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My wife is in the retail side of this market and I’ve had a lot of second hand familiarity with the transition to lab grown. What I find most interesting is th

My wife is in the retail side of this market and I’ve had a lot of second hand familiarity with the transition to lab grown. What I find most interesting is the weight put on the ethical side. I think it’s overstated. When the issue became big, the Blood Diamond movie, sales of lab grown did not markedly increase. It took another decade or so to become more prevalent. What changed over that time is the price, IIRC the price was comparable to natural at the time the movie came out. Ethics were not compelling enough for most people at that price. When prices got about 50% of natural, it became much more compelling. Now that it’s around 10%, it’s practically so compelling that buying natural isn’t even a real consideration for many people. Anyways, I think people use the Blood Diamond talking point as a socially acceptable reason- it’s what they tell their parents and grandparents who might judge them- but in reality it’s almost completely a financial decision. If the tables were turned and natural diamonds became 1/10th the cost of lab grown, the market would completely flip back practically overnight.

aprilthird2021 1y ago
I actually predict in a few years it will become more fashionable to wear other jewels over diamonds given the rate the prices are crashing at. When diamonds are competitive with all the other gemstones, people start looking at those the same way too
- holowoodman 1y ago
  But as soon as that happens, other gemstones will come in cheaper artificial varieties as well.
  - SpicyLemonZest 1y ago
    The biggest diamond alternative today, moissanite, is always artificial - ironically because its natural form is so rare that it's not obtainable.
    - tsimionescu 1y ago
      The point is more that people would move to gemstones that don't look like diamonds, if diamonds start being perceived as cheap. Moissanite was popular because it's not immediately obvious it's not a diamond, while diamonds were popular.
- spwa4 1y ago
  Diamonds are quite possibly the only stone that isn't yet essentially 100% artificial. Rubies, the next hardest stone, is trivial to make artificially: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybcdRQmQcHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybcdRQmQcHQ
  - rowanG077 1y ago
    moissanite is harder than ruby afaik. Also more beautiful than diamond imo.
- BobAliceInATree 1y ago
  You're a few years too late, as this trend has been been happening for a decade at this point. You can find many articles online about how millenialls and now gen-z are ditching diamonds.
  - alfiedotwtf 1y ago
    Are they ditching diamonds because if fashion, or are they ditching diamonds like they’re ditching buying houses? I would bet affordability is more likely the cause of decline in younger people
    - aprilthird2021 1y ago
      Diamonds have absolutely catered in affordability in the last few years, so I think it's probably fashionable. I've seen more and more people say they want something different than a diamond ring and I think part of it is that they aren't worth multiples of any other ring anymore
- lovich 1y ago
  Lab rubies, sapphires, emeralds and basically anything you can think of with a known chemical makeup is being produced en masse by factories all over India and China. Here’s just one sellers assortment of various “roughs” https://www.gemsngems.com/product-category/rough-stones/lab-created-top-quality-rough/ https://www.gemsngems.com/product-category/rough-stones/lab-... As someone who doesn’t care about the authenticity of the gems provenance and only about having consistent physical properties for rock tumbling and gem faceting, it’s been very nice for the budget
Spooky23 1y ago
Years and years of “diamonds suck” make a mark. It’s an evergreen topic online for a long time, and the people looking at engagement rings in 2025 have been aware of the shittiness of the diamond business for years. The mining, corrupt trade practices, etc are all well known and sometimes subject to enforcement action.
- spwa4 1y ago
  Seems to be the opposite ...
- j45 1y ago
  There were some pretty major articles in the past 20 years challenging the pr Cambodian that was diamonds. The thing about today is many pale aren’t seater horse beliefs and preferences (“trends”) can be manufactured. Social media is a different kind of amplifier the past few years.
kergonath 1y ago
> What I find most interesting is the weight put on the ethical side. I think it’s overstated. When the issue became big, the Blood Diamond movie, sales of lab grown did not markedly increase. It was not a switch that was pushed the moment the movie went out. In the grand scheme of things, the movie was not even that popular. But there definitely was a realisation that diamond prices were completely artificially inflated by an oligopoly, and that there were many issues with how they were sourced. Just because demand did not follow a step function when the file was released does not imply that ethics are not relevant.
- throwaway2037 1y ago
  Wiki says: "The film grossed $171 million worldwide and received five Oscar nominations..." That is popular by any reasonable definition.
  - yorwba 1y ago
    That makes it popular for a movie. It also means that most people didn't watch it, at least not in theaters. (I guess that would be true even for the most popular movie of all time. The most popular thing in some category is rarely more popular than the entire rest of the category combined.)
  - kergonath 1y ago
    Even if every viewer paid $1, that would be 171 millions people, which really is not that much compared to even the population of North America and Europe combined.
    - Eisenstein 1y ago
      Most people don't watch films in the theater run exclusively. It has been viewed by many hundreds of millions of people after it left the box office. Also, network effects account for a lot. One person seeing the film and talking about blood diamonds to their friends and family leads to 2 others who look into it, which leads to 4 more, etc. That's how ideas spread.
LightBug1 1y ago
Not necessarily. When prices are equal, I'd wager the decision is: "if prices are equal why wouldn't I buy the "real" thing? I'll just try and justify to myself that it's sourced correctly". When the price of the grown diamonds falls, the decision might be: "Ok, so grown diamonds are cheaper AND more ethical? Ok, I'm definitely buying grown". If the ethics factor didn't exist, "real" diamonds would still retain the kudos and still be valued highly over "nice but fake" diamonds. It's the ethics factor that pushes the decision over the line. As an n=1 economic animal, that's what my behaviour would have been anyway.
- smohare 1y ago
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- XorNot 1y ago
  Why would someone with ethical concerns still buy a diamond and not just choose another gemstone if somehow synthetic was more expensive? And it's all marketing anyway: slap a "condensed from pure carbon" campaign out there and suddenly natural diamonds are fake rich and not as pure or precise or something.
  - tsimionescu 1y ago
    Because there is a century now of diamonds being associated with certain cultural elements in US life, and that's not easy to take away overnight. Lots of people expect a diamond ring as part of an engagement - not just the future bride, but their friends, family, co-workers. A sapphire ring or an opal ring or a ruby ring will not be easily accepted - it will be seen as weird, or cheap, or anti-traditional, etc. Now sure, this concept was manufactured to a great extent through marketing, and it can be replaced or just fall out of favor. But established culture changes very slowly, and there's no "other gemstones cartel" to throw money at this the way DeBeers did to establish the diamond engagement ring in the first place.
jsbisviewtiful 1y ago
More people have caught on to the many terrible things about natural diamonds over time and now we are finally at the tipping point for lab grown to dismantle the unethical natural diamond trade. The idea of lab grown needed time to gestate with the public, which has been manipulated for decades about the “value” of natural diamonds. Even when lab grown became a thing, the natural diamond trade did its damnedest to manipulate the public on the quality of lab grown vs natural. Coincidentally, natural diamonds are overvalued due to decades of market manipulation by a monopoly.
snowwrestler 1y ago
But one big reason lab-grown diamonds are so much less expensive now is economy of scale. Something had to start increasing the demand to enable that. Especially considering the large marketing investment against lab-grown gems by established players, trying to make them seem “tacky.” The ethical issues have been a very capable counter-message to that.
- inetknght 1y ago
  > Something had to start increasing the demand to enable that. Diamonds are used in all kinds of things besides jewelry. Industry needs that economy of scale.
  - acjacobson 1y ago
    True but industrial grade natural diamonds are very inexpensive in comparison to jewelry quality ones.
    - ReptileMan 1y ago
      A rising tide lifts all boats. The demand for industrial diamonds is insatiable. And for bigger grits. This leads to people learning how to make bigger and stronger diamonds. Eventually some of the knowledge and tech will percolate to the jewelry side.
      - cwmoore 1y ago
        So simply, produced over time by a different kind of intense heat and pressure.
    - grues-dinner 1y ago
      It depends what you use it for. Abrasives can use pretty much any horrible misshapen brown rock of roughly the right size. But there are also applications for larger flawless crystals in things like diamond windows, semiconductor substrate and microtomes. Recently you can even buy a diamond 3D printer nozzle for extruding abrasive materials like carbon fibre. These require better processes than the ones that churn out abrasive diamonds.
deleted 1y ago
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pengaru 1y ago
When I was a kid in the 80s my mother worked at a jewelry store and CZ diamonds were already considered cheap fakes at the time. The price was not comparable to the real deal because nobody was buying them at diamond prices. They were simply dismissed as more trash belonging in the gold-plated case. It's hard to appreciate how much less informed people were back then - we're talking pre-internet. The adults around me couldn't explain scientifically what the actual difference was between a CZ and natural diamond. Just one was a fake, held little value, and was a sure way to lose your fiance.
- thfuran 1y ago
  Cubic zirconia isn't synthetic diamond at all.
  - heavyset_go 1y ago
    They were marketed as synthetic diamond alternatives in the layman sense, even if they are not composed of actual diamonds.
  - asdfasvea 1y ago
    You sound just like the adults he was talking about.
    - thfuran 1y ago
      They literally aren't diamond. They contain no carbon. Because they're zirconia, not diamond. They're marketed as an alternative to diamond.
      - musicale 1y ago
        How do CZ gemstones compare to diamond gemstones visually/in person? It looks like CZ has a lower refraction index but higher color dispersion vs. diamond, so that seems like it would still result in an attractive gemstone. The main disadvantages seem to be slightly lower refractive index (so less internal reflection and brilliance?), lower hardness (disadvantage for the gem getting scratches - possible advantage for not scratching your sapphire glass watch or smartphone camera lens?!) and higher weight. edit: seems that moissanite (silicon carbide, perhaps unsurprisingly) is another diamond-like (though hexagonal crystals vs. cubic for diamond or CZ) gemstone that is actually harder than sapphire and less prone to fracture than diamond.
jterrys 1y ago
What you're seeing in the drop of value of diamonds also reflects the general shift in tastes of different generations with income. I'm a person that likes to go to flea markets and antique stores on the rare occasion and the value of the same items on the market has drastically shifted in the last 10 years as boomers are no longer in the collectible age bracket. Younger people don't really care about Tiffany jewelry
- aerostable_slug 1y ago
  Depends a lot on the demographic. It's still popular with young people who express status and success through culturally relevant jewelry styles (often influenced by hip-hop and sports culture). It's more status-forward than authenticity-forward consumption, and many jewelers can assure you that it's very much still in vogue in some areas.
  - conductr 1y ago
    When discussing market shifts I think the relative nature of all these points needs to be considered. There will of course always be pockets of exceptions, but on a relative basis the prior comment is correct. Getting married is less common which in of itself is a huge reduction to diamond jewelry demand. Of course there’s probably some town that marriage is at an all time high.
jjtheblunt 1y ago
i think you overlooked a general revulsion towards monopoly and therefore DeBeers, their laughable (though long effective) marketing, though agree it's mainly economic.
heavyset_go 1y ago
I think it's a generational thing. Younger generations genuinely cared about the implicit exploitation and violence in the industry, older didn't. See also: views on climate change, adoption of renewable energy, etc.
- mensetmanusman 1y ago
  Younger generations have none percent of the wealth to make these decisions compared to the boomers.
  - karaterobot 1y ago
    > Younger Americans (millennials and Gen Zers) owned $1.35 for every $1 of wealth owned by baby boomers at the same age. https://www.stlouisfed.org/community-development/publications/the-state-of-us-household-wealth https://www.stlouisfed.org/community-development/publication...
    - nyc_data_geek 1y ago
      >At the same age Boomers have had significantly longer and better sustained market conditions to grow their wealth.
    - moate 1y ago
      Um, I'm going to go ahead and point out this, probably not super relevant data point "While trailing Gen Xers for the beginning of their adult lives, younger American households’ average wealth began to exceed that of Gen Xers at about age 30, reflecting historically high wealth levels following the COVID-19 pandemic." I have a feeling that average wealth adjustment falls very heavily on the home owners, which is only just above half of all the cohort. Had a similar thing happened to boomers in 89, almost 70% would have benefitted. I think it's also worth pointing out: The share of wealth held by boomers in 89 (why 89? Because they didn't have data before that. It's why the graphs start in a weird spot and why it's not a great study unless you're trying to pull out a "gotcha" stat) represented almost 20% of the total wealth in the country. "Millenials/GenZ" has a hold on only HALF that percentage. Doctors may hate your one weird statistic, but socio-demographists probably don't...
userbinator 1y ago
What I find most interesting is the weight put on the ethical side. I think it’s overstated. Virtue-signaling has always been a thing, and apparently quite useful for marketing to certain segments of the population.
eddiewithzato 1y ago
Nah it’s also environmentally, mining is bad. And if there is an alternative with no mining, people will opt for that.
stocksinsmocks 1y ago
It’s also worth noting that diamonds for jewelry have very little to no used market value or appreciation. Natural diamonds might be worth the premium if they could be a store of value like gold, but that isn’t the case. I think that is a clue to the absence of a fair market dynamic.
- jfengel 1y ago
  So if I wanted to get a used diamond on the cheap, where would I go? Estate sale? Pawn shop? Perhaps to have a jeweller set it in a different setting?
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    Yes to all your questions. Be wary though, especially at pawn shops. Those places are not bastions of integrity.
  - milofeynman 1y ago
    You can just order brand new ones from China for even cheaper I imagine. https://www.npr.org/2019/03/14/703472647/saying-i-do-to-lab-grown-diamonds https://www.npr.org/2019/03/14/703472647/saying-i-do-to-lab-...
    - cluckindan 1y ago
      Just make sure to pay your taxes and avoid decaf coffee, otherwise some college kid is going to buy one for you and install it in your basement porta-potty time machine.
      - ta1243 1y ago
        I learnt a lot about Colonial America from that game
  - jbeninger 1y ago
    I bought mine from therealreal.com. I got a lot more ring than I'd normally be able to afford, and it's an elegant design you don't see everywhere. Check with the recipient beforehand, of course. You're not the one who has to wear it, and no amount of logic is going to change a mind that wants a brand new, natural diamond.
Night_Thastus 1y ago
People love to claim the moral high ground, believing themselves so much better. So much more noble. So much smarter. But at the end of the day, they always do the exact same thing - buy whatever is cheaper. Doesn't matter if it's produced with slave labor, or child labor, or the product of corporate government coups. They put all that out of their mind, and just buy the product. They rationalize it or conveniently forget it or just pretend it doesn't apply to them. Whatever will get them past it. A similar topic: Does anyone think things like solar and wind are being used out of the goodness of anyone's heart? Concern for the next generations? A desire to give clean air to our youth? Sympathy for sufferers of all of the horrible diseases and respiratory problems? Concern about lands lost to rising seas? No. It's because they got cheaper than fossil fuels. Anything else is fantasy.
- albumen 1y ago
  You do realise there are different categories of users? There’s consistent evidence that early adopters and ethically motivated consumers accept price premiums to align purchases with values, identity, or status; only later—when technologies mature—do cost considerations dominate for mainstream buyers. Solar PV: https://research.chalmers.se/publication/520553/file/520553_Fulltext.pdf https://research.chalmers.se/publication/520553/file/520553_... EVs: https://ia600108.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/24/items/wikipedia-scholarly-sources-corpus/10.3141.zip&file=10.3141%252F2572-03.pdf https://ia600108.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/24... Renewable energy premiums: https://research-hub.nrel.gov/en/publications/will-consumers-really-pay-for-green-electricity-comparing-stated- https://research-hub.nrel.gov/en/publications/will-consumers... Fair Trade: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Shared%20Documents/conferences/2014-launching-the-star-lab/FT_final_2_20.pdf https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Shared%20Documents/conferences/2...
  - Night_Thastus 1y ago
    Those are very rare exceptions, and generally from people who already have enough money that it makes next to no difference what they buy. Or it's just performative, they're doing it for the sake of appearances.
jMyles 1y ago
What about the size of the market as a whole? Was there a drawdown during the period in question? Is it possible that people decreased purchases of diamonds altogether in response to ethical qualms (in favor of other jewels or precious items), and then were later motivated by price to go with lab-grown diamonds?
apparent 1y ago
I think it reached a tipping point. It used to be that there wasn't much of a cost advantage, so people assumed you bought the real thing. Now that the lab-made diamonds are super cheap, many people will assume you bought one of those. When that's the case, people feel like they might as well buy the cheaper ones. It's like people buying natural mined diamonds are chumps. No one will know you spent more unless you talk about how it's natural (and that makes you annoying).
- forkeep 1y ago
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- forkeep 1y ago
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- j45 1y ago
  Strange, having been in the market for a diamond 10 y ago, I distinctly remember man made diamonds were noticeably cheaper. I wonder if my spreadsheet still exists. Also recent synthetic diamonds adding some kind of a marker to the synthetic diamond. Today it makes one think there’s likely synthetic diamonds mixed in with real ones somewhere.
ghushn3 1y ago
I don't think those are orthogonal. Natural diamonds are more expensive, and they therefore have a conspicuous consumption element to them. That could be valuable as a means to gain social cachet. Except you'd have to speak loudly about how they were natural. And in doing so you are loudly proclaiming you don't care about human suffering it took to get the diamonds. That's probably fine in very wealthy circles, but in upper middle class/upper-upper middle class circles, it's likely quite gauche. If the natural ones didn't have this faux pas attached to them by default, then they might carry more interest as a "I saved up for these" class indicator.
- DonHopkins 1y ago
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- grues-dinner 1y ago
  > have a conspicuous consumption element to them I've never understood this really because no-one carries their GIA certificate with them. With the existence of moissanite and artificial stones, it should be a "market for lemons" situation where a given stone on someone's finger is assumed low-value by default.
lern_too_spel 1y ago
> When the issue became big, the Blood Diamond movie, sales of lab grown did not markedly increase Other people would still assume you might have bought a blood diamond, so instead of buying a lab diamond, I would expect these people to have bought another gem if they bought a gemstone at all.
SenHeng 1y ago
My then-gf (now wife) and I watched a movie together about an African man whose village got raided, him put into slavery to search for diamonds and his son becoming a child soldier by the same people and their struggles to get free, and finally pawn off a pink diamond to one of the largest diamond companies in London. At the end of it, she finally came to realise that the diamond trade was really quite shitty. And we had a long discussion about the whole thing, as well as the growth of the synthetic diamonds industry and how they’re much better on the supposed 4C properties as well as on price. Yet in the end she still wanted to get a ring from one of the big names because that’s what she grew up with and what she had always dreamt of since young. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- conductr 1y ago
  My wife too. She’s a jewelery buyer for national retailer, she was well aware, even has visited mines and seen the conditions first hand, admitted how good lab grown was for ethics, etc. yet- her inner 5 year old princess wedding dream won her mind and she couldn’t envision anything other than a natural diamond for her wedding set.
- Matthyze 1y ago
  Similar story here. Goes to show how effective brainwashing kids as an advertisement technique is.
- nautikos1 1y ago
  So she wanted a real diamond because it's more expensive than a synthetic diamond. The irony is that as synthetic diamonds become indistinguishable from naturals, the price will plummet over time.
  - pyrolistical 1y ago
    I have a diamond to sell her then. It a flawless synthetic diamond that has been hand curated. It’s a one of one. Therefore it is even more expensive than so called real diamonds
npteljes 1y ago
>Ethics were not compelling enough for most people This matches my experience with people, including myself. I think it's about the feedback. The price pain or the energy pain is readily and immediately felt, whereas ethics violations are not, as people are shielded from the impact externally, and have many defenses against it internally as well.
- indymike 1y ago
  Even 29 years ago, my wife did not want a diamond because she didn't want a fruit of oppression, slavery and murder on her finger.
  - npteljes 1y ago
    That's cool!
    - indymike 1y ago
      She is cool. I'm lucky!
mattmaroon 1y ago
Blood Diamond came out in 2006. Prices were not comparable at that point and they barely existed. The ethics could easily have played a strong part in driving the demand that evolved the technology to the point where it became affordable. But in any case, these aren’t mutually exclusive. People want conflict free diamonds but not to spend a years pay getting one.
DonsDiscountGas 1y ago
The quality of lab grown also improved a lot over that time

aprilthird2021 1y ago

I actually predict in a few years it will become more fashionable to wear other jewels over diamonds given the rate the prices are crashing at. When diamonds are competitive with all the other gemstones, people start looking at those the same way too

holowoodman 1y ago
But as soon as that happens, other gemstones will come in cheaper artificial varieties as well.
- SpicyLemonZest 1y ago
  The biggest diamond alternative today, moissanite, is always artificial - ironically because its natural form is so rare that it's not obtainable.
  - tsimionescu 1y ago
    The point is more that people would move to gemstones that don't look like diamonds, if diamonds start being perceived as cheap. Moissanite was popular because it's not immediately obvious it's not a diamond, while diamonds were popular.
spwa4 1y ago
Diamonds are quite possibly the only stone that isn't yet essentially 100% artificial. Rubies, the next hardest stone, is trivial to make artificially: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybcdRQmQcHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybcdRQmQcHQ
- rowanG077 1y ago
  moissanite is harder than ruby afaik. Also more beautiful than diamond imo.
BobAliceInATree 1y ago
You're a few years too late, as this trend has been been happening for a decade at this point. You can find many articles online about how millenialls and now gen-z are ditching diamonds.
- alfiedotwtf 1y ago
  Are they ditching diamonds because if fashion, or are they ditching diamonds like they’re ditching buying houses? I would bet affordability is more likely the cause of decline in younger people
  - aprilthird2021 1y ago
    Diamonds have absolutely catered in affordability in the last few years, so I think it's probably fashionable. I've seen more and more people say they want something different than a diamond ring and I think part of it is that they aren't worth multiples of any other ring anymore
lovich 1y ago
Lab rubies, sapphires, emeralds and basically anything you can think of with a known chemical makeup is being produced en masse by factories all over India and China. Here’s just one sellers assortment of various “roughs” https://www.gemsngems.com/product-category/rough-stones/lab-created-top-quality-rough/ https://www.gemsngems.com/product-category/rough-stones/lab-... As someone who doesn’t care about the authenticity of the gems provenance and only about having consistent physical properties for rock tumbling and gem faceting, it’s been very nice for the budget

Spooky23 1y ago

Years and years of “diamonds suck” make a mark. It’s an evergreen topic online for a long time, and the people looking at engagement rings in 2025 have been aware of the shittiness of the diamond business for years. The mining, corrupt trade practices, etc are all well known and sometimes subject to enforcement action.

spwa4 1y ago
Seems to be the opposite ...
j45 1y ago
There were some pretty major articles in the past 20 years challenging the pr Cambodian that was diamonds. The thing about today is many pale aren’t seater horse beliefs and preferences (“trends”) can be manufactured. Social media is a different kind of amplifier the past few years.

kergonath 1y ago

> What I find most interesting is the weight put on the ethical side. I think it’s overstated. When the issue became big, the Blood Diamond movie, sales of lab grown did not markedly increase. It was not a switch that was pushed the moment the movie went out. In the grand scheme of things, the movie was not even that popular. But there definitely was a realisation that diamond prices were completely artificially inflated by an oligopoly, and that there were many issues with how they were sourced. Just because demand did not follow a step function when the file was released does not imply that ethics are not relevant.

throwaway2037 1y ago
Wiki says: "The film grossed $171 million worldwide and received five Oscar nominations..." That is popular by any reasonable definition.
- yorwba 1y ago
  That makes it popular for a movie. It also means that most people didn't watch it, at least not in theaters. (I guess that would be true even for the most popular movie of all time. The most popular thing in some category is rarely more popular than the entire rest of the category combined.)
- kergonath 1y ago
  Even if every viewer paid $1, that would be 171 millions people, which really is not that much compared to even the population of North America and Europe combined.
  - Eisenstein 1y ago
    Most people don't watch films in the theater run exclusively. It has been viewed by many hundreds of millions of people after it left the box office. Also, network effects account for a lot. One person seeing the film and talking about blood diamonds to their friends and family leads to 2 others who look into it, which leads to 4 more, etc. That's how ideas spread.

LightBug1 1y ago

Not necessarily. When prices are equal, I'd wager the decision is: "if prices are equal why wouldn't I buy the "real" thing? I'll just try and justify to myself that it's sourced correctly". When the price of the grown diamonds falls, the decision might be: "Ok, so grown diamonds are cheaper AND more ethical? Ok, I'm definitely buying grown". If the ethics factor didn't exist, "real" diamonds would still retain the kudos and still be valued highly over "nice but fake" diamonds. It's the ethics factor that pushes the decision over the line. As an n=1 economic animal, that's what my behaviour would have been anyway.

smohare 1y ago
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XorNot 1y ago
Why would someone with ethical concerns still buy a diamond and not just choose another gemstone if somehow synthetic was more expensive? And it's all marketing anyway: slap a "condensed from pure carbon" campaign out there and suddenly natural diamonds are fake rich and not as pure or precise or something.
- tsimionescu 1y ago
  Because there is a century now of diamonds being associated with certain cultural elements in US life, and that's not easy to take away overnight. Lots of people expect a diamond ring as part of an engagement - not just the future bride, but their friends, family, co-workers. A sapphire ring or an opal ring or a ruby ring will not be easily accepted - it will be seen as weird, or cheap, or anti-traditional, etc. Now sure, this concept was manufactured to a great extent through marketing, and it can be replaced or just fall out of favor. But established culture changes very slowly, and there's no "other gemstones cartel" to throw money at this the way DeBeers did to establish the diamond engagement ring in the first place.

jsbisviewtiful 1y ago

More people have caught on to the many terrible things about natural diamonds over time and now we are finally at the tipping point for lab grown to dismantle the unethical natural diamond trade. The idea of lab grown needed time to gestate with the public, which has been manipulated for decades about the “value” of natural diamonds. Even when lab grown became a thing, the natural diamond trade did its damnedest to manipulate the public on the quality of lab grown vs natural. Coincidentally, natural diamonds are overvalued due to decades of market manipulation by a monopoly.

snowwrestler 1y ago

But one big reason lab-grown diamonds are so much less expensive now is economy of scale. Something had to start increasing the demand to enable that. Especially considering the large marketing investment against lab-grown gems by established players, trying to make them seem “tacky.” The ethical issues have been a very capable counter-message to that.

inetknght 1y ago
> Something had to start increasing the demand to enable that. Diamonds are used in all kinds of things besides jewelry. Industry needs that economy of scale.
- acjacobson 1y ago
  True but industrial grade natural diamonds are very inexpensive in comparison to jewelry quality ones.
  - ReptileMan 1y ago
    A rising tide lifts all boats. The demand for industrial diamonds is insatiable. And for bigger grits. This leads to people learning how to make bigger and stronger diamonds. Eventually some of the knowledge and tech will percolate to the jewelry side.
    - cwmoore 1y ago
      So simply, produced over time by a different kind of intense heat and pressure.
  - grues-dinner 1y ago
    It depends what you use it for. Abrasives can use pretty much any horrible misshapen brown rock of roughly the right size. But there are also applications for larger flawless crystals in things like diamond windows, semiconductor substrate and microtomes. Recently you can even buy a diamond 3D printer nozzle for extruding abrasive materials like carbon fibre. These require better processes than the ones that churn out abrasive diamonds.

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pengaru 1y ago

When I was a kid in the 80s my mother worked at a jewelry store and CZ diamonds were already considered cheap fakes at the time. The price was not comparable to the real deal because nobody was buying them at diamond prices. They were simply dismissed as more trash belonging in the gold-plated case. It's hard to appreciate how much less informed people were back then - we're talking pre-internet. The adults around me couldn't explain scientifically what the actual difference was between a CZ and natural diamond. Just one was a fake, held little value, and was a sure way to lose your fiance.

thfuran 1y ago
Cubic zirconia isn't synthetic diamond at all.
- heavyset_go 1y ago
  They were marketed as synthetic diamond alternatives in the layman sense, even if they are not composed of actual diamonds.
- asdfasvea 1y ago
  You sound just like the adults he was talking about.
  - thfuran 1y ago
    They literally aren't diamond. They contain no carbon. Because they're zirconia, not diamond. They're marketed as an alternative to diamond.
    - musicale 1y ago
      How do CZ gemstones compare to diamond gemstones visually/in person? It looks like CZ has a lower refraction index but higher color dispersion vs. diamond, so that seems like it would still result in an attractive gemstone. The main disadvantages seem to be slightly lower refractive index (so less internal reflection and brilliance?), lower hardness (disadvantage for the gem getting scratches - possible advantage for not scratching your sapphire glass watch or smartphone camera lens?!) and higher weight. edit: seems that moissanite (silicon carbide, perhaps unsurprisingly) is another diamond-like (though hexagonal crystals vs. cubic for diamond or CZ) gemstone that is actually harder than sapphire and less prone to fracture than diamond.

jterrys 1y ago

What you're seeing in the drop of value of diamonds also reflects the general shift in tastes of different generations with income. I'm a person that likes to go to flea markets and antique stores on the rare occasion and the value of the same items on the market has drastically shifted in the last 10 years as boomers are no longer in the collectible age bracket. Younger people don't really care about Tiffany jewelry

aerostable_slug 1y ago
Depends a lot on the demographic. It's still popular with young people who express status and success through culturally relevant jewelry styles (often influenced by hip-hop and sports culture). It's more status-forward than authenticity-forward consumption, and many jewelers can assure you that it's very much still in vogue in some areas.
- conductr 1y ago
  When discussing market shifts I think the relative nature of all these points needs to be considered. There will of course always be pockets of exceptions, but on a relative basis the prior comment is correct. Getting married is less common which in of itself is a huge reduction to diamond jewelry demand. Of course there’s probably some town that marriage is at an all time high.

jjtheblunt 1y ago

i think you overlooked a general revulsion towards monopoly and therefore DeBeers, their laughable (though long effective) marketing, though agree it's mainly economic.

heavyset_go 1y ago

I think it's a generational thing. Younger generations genuinely cared about the implicit exploitation and violence in the industry, older didn't. See also: views on climate change, adoption of renewable energy, etc.

mensetmanusman 1y ago
Younger generations have none percent of the wealth to make these decisions compared to the boomers.
- karaterobot 1y ago
  > Younger Americans (millennials and Gen Zers) owned $1.35 for every $1 of wealth owned by baby boomers at the same age. https://www.stlouisfed.org/community-development/publications/the-state-of-us-household-wealth https://www.stlouisfed.org/community-development/publication...
  - nyc_data_geek 1y ago
    >At the same age Boomers have had significantly longer and better sustained market conditions to grow their wealth.
  - moate 1y ago
    Um, I'm going to go ahead and point out this, probably not super relevant data point "While trailing Gen Xers for the beginning of their adult lives, younger American households’ average wealth began to exceed that of Gen Xers at about age 30, reflecting historically high wealth levels following the COVID-19 pandemic." I have a feeling that average wealth adjustment falls very heavily on the home owners, which is only just above half of all the cohort. Had a similar thing happened to boomers in 89, almost 70% would have benefitted. I think it's also worth pointing out: The share of wealth held by boomers in 89 (why 89? Because they didn't have data before that. It's why the graphs start in a weird spot and why it's not a great study unless you're trying to pull out a "gotcha" stat) represented almost 20% of the total wealth in the country. "Millenials/GenZ" has a hold on only HALF that percentage. Doctors may hate your one weird statistic, but socio-demographists probably don't...

userbinator 1y ago

What I find most interesting is the weight put on the ethical side. I think it’s overstated. Virtue-signaling has always been a thing, and apparently quite useful for marketing to certain segments of the population.

eddiewithzato 1y ago

Nah it’s also environmentally, mining is bad. And if there is an alternative with no mining, people will opt for that.

stocksinsmocks 1y ago

It’s also worth noting that diamonds for jewelry have very little to no used market value or appreciation. Natural diamonds might be worth the premium if they could be a store of value like gold, but that isn’t the case. I think that is a clue to the absence of a fair market dynamic.

jfengel 1y ago
So if I wanted to get a used diamond on the cheap, where would I go? Estate sale? Pawn shop? Perhaps to have a jeweller set it in a different setting?
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  Yes to all your questions. Be wary though, especially at pawn shops. Those places are not bastions of integrity.
- milofeynman 1y ago
  You can just order brand new ones from China for even cheaper I imagine. https://www.npr.org/2019/03/14/703472647/saying-i-do-to-lab-grown-diamonds https://www.npr.org/2019/03/14/703472647/saying-i-do-to-lab-...
  - cluckindan 1y ago
    Just make sure to pay your taxes and avoid decaf coffee, otherwise some college kid is going to buy one for you and install it in your basement porta-potty time machine.
    - ta1243 1y ago
      I learnt a lot about Colonial America from that game
- jbeninger 1y ago
  I bought mine from therealreal.com. I got a lot more ring than I'd normally be able to afford, and it's an elegant design you don't see everywhere. Check with the recipient beforehand, of course. You're not the one who has to wear it, and no amount of logic is going to change a mind that wants a brand new, natural diamond.

Night_Thastus 1y ago

People love to claim the moral high ground, believing themselves so much better. So much more noble. So much smarter. But at the end of the day, they always do the exact same thing - buy whatever is cheaper. Doesn't matter if it's produced with slave labor, or child labor, or the product of corporate government coups. They put all that out of their mind, and just buy the product. They rationalize it or conveniently forget it or just pretend it doesn't apply to them. Whatever will get them past it. A similar topic: Does anyone think things like solar and wind are being used out of the goodness of anyone's heart? Concern for the next generations? A desire to give clean air to our youth? Sympathy for sufferers of all of the horrible diseases and respiratory problems? Concern about lands lost to rising seas? No. It's because they got cheaper than fossil fuels. Anything else is fantasy.

albumen 1y ago
You do realise there are different categories of users? There’s consistent evidence that early adopters and ethically motivated consumers accept price premiums to align purchases with values, identity, or status; only later—when technologies mature—do cost considerations dominate for mainstream buyers. Solar PV: https://research.chalmers.se/publication/520553/file/520553_Fulltext.pdf https://research.chalmers.se/publication/520553/file/520553_... EVs: https://ia600108.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/24/items/wikipedia-scholarly-sources-corpus/10.3141.zip&file=10.3141%252F2572-03.pdf https://ia600108.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/24... Renewable energy premiums: https://research-hub.nrel.gov/en/publications/will-consumers-really-pay-for-green-electricity-comparing-stated- https://research-hub.nrel.gov/en/publications/will-consumers... Fair Trade: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Shared%20Documents/conferences/2014-launching-the-star-lab/FT_final_2_20.pdf https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Shared%20Documents/conferences/2...
- Night_Thastus 1y ago
  Those are very rare exceptions, and generally from people who already have enough money that it makes next to no difference what they buy. Or it's just performative, they're doing it for the sake of appearances.

jMyles 1y ago

What about the size of the market as a whole? Was there a drawdown during the period in question? Is it possible that people decreased purchases of diamonds altogether in response to ethical qualms (in favor of other jewels or precious items), and then were later motivated by price to go with lab-grown diamonds?

apparent 1y ago

I think it reached a tipping point. It used to be that there wasn't much of a cost advantage, so people assumed you bought the real thing. Now that the lab-made diamonds are super cheap, many people will assume you bought one of those. When that's the case, people feel like they might as well buy the cheaper ones. It's like people buying natural mined diamonds are chumps. No one will know you spent more unless you talk about how it's natural (and that makes you annoying).

forkeep 1y ago
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forkeep 1y ago
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j45 1y ago
Strange, having been in the market for a diamond 10 y ago, I distinctly remember man made diamonds were noticeably cheaper. I wonder if my spreadsheet still exists. Also recent synthetic diamonds adding some kind of a marker to the synthetic diamond. Today it makes one think there’s likely synthetic diamonds mixed in with real ones somewhere.

ghushn3 1y ago

I don't think those are orthogonal. Natural diamonds are more expensive, and they therefore have a conspicuous consumption element to them. That could be valuable as a means to gain social cachet. Except you'd have to speak loudly about how they were natural. And in doing so you are loudly proclaiming you don't care about human suffering it took to get the diamonds. That's probably fine in very wealthy circles, but in upper middle class/upper-upper middle class circles, it's likely quite gauche. If the natural ones didn't have this faux pas attached to them by default, then they might carry more interest as a "I saved up for these" class indicator.

DonHopkins 1y ago
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grues-dinner 1y ago
> have a conspicuous consumption element to them I've never understood this really because no-one carries their GIA certificate with them. With the existence of moissanite and artificial stones, it should be a "market for lemons" situation where a given stone on someone's finger is assumed low-value by default.

lern_too_spel 1y ago

> When the issue became big, the Blood Diamond movie, sales of lab grown did not markedly increase Other people would still assume you might have bought a blood diamond, so instead of buying a lab diamond, I would expect these people to have bought another gem if they bought a gemstone at all.

SenHeng 1y ago

My then-gf (now wife) and I watched a movie together about an African man whose village got raided, him put into slavery to search for diamonds and his son becoming a child soldier by the same people and their struggles to get free, and finally pawn off a pink diamond to one of the largest diamond companies in London. At the end of it, she finally came to realise that the diamond trade was really quite shitty. And we had a long discussion about the whole thing, as well as the growth of the synthetic diamonds industry and how they’re much better on the supposed 4C properties as well as on price. Yet in the end she still wanted to get a ring from one of the big names because that’s what she grew up with and what she had always dreamt of since young. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

conductr 1y ago
My wife too. She’s a jewelery buyer for national retailer, she was well aware, even has visited mines and seen the conditions first hand, admitted how good lab grown was for ethics, etc. yet- her inner 5 year old princess wedding dream won her mind and she couldn’t envision anything other than a natural diamond for her wedding set.
Matthyze 1y ago
Similar story here. Goes to show how effective brainwashing kids as an advertisement technique is.
nautikos1 1y ago
So she wanted a real diamond because it's more expensive than a synthetic diamond. The irony is that as synthetic diamonds become indistinguishable from naturals, the price will plummet over time.
- pyrolistical 1y ago
  I have a diamond to sell her then. It a flawless synthetic diamond that has been hand curated. It’s a one of one. Therefore it is even more expensive than so called real diamonds

npteljes 1y ago

>Ethics were not compelling enough for most people This matches my experience with people, including myself. I think it's about the feedback. The price pain or the energy pain is readily and immediately felt, whereas ethics violations are not, as people are shielded from the impact externally, and have many defenses against it internally as well.

indymike 1y ago
Even 29 years ago, my wife did not want a diamond because she didn't want a fruit of oppression, slavery and murder on her finger.
- npteljes 1y ago
  That's cool!
  - indymike 1y ago
    She is cool. I'm lucky!

mattmaroon 1y ago

Blood Diamond came out in 2006. Prices were not comparable at that point and they barely existed. The ethics could easily have played a strong part in driving the demand that evolved the technology to the point where it became affordable. But in any case, these aren’t mutually exclusive. People want conflict free diamonds but not to spend a years pay getting one.

DonsDiscountGas 1y ago

The quality of lab grown also improved a lot over that time