Item — HN Reader

This article is interesting. I remember in Geology class when our teacher explained that you could make synthetic diamonds for a fraction of the price of a real diamond. He then asked all the women if they would rather have a natural diamond or a synthetic diamond, and almost all of them raised their hands. He then went on to explain that it was like the difference between natural ice and ice made in a freezer. He asked the question again and almost all the women still voted for natural.

That day I realized the power of the diamond marketing engine.

3 comments

Your teacher was asking the wrong question. Ask these same women if they'd rather have a larger diamond at what would be twice the cost were it not for technology, and they'd probably agree.

If we want to help fix this diamond bullshit, we've got to reframe the discussion. It's not about natural vs synthetic, it's about cultured diamonds vs blood diamonds.

I did a fair amount of research on this when shopping for my wife, and couldn't find any decent sized (say, larger than ~1/2 carat) clear synthetic diamonds. There were some options in yellow or pink, but I didn't find a thriving manufactured diamond industry I thought I would find.

Regardless, even if I had, manufacturers of gem grade diamonds wouldn't need to undercut the price of natural diamonds by much. The cartel has done all the hard work raising the price for them already. Market them at 90% of natural diamonds and reap the rewards.

Agreed. Does anyone know a reliable place to buy man-made diamonds? I never found one during my search.

But your geology teacher wasn't even correct. You can't make synthetic diamonds with similar color characteristics to natural diamonds at a fraction of the price. In fact, colorless synthetic diamonds are more expensive.

Not really true - it's relatively easy to make the diamonds colorless. Biggest difference is that the diamonds tend to have crystal structures that are a little rare in natural diamonds, since they grow very quickly compared to natural diamonds.

The price gap in natural vs cultured diamonds in the colorless range is far too narrow to make it a viable business model. So the effort, and profit, is made in the color end of the spectrum. Yellow and blue are the most popular, and the price gap is significant.