An End to Mined Diamonds?

DeBeers has already closed a bunch of their mines and sold off their stocks of diamonds (no doubt in an effort to keep prices high).

About damned time.

DeBeers is still evil, but this is good progress.

Good!

How am I going to be able to tell someone I love them and establish the sanctity of marriage without a shiny rock that was mined by slaves? How am I going to buy a woman's love without these things? What if my woman only takes shiny rocks and not credit cards and cash?

I hope car manufacturers don't stop making large engine shiny sport cars because of carbon emissions, slave labor, and thew ability to artificially create them with machines. How will I ever attract a woman then? I guess I will just have to go gay because you can always get a man by sucking dick.

There are tens of trillions of dollars worth of already mined and cut diamonds floating around the world markets. We could cease all non-industrial diamond mining right now and it would take hundreds of years before supply even started to become scarce. The thing with lab created diamonds is that it only appeals to the "green" customer. There just isn't enough of a price difference to justify the cessation of the sale of natural diamonds in favor of lab created diamonds for your average, price conscious, shopper.

If there was a significant price difference, I could see it. But, generally, there's a less than 5% difference in cost between a lab-created diamond and a natural diamond of equal quality. An E, VS1 is going to cost you a mountain of cash whether it's lab-created or natural. There's also the issue of simulants making their way into the market which require expensive testing equipment to detect that only gemological grading labs have.

Pandora makes garbage jewelry anyway. Like that god awful Michael Kohrs garbage, you're buying a brand name, a fashion piece, not a quality piece of jewelry that will last a lifetime.

I thought you just had to wait and see if they ripped someone's head off and spat down their neck?

Jewelry's okay, humans like adornments, we've been fashioning them for millennia, it's the blood money that goes into convincing someone that if they don't buy shiny rock then they don't actually love their partner, and so on. To me, that's the bullshit.

I suspect that the reason the price difference between synthetic and natural diamonds is so close has a lot to do with greed. In the early 00s, Wired published a story about a couple of companies that had created synthetic diamonds that were basically impossible to distinguish from natural and were supposed to be able to be produced for a fraction of what identical natural diamonds were selling for. When their stuff hit the market, it wasn't significantly cheaper than the natural stuff. So, either the folks running the companies (or the VCs backing them) figured that they'd rake in the bucks, or someone from one of the diamond syndicates bought 'em and decided to keep prices high to prop up their monopoly. I will note that the patents on that technology will start expiring soon, and when the patents on 3D printing tech began expiring, we saw an explosion of inexpensive machines hit the market.

From what I've been able to gather, 99% of the jewelry industry are less honorable than the Ferengi to the point that even the Ferengi wouldn't want anything to do with them.

This is extremely simplistic, but there are two basic types of jewelry. Fashion Jewelry and Fine Jewelry. Fashion Jewelry, like the Travel Jewelry category it replaced, is meant to be disposable garbage. But, somewhere along the way someone figured out that you can charge Fine Jewelry prices for Fashion Jewelry if you build a big enough brand (ie Pandora). The quality is still garbage, but you're paying Fine Jewelry prices so the average consumer thinks they're getting a Fine Jewelry piece.

My advice to anyone buying jewelry is to stay away from displays with names on them. If you walked into your preferred jewelry store and you see a tray marked Pandora, or LeVian, or Love's Crossing (that's real hot right now), run. Stay away from it. It's likely a fashion jewelry piece for a fine jewelry price. Like LeVian, they trade on their history and marketing. But, those "chocolate diamonds" are trash. Brown diamonds are industrial diamonds. The industry had a glut of industrial diamonds and LeVian bought them on the cheap, set them in rose gold, and hit it with black rhodium, and sells you a garbage industrial diamond at MORE than a near colorless natural diamond's price.

If you want a real piece of fine jewelry, find a jeweler you trust, with a reputation, and who makes stuff in-house. That will net you an heirloom quality piece of fine jewelry that will last a lifetime at a fair price.

I could make you a rose gold and sapphire ring identical in shape and size to a LeVian piece. It would be 2/3rd's the price of the LeVian piece and be MUCH higher quality. But, people wouldn't buy it because the bag you take home with you doesn't say LeVian.

My point was that there's a shitload of jewelry stores out there that promote themselves as mom-n-pop operations, or that they're somehow more exclusive than the places one finds in malls, but are still owned by the same megacorp.

Personally, were I able to find a woman foolish enough to marry me, I'd not broach the idea of marriage if she suggested that she needed any kind of ring before she found me "worthy." I'd happily make her one, or find one that was ethically sourced, but any woman who thinks that I should cough up a specific amount of my income for a bauble before she'd be willing to shack up with me, isn't someone I'm interested in marrying.

I seem to remember during the 70s that hard liquor manufacturers tried to boost sales by lowering prices. Sales fell. They raised their prices and sales went back up

Me:

That's sort of my gut reaction, but then I remember that I like art, I like having art in my house, and I'm not sure there's that big an empirical difference between them.

Paging @RickDeckard

Oh, wait, that's replicants.

So-called "personal adornment" in general. Jewelry, tattoos, overly contrived hairstyles, all that crap. Meh.

Clothes

This happened with cigarettes too.

If I recall correctly, one brand made a modest reduction in prices compared to their competitor. Cig snobs (which actually exist surprisingly) started seeing that company as the "budget brand" (despite no change in their "quality", as if there's such a thing in store bought cigarettes) and switched to the competitor.

Friend of mine was working in the US in the 80s and used to buy cheap beer, only to be pulled up by his colleagues for it and told "that's nigger beer!". The insinuation being it was cheap and strong (which is why he bought it!) to keep blacks drunk and tractable. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the "liquor snobbery" was closet racism.

We have our own version in the UK with LIDL wine.

So much of human nature summarised in one story.

I have to be honest…. I’m not a big jewelry guy. I was aware of that gif meme on the internet and couldn’t resist posting it. Although I do wear a few pieces of jewelry everyday, I don’t think I’ve ever bought a piece for myself. The women in my life have bought me things that they would like me to wear so I do. I didn’t even wear a watch for the longest time until my kids bought me an Apple Watch and I really love that thing.

I’ve bought jewelry for my Mom when she was alive. I do buy jewelry for my lady on occasions. She loves it. I don’t any practical use for it but I’m a guy. I can’t imagine that some of you guys who think that jewelry is a “stupid concept” haven’t done this at some point for somebody in your life that you respected very much.

Sammy "the Bull" Gravano? Sounds like something he'd do.

Family Guy Italian mob names (dedicated to Don Belucci) - YouTube

My exhusband and his entire family used to buy me jewelry for Christmas or my birthday. We were together for more than 15 years. It's like he never really knew 'me'.

Two Buck Chuck disagrees!