Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and vastly cheaper than mined diamonds. Beating nature took decades of hard graft and millions of pounds of pressure.

My personal take is that diamonds are boring and fraught. Not just because of the violence... From De Beer using their once 90% monopoly on supply to control prices, to their incredibly successful marketing campaign 200 years ago which singlehandedly created the diamond engagement ring market, to their addon campaign that arbitrarily introduced how much of your income you should spend on a ring. It's a story of cynical capitalism, devoid of romance.

So I guess I can't directly answer your question as diamond jewelry isn't something I'd buy, but my understanding is that people are usually concerned with how much they're spending as a proxy for quality, rather then deeply investigating the quality for themselves.

I liked what the article said - that at this point the symbolism of commitment around a diamond ring is fully embedded in the culture and isn't going anywhere. Because I completely subscribe to the notion of it being a bunch of capitalist bullshit from a monopoly and have done for a decade or two.

That being said, I've semi-followed the concept of lab grown diamonds over the years, passionately awaiting for my millennial cohort to destroy yet another industry with our buying preferences!

I've checked in once or so every couple years and still been saddened by the prices of lab grown diamonds that are pre-cut into shapes. Now, I get market forces. All you need to do is under-cut mined diamonds by a little bit and you can win.

It was refreshing to search online tonight after reading this historical piece about the science behind ma -made diamonds and see that it has genuinely changed finally. You can buy an unset lab grown diamond for < $200 USD. You can also buy massive carat multiple thousand dollar lab grown diamonds preset in a ring.

I've had multiple partners in my life, some that cared about a traditional engagement ring and some that haven't.

I've never ever thought, myself, that I would want or accept some nonsense about spending a fixed portion of my yearly income on a ring if I were to marry. But I've also accepted in my years that if it's important to my partner to have that symbol, that's okay. I think a lot of folks are absolutist about whether it's okay or not, and I've even been that guy.

I've also grown in my career, and I can look at the prices of some of these trinkets and not get angry. That's been a nice feeling for awhile. But I'll end with this: if a couple isn't on the same page on the financial feasibility and acceptability of something as trivial as a symbol of their commitment ... That's not a basis upon which to form a legal contract.

The marriage industry is a bunch of bullshit. I've been to enough weddings and seen enough divorces over financial irreconcilable differences that I simply grant my sympathies to anyone that experienced a divorce over such circumstances.

I strongly support that decimation of the diamond cartels in favor of lab-grown diamonds.

In the end, all that matters is that there's pressure from the top as well as from consumers at the bottom to change the status quo. Changing the status quo is a net good for so many reasons and in a superficial way, why shouldn't you be able to pay less for a superior quality (and ethically clean) product without social stigma? Lab-made diamonds should be available to those who want them and really the monopolies on diamond mining should've been undone long ago to prevent a lot of violence and human-trafficking, or for those who aren't into that then to allow for a competitive market to develop.

In the end, much like with plant-based protein options, we'll never really get to a point where there's total conversion from one thing to the other. But as people have options, they'll be able to make choices that change the market. That should encourage the real-diamonds folks as well as the meat-from-animals folks, because in the future there will be more for them and there will be less demand when these alternatives are normalized. More for them.

By merit of being here, in this tiny, self-selected, obscure corner of the English speaking Internet, we are, not possibly, but most definitely not in the kind of circles where rocks and signifiers of their ilk have value in a way that escapes our comprehension.

I don't want a "fake" diamond no matter what

This is where you get into quality stuff.

If you feel that synthetic diamonds (or gems in general) are not for you, then yes you are likely going to be paying a premium for size, clarity, and cut.

These things are absolutely relevant to the population? When you think of a gemstone you almost always think of something with vibrant and clear color or a decent size and cut. Most diamonds are much the same.

There's a lot of external reasons diamonds cost what they do (some are no longer relevant but over cited), but yeah if you don't want to get synthetic, you probably at least care about the visual appearance of the stone, so yes you care about "quality"

I think in your examples, the part that makes them special are the craftsmanship that went into them. It's the same for me.

Ultimately, anything we give as a gift is just a clump of atoms, we're not using them for any actual work, and we usually don't plan on reselling gifts, so the whole concept of them being valuable or not to the wider world is basically meaningless in my eyes. What makes them valuable is dependant on the individual person, and for me, knowing that a great deal of skilled labor went into creating something makes it more valuable.

Ultimately if a nugget of crystalized carbon was crystalized by sitting under billions of tons of rocks for a long time, or in a machine has no bearing on how valuable I find it. The work that went into crafting the ring it's set in, cutting the gem, and setting it matters a lot more to me.

Similarly, a crappily screwed together chair made from endangered zebrawood is a lot less valuable to me than an expertly joined and finished chair made from southern yellow pine.

Art is intrinsically valuable, clumps of atoms are not.

I can't speak for anyone else, and I don't own any jewellry other than a gold wedding band, but it's not the industrial mining that would give it the character in my eyes, it's the sheer pre-history. A naturally formed diamond is potentially billions of years old, at the very least tens of millions. And by virtue of being at a depth that can be mined it has traveled for miles through the earth's crust before a human ever saw it. I don't really care for diamonds visually or culturally, hence not owning any, but I definitely feel the geology gives naturally formed diamonds more meaning.

Interesting look at it. I knew that diamonds are used in industrial applications, for instance bore drills, but I didn't know it was also used in electronics.