We made our pillory out of sustainable lumber!
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Thank God for advertising that tells me how to value this new product. I’d hate to have to rely on my own opinion. /s
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Don’t women love diamonds for their wide range of industrial applications?
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Diamonds are actually very common and should be very cheap except for the artificially restricted market.
The real rare stones are the colored stones such as rubie and emeralds.
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Aren’t these the same clowns that tried to make diamonds with dark inclusions to be sold as “chocolate” diamonds? I swear these folks are pathetic. We can make synthetic diamonds which can be used for so many things (where are my diamond heat sinks for my fancy PC rig?) but they can’t just let go of the fact my generation isn’t interested in jewelry the same way my parents were.
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A friend of mine has always “joked” that instead of carats, they should measure the worth of diamonds in dead Africans to distinguish them. Still seems to be perversely true…
That’s the kindest way of putting it. Diamonds are worthless. Diamonds are a scam.
Although that pixie dust never extended to resale value, so I’m not sure what’s really changed for the consumer…
Even sold cheaply, it’s still profitable, though. I think this is more a case where they’re trying to create a tiered system where everyone is convinced “artificial” diamonds are worth less (worthless).
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Marketing.
DeBeers started pushing “a diamond is forever”, Hollywood product placement, and the vile “two months salary” convention back in the late 1930s (when folks clearly had a bunch of disposable income to throw around).
This marketing has endured for a very long time and become ubiquitous to the point where people buy things like diamond engagement rings simply because they feel as if they are expected to do so.
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Dirty open secret: Virtually all Russian “mined” diamonds are actually lab grown; and have been for decades. DeBeers has been selling them as mined since the '90s.
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Perhaps also fueled by peer pressure as opposed to a real desire driven by expectation?
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It’s a hell of a drug.
So, you can advise me on which impurities to add to my lab-made diamonds to avoid detection? 
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Problem is that millennials don’t buy enough jewelry as it is so their business model is becoming harder to sustain even with state subsidies. Artificial diamonds are already pushing them out of the industrial markets (ex. lasers) so they’re desperate to do anything and everything to prevent their demise. I personally will drink to their ending when that day comes.
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“affordable fashion jewelry that may not be forever, but is perfect for right now”
So, a potential co-branding opportunity with hook-up apps?
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True. What I was thinking is that they are trying to make them cheap enough to make them unprofitable for competitors and then once there aren’t any competitors create the tiered system you mentioned. This is DeBeers, the monopoly example par excellance.
That would be extremely nice, so I hope so:
Not unlike gold(though more extreme because ‘correctly arrange cheap carbon, receive diamond’ is less challenging to do cost effectively than the nuclear chemistry required to fabricate gold) diamonds have some quite interesting properties for a variety of applications, all presently overshadowed by their decorative value; except in niches where the cost is worth it.
Their thermal conductivity, say, is astonishingly high(something like 5 times that of copper; and in a reasonably decent resistor); their various cutting and abrasive applications are well known; their ability to be semiconductors when suitably doped is intriguing(particularly in light of their thermal conductivity); and I’m sure there are a variety of other neat tricks I’m not thinking of.
Their motives for flooding the synthetic diamond market would presumably be something along the lines of “create consumer association with cheap, lousy, costume jewelry”; but you don’t have to have good intentions to make a useful engineering material more readily available.
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I suspect that, especially before very high end light sources became so common and cheap that we embed batteries of them in shoddy consumer cable modems to inhibit sleep, the brilliance you can get out of a suitably cut diamond was an object of some interest. As with gold, “visually striking + hard to duplicate by other means” seems to be a popular combination for ascribing otherwise bafflingly high values to things.
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I wonder if it’s because millennials don’t have the disposable income (thanks to monstrous housing and college loan costs) or if they’re just not buying into De Beer’s marketing-brainwashing. (I hope it’s the latter.)
They’re doing it directly with this move, though - their man-made diamonds are being sold for a lot less, creating the two sales tiers. I think previous man-made diamonds were being sold at prices closer to those of natural diamonds, with the sales pitch being that they were guaranteed ethical/conflict free. With the two tiers, they can maintain artificially high prices for natural diamonds, while having separate pricing for man-made diamonds. Which both creates a new market for those who weren’t going to pay the inflated prices while simultaneously helps develop pricing expectations that might prevent other “artificial” diamond makers from under-cutting their natural diamond business.
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