Yep. I've seen lots of marketing spam on my elevator's "Captivate" box "educating" viewers on colored diamonds and how "natural" impurities make them that way. Very obvious ploy to increase the desirability of mined diamonds.

Off topic, but I'm not sure I got this -- you have advertisements in an elevator?

Yes, we also have these screens in our office elevators. They show the weather, pictures of office views better than yours, and ads. I find the brand name "Captivate" depressingly accurate since you are trapped in a box with it.

I've seen elevators with a mounted TV that's playing ads.

(I believe I've only seen them in hotels)

I have these too at work

First time I saw them I thought it was some kind of dystopian joke.

Well, the whole point of diamonds is to show off wealth. Natural diamonds and their defects are more expensive and very hard to replicate crystallographically , so they're not doing anything unexpected.

But they are more expensive in many cases because of artificially reduced supply, not because of actual rarity. Now, for a whole bunch of people that makes absolutely no difference (if anyone needs evidence, look at the Birkin Bag, which NPR's Planet Money covered well), but for others it does.

In this case the market needs the average consumer to buy into that status symbol, and enough of them are price conscious that a cheaper alternative that almost nobody can tell is cheaper is quite a draw.

Somebody needs to persuade rich assholes that trying to make the world better is the new trendy way to show off.