‘Diamonds Are Forever,’ and Made by Machine

As a kid in the 1959’s I remember Superman (George Reeves) making a diamond by squeezing a lump of coal and simulating “a thousand tons of pressure for a million years”. Who knew we would be doing the same thing 60 years later in far less time!

It's not a real diamond unless a destitute and desperate native of Africa has risked his life and health working in mud and filth to gather it for you.

Of course it’s a real diamond. Saying that a synthetic diamond is not a real diamond is rather like saying that a cultured pearl is not a real pearl. And look at what happened to the price of natural pearls except for the very top end of the market after the development of cultured pearls .... And that is what I predict for mined diamonds - small ones - the odd carat or two - will become pretty much worthless, especially if they are flawed and have inclusions once the market settles - so if you think that ring is an investment for your retirement fund or a nest egg for a rainy day .... now, on the other hand, if you can afford a thirty carat canary diamond, especially one with an interesting provenance .... rather like paintings isn’t it? Buy something for a couple of grand and it’s basically a little extravagance. Buy something for a couple of million and you might just double your money.

How quaint. The very same corporation which carved out swaths of Africa for strip mining over centuries now wants to produce laboratory-grade stones (which are actually far superior in quality thanks to technological advancements) and turn their plundered fortune from blood diamonds into something a bit more sterile. It must feel nice for all of these corporate people to finally repent for their collective malfeasance.

End of the diamond business!

Nothing says romance quite like a De Beers chemically engineered diamond which could be “used for industrial purposes” if one ever finds him/herself in a pinch or a bind. The best thing about De Beers was their commercial in which they used Karl Jenkins’ first movement of the suite “Palladio”, which was inspired by Andrea Palladio and used in the concerto grosso style (sorry, couldn’t help myself – music major in college). Thanks NYT for an enlightening and illuminating article.

Save the money you'd be spending on pretty rocks for something you'd really enjoy. The only reason diamonds are as expensive as they are is decades of false marketing and a global price-fixing scheme. If you need pretty rocks for whatever reason, cubic zirconia or moissanite is cheaper and works just fine.

This is one of the industry's largest players trying to convince its users of what they ought to believe in. Hardly a winning long term approach. Now let us imagine this: several well financed startups doing custom made, personalized diamonds for millions of online shoppers. Top quality, priced like smartphones, amazon prime type of delivery. It will eventually happen.

You don't have to be a jeweler to know that diamonds, and exclusively diamonds, have been inflated far beyond their real value by De Beers using brilliant market, and, for decades, keeping supply low. In other words, unlike other gems and precious metals, the moment you buy a diamond, if you try to turn around and sell you'll be lucky to get even 1/10th of its cost back. They are a simply dreadful investment. Synthetic gemstones have been around a long time. Virtually every high-end watch, starting around $700 or so on up Ferrari-priced wrist pieces ALL use synthetic sapphire for their crystals and clear ("skeleton") back plates. High school class rings have had synthetic rubies since the late 1960's, ruby being a red sapphire. They are chemically identical. But diamonds (again, marketing) have been given a magic and mystery that they don't merit. And now there are successful modern alchemists who, unlike their medieval counterparts, CAN regularly make precious materials en masse. It's far, far harder to make Gold, a fundamental element, than a Diamond, a carbon construct.

I’d buy one and I own maybe a dozen or so pieces of jewelry total. I think Diamonds are beautiful, and I’m all in support of lab made ones lowering the prices. I’d LOVE it even more if this led to the point where I could buy a diamond edged chef’s knife as a legacy heirloom.

I think DeBeers is entering the artificial diamond in industry to maintain monopolistic control of diamonds generally. Today in highly technical industries, monopolistic control is maintained through what are called "patent thickets." A patent thicket is ownership of thousands of technical patents on a given subject. If some competitor arises, you file a suit claiming that this company is violating one of your patents. No one can possibly be sure that this is true because there are thousands of these processes and each one must be separately litigated. The object is to impose high legal costs on competitors and force them to pay you to do what they're doing. If the competitor beats the court case you reach into your thicket of patents and repeat. I suspect DeBeers is doing artificial diamonds to make a buck, sure, but mainly to establish a foothold in the artificial diamond industry is a step to building its monopolistic patent thicket.

Hasn't the diamond market always been a false market of sorts? Do diamonds, even large, dinner plate size nearly flawless ones have any real value?

DeBeers can see the writing on the wall with synthetic diamonds and are out to undercut, put out of business, or purchase the other synthetic diamond manufacturers and then set synthetic diamond prices just like they have controlled and set real diamond prices...by controlling supply.

I love this: “... the weight and seriousness of a real diamond...” Oh please. Whether a stone came from a mine or a test tube, it’s all marketing. Someone has something to sell, and they want you to want it badly. It’s amazing to me that people don’t see this.

You have to give these guys credit. They've made billions over the decades from one of the most successful marketing schemes ever devised. But this move has desperation written all over it. Now that the monopoly of old has finally died, De Beers has to play by the same rules as everyone else. They've chosen to take a risky leap of faith and open the floodgates themselves, presumably hoping for a first-mover advantage. I don't think it'll save them. Count the days until Amazon decides to setup a jewelry subsidiary and PrimeJewelry begins to churn out chemically perfect diamonds by the millions.

“chemical vapor deposition, which uses low pressure in a vacuum filled with gases...” - Oxymoron Alert! No such thing as a vacuum filled with gases. Is deBeers gaslighting us?

Wearing diamonds and other expensive jewelry demonstrates who you are and how you think. Take that any way you like.

“A diamond is forever,” until it goes up in 'smoke' or more accurately CO2 or graphite. Interesting that De Beers claims the new man made diamonds essentially cost as much to make as natural diamonds are to mine while they will sell the man made stuff will be sold for a fraction of other faux stones and less than the natural stones. Think of the profit margin of the natural stones. I guess profits are forever.

Natural diamonds are mined by abusing African workers. These are so-called blood diamonds. Buyers of synthetic diamonds can have a clean conscience and pay less at the same time.

Brilliant strategy by DeBeers...debase the synthetic competition. NYT also gave them the money quote at the end to wrap up the article. Expect DeBeers advertising dollars to now flow...ha.

I found the article interesting. But this statement makes no sense: "...in a vacuum filled with gases..."

Perhaps, just perhaps, the entire DeBeers marketing scam about having to buy diamonds . . . from them . . . at stupid high prices . . . is the only way to "show" certain emotions will die a horrible, screaming death.

DeBeers doesn't know it yet, but its days are numbered. This article should have reported on the CVD manufacturing process, which produces extremely high quality synthetic diamonds. Gemologists require extremely sensitive equipment to detect this type of diamond; your local jeweler cannot. As this process scales up and more companies learn how to produce them, in a decade or so, the price of diamond manufacturing will have tanked. And so will the price of diamonds.

Ah, now the bloom is officially off the rose. Of course a diamond is a diamond, whether man or nature made. I can't wait for the feats of linguistic legerdemain DeBeers and other will come up with to rationalize the prices of mined diamonds and the blood and toil required to get them. It almost feels like they shooting themselves in the foot on this one.

At last a practical way to sequester our excess carbon!

It has been possible for several years to make a diamond from a dead dog. A company offered the service for those who wish to memorialize deceased loved ones, including humans. Through a proprietary process they would extract the carbon from the remains and put it in a high pressure, high temperature press and make a diamond out of it. They could make a diamond from a jar of peanut butter, but it is a different process described in the article.

The real problem raised by this article (if it is accurate) is that DeBeers will be dumping lab created diamonds on the market under the premise that their value will go down over the years. If those prices are low enough, they’ll be putting the other lab diamond manufacturers out of business and cornering that market. On another note, I can’t believe how much misinformation is in these comments! As someone that works in the industry, they are glaring. I hope times readers can distinguish.

Signet Jlrs (Jared, Sterling, Zales, Helzberg, etc) has invested much energy in ensuring the marketing of conflict free (blood) diamonds and more importantly, in light of this article, ensuring that their vendors test and guarantee that their supply chain does not contain any lab-created stones. I wonder how (if) they will market these new products, integrate them at the point of sale, and deal with their vendors.

In the end this will kill the industry. And thats a good thing. Probably in 5 years we will be 3-printing our own.

I love my Biron emerald. Synthetics are truly gorgeous.

It's only a matter of time before the artificially high prices of natural diamonds collapse as a flood of technically superior lab-made stones enter the market. C'est la vie!

This is absolutely devious. People are just beginning to realize that synthetic diamonds are exactly the same as natural ones, and that is going to cut into their market domination, especially in regard to engagement rings. So before the general population catches on, they're getting out ahead of it and marketing the synthetics as a child's gift, not something for serious adults. Brilliant and underhanded.

Diamonds are a total scam. I can't tell the difference between naturally mined and CZs,so why should I pay for it? Even gemologists can't tell the difference because they are structurally identical. I wonder if DeBeers will put a signature "flaw" in their lab diamonds so they can tell them apart?

De Beers is taking the Chinese approach "covfefe" railed about so often: if you can't hoard your goods and monopolize the market, dump them on it. Natural diamonds would be vastly cheaper too, were it not for De Beers' hideous hoarding. In Cablevision's heyday here, they used their blatant cable monopoly to raise prices and used the Dolans' blatant stadium monopoly to air ads to stop the West Side Stadium. When Verizon finally muscled onto our block with FiOS, THEN Cablevision started knocking on doors and offering deals, before getting bought by Altice. It's why I loathe the former even more than the honorary birthplace of FCC occupant [un-Fit to Print] Pie. De Beers has been the world's Cablevision of diamonds, the Hare asleep until the Tortoise at long last overcomes the Hare's lawyers and (price- and otherwise-)fixers to outmaneuver and outmarket them, after which they take even MORE advantage of their patently illegal monopoly. It's reason #36493765 we need a strong, sane government to regulate these non-"market"s and reward white-collar criminals with JAIL. But in Hannityland, socialism is bad. Yeah.

The real thing always means more than man made regardless of content while buying a capitalist’s invention of value.

Diamonds are not rare. They are warehoused by De Beers, which completely controls and distributes them to the entire world, determining availability and fixing its price. If that isn’t the very definition of a cartel I don’t know what is. That child labor and corrupt regimes are funded by the extremely dangerous diamond mining practices simply to perpetuate the lie that these rocks are “rare” is on a par with the fables our conspiracy-theory peddling president regularly spews. Sadly this practice, and the public’s gullibility,?are truly what is “forever.”

I had been wondering when someone would take this step - direct marketing cheap synthetic diamonds. Until now the producers of synthetics had been participating in the cartel (once run directly by DeBeers, but still in existence as a profitable collaboration among diamond producers), pricing their wares at the same price point as the (cartel fixed) prices of natural diamonds. The cartel had enforcement muscle by having the power to keep the diamonds of non-complaint companies out of the regular jewelry supply chain. The obvious solution is direct marketing of diamonds outside this supply chain. I did not expect it would be deBeers itself that would take this step. But it makes sense, since they have dropped control of the cartel, and this allows them to capitalize on this market ahead of any competition, who will now be playing catch up. And natural diamonds are not rare. Since everyone in the world who wants one can buy one they could not possibly be genuinely rare. In fact the 'problem' that the industry faced after the discovery of the diamond pipes in Africa, and then Siberia and Australia is increasing the market to absorb the glut in potential production with their extremely effective century-long marketing campaigns.

Would be nice if the nytimes made a more concerted effort to push back on the repeated marketing claim stated throughout the piece that lab-produced diamonds are in some way not "real". They are chemically, physically, and aesthetically identical to anything you might uncover from a glob of dirt. If you swapped labels, even an expert would likely be none the wiser. There's very little besides technical know-how stopping a "mining" company from just secretly setting up a lab underground and passing off a diamond of one source for the other. The consumer certainly couldn't tell the difference. The distinction only serves the purpose of artificially inflating the profits of the diamond industry for a good which hasn't been genuinely rare for quite some time.

I was under the impression there was a vast supply of diamonds of all qualities kept out of the market by DeBeers et al. and that by the law of supply, diamonds are in fact mostly worthless.

This is an interesting article, but it doesn't answer the fundamental question as to whether a professional gemologist can reliably distinguish between a natural diamond and a synthetic diamond.

The distinction between “manufactured” diamonds and “real diamonds” will soon disappear. Manufacture diamonds are real diamonds. Experts distinguish between manufactured diamonds and diamonds dug from mines by noting manufactured diamonds have greater luminosity and fewer defects. People are fools to pay higher prices for lower quality diamonds.