go to the trouble to throw extra junk into teh diamond and get it just right).
I did a quick price comparison and a 1 carat VVS diamond from Gemesis cost around $3200. A 1 carat VVS1 diamond priced on the web cost around $9000. I admit however that I have no clue if I was comparing apples-to-apples on this (cut, clarity, color).
-I believe the idea here is that the formation of ice is a natural process: the temperature drops, water forms ice. The process itself is natural regardless of the source of the temperature drop.
As opposed to a process not found in nature, such as the formation of Plutonium, or, say, titanium nitride.