If you can create the exact same rough/uncut synthetic diamond, and therefore can deterministically reproduce the same cut on each diamond, then the decision of how to cut that diamond becomes intellectual property and is potentially copywritable.
If de Beers really can't hold back the synthetic market, they'll find a way to take it over, and legally-enforced monopolies sure isn't a bad strategy.
The most important commercial cut (the brilliant) was described in Marcel Tolowsky's 1919 book Diamond Design, so would not be copyrightable without some tremendous legal gymnastics. De Beers could dream up some "improvement" to the brilliant cut and trademark it, but there really isn't much room for improvement. The cut that Tolowsky described is very, very close to the mathematical ideal for brilliance and fire. Most of the later optimisations in diamond modelling are in the public domain.
Admittedly their marketing scheme is under a little more pressure with the various articles about their "interesting" past and price fixing schemes, but that's a drop in the bucket compared to their decades of propaganda.
They will find some way, openly or through any back channel they can find or manufacture, to control as much as they can. Plus or minus further monitoring and exposes.
I'm with you so far.
A more realistic option is use nanoscale etching to get unique colors. Much like those blue butterfly wings that don't use pigment.
If de Beers wants to patent and copyright some bizarre foamy cut of a diamond that does some exotic thing, that's fine, but it's not going to be "a diamond ring" as most people think of them.
> Indeed, diamond jewelers claim that silicon carbide (SiC) has "excess fire" as it has greater dispersion than diamond. SiC has a greater index of refraction, which improves the properties of total-internal-reflection as well!
As an investor you probably know this, but for the benefit of everyone else, Moissanite is a marketing term for (crystalline) silicon carbide.
Similarly to how sapphire is a special term for crystalline aluminum oxide, but the word "sapphire" has a bit more tradition behind it.
Clear crystalline aluminum oxide you’d generally just call corundum (or aluminum oxide if you’re not feeling fancy), but that doesn’t market as well when you’re making watch faces and camera lenses out of it, so I guess we’re calling that sapphire now too.
TLDR: Gemstone naming seems a bit super arbitrary and marketing driven (not that I’m an expert on the subject)
Many famous historical "rubies" are not corundum but spinel; they were called rubies because "ruby" was the term for any red gemstone.
"Moissanite" is purely marketing, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Prince%27s_Ruby
> The Black Prince's Ruby is a large, irregular cabochon red spinel weighing 170 carats (34 g)
> It wasn't until 1783 that spinels were differentiated from rubies.
For some people, geologists in particular, there is a romance to the formation of a natural diamond due to heat and pressure within the earth. That's great too!
[1] Look at your high-efficiency LED lights to find some SiC in your house. Thanks, Cree and others!
De Beers relies on the fact that ordinary people don't understand diamonds aren't very valuable. After all, the diamonds they see sold by De Beers are expensive, so...?
De Beers plucks a $50 diamond from the mines, charges $5000 for it in jewellery and says that's symbollic of True Love, or whatever nonsense people believe.
But the people making diamond cutting saws do not care about True Love, so they are already buying whatever is cheapest, and they won't pay more than $10 for $10 of diamonds. To them that $50 diamond is worth... $50.
De Beers new plan is to make $50 synthetic diamonds, brand them, get across to consumers how these aren't "real" diamonds (hurting synthetic producers), that they're more "I wanna get into your knickers" than "True Love" and charge say $500 for them to emphasise that they're worse than its $5000 mined diamonds.
That makes no difference to the diamond cutting saw people, they still just want diamonds for their purely mechanical properties, and they'll continue to pay $10 for $10 of little diamonds.
De Beers hopes that this drives the synthetic diamond competition out of their market, and allows it to go back to charging $5000 for a $50 diamond in jewellery. The industrial market operates on a rational basis, there's no profit for De Beers there, it's all about the silly people paying $5000 to signal "True Love".
About flammability... Technically it is flammable. If you heat it enough, it will react with oxygen. Steel will melt way before that point, I would be it would burn before that point too.
Considering this, I don't think this is going to bring about the Diamond Age unfortunately.
Diamonds, despite being very hard, are also very brittle. They'll likely crack much more easily than Gorilla Glass (another hard material that is hard to scratch).
Platinum has very low reactivity so it doesn't rust, corrode, whatever easy, unlike the others. That's why it's considered valuable, because it looks almost the same after a lot of time.
Neither of those metals becomes structurally weaker in any meaningful way over time due to oxygen exposure.
All of this is to say that as a "Symbol of lasting love" every-shiny platinum jewelry seems to make some sense.
A clear anodization finish leads to "bright aluminum" - the natural shine is absolutely preserved. Natural oxidization on the other hand does dull the metal.
Yes, all forms of aluminum look different than steel. Gold and platinum do have the advantage of being homogenously non-oxidizing. But I think anodized aluminum is a great alternative with many advantageous properties for jewelry (low cost, wide variety of beautiful colors, high strength/weight ratio, low density, non-allergenic). I'm not sure why it's used so infrequently - perhaps because of the connection with aluminum cans and thus the image of "cheap"/"disposable"?
So what? But they do melt. And you can't eat Titanium or Aluminum. We would starve to dead soon without Pt/Rh
Srsly no one cares if a stone is real or not.
Personally, I just didn't even bother buying an engagement ring (or wedding ring for that matter) because it's a "tradition" that means literally absolutely nothing to me. My husband doesn't care that I don't want jewelry and he prefers to not wear a wedding ring too. So I guess we are happy being "less stupid."
Even if its a "charitable gift" on the seller's part, it saves one family from the suffering of buying a diamond.
> it's a "tradition" that means literally absolutely nothing to me.
Please preach to all the impressionable young women you know.
The idea someone would worry replacing expensive trinkets with cheaper but similar looking trinkets might damage your marriage is extremely foreign to me! I can say that much at least!
Plus I don't know many impressionable young women these days because I'm approaching 40 and the majority of my friends are already married or no longer impressionable. :)
The synthesis process for the giant corundum boules used to make lenses and windows and such is pretty cool, too.
> "Synthetic diamonds, which can be produced in about 500 hours, share the same physical, chemical and optical characteristics as natural stones. But they are not nearly as valuable."
This "article" is an advertisement. This bullshit statement seals it. Value is demand driven. The only way for DeBeers to force mined diamonds to sell for more than grown diamonds is with relentless marketing to make people think there is a meaningful difference. And there is. Mined diamonds have historically resulted in a lot of human misery to bring the stones to market, whereas grown diamonds use some electricity and can come from any industrial park.
I understand the value of an heirloom that symbolizes one's progenitor's marriage. Presumably, that is how the ring tradition originated, and why the durability of diamond is a significant selling point for that use case. But I don't think rings are well-suited to this purpose now and would rather leave some other trinket behind, well aware that the true legacy of the progenitors lives on through the posterity.
I remember an article years ago that went into detail about De Beers' manipulation of the market, and how change from "larger is better" to "clearer is better" happened just as a large mine outside of De Beers control opened that had quite a few large diamonds coming from it on a regular basis. That same article made some assertions about the secondary market being somewhat manipulated, IIRC, but this was close to a decade ago, so sourcing it might be hard, and I'm also unsure how accurate it was at this point. I think it was about how modern incarnation of idea of giving rings for marriage was also largely manipulated by De Beers.
This issue is squarely in the women feminists' court, and (for the most part) they haven't taken up the cause to stop supporting this evil system that hurts both men and women.
I've looked and I can't find any.
I don't know if they actually do this but I imagine if you sell your ring to a jeweler they can send it off for the band to be melted down the stone to be polished and re-set so the resulting ring is resold as "new."
Modern high-quality synthetic materials, whether in gemstones or other uses, have so much to offer in fashion innovation. Indeed, diamond jewelers claim that silicon carbide (SiC) has "excess fire" as it has greater dispersion than diamond. SiC has a greater index of refraction, which improves the properties of total-internal-reflection as well! (Edit: It is also birefringent, which does require care when choosing a cut, size, and setting)
Cubic zirconia, too, can be stunning. Order a handful of 10-15mm stones and see for yourself. Or, for a little more money, synthetic rubies and sapphires can transform how you think about nature (they're the same crystal, except for differing defects). The real beauty of many stones is in the cut, not the base material. Diamond absolutely has its place, but it is but one in a spectrum of really cool offerings.
It is the rarity of materials that give them cachet, but the physical properties that make them beautiful. Platinum is a boring metal, visually, difficult to distinguish by eye from steels, aluminum, and titanium. The bloom of the commonest flower is far prettier, but we barely notice because they seem so commonplace and ephemeral.
Every one of these materials was born in the heart of a star or in the heat of an astrophysical cataclysm, each just as natural as the next.
Disclaimer/Caution: I've lost (so far) large fractions of small amounts of money betting long on SiC as a business venture.