South African diamond mines are closing due to weak sales and lab-grown stones • Hacker News Board

Re: South African diamond mines are closing due to weak sales and lab-grown stones

#171

Post by mcv » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 10:18 PM UTC

msm_ wrote: post #163

watwut wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is ok and entirely valid regulation. It is ok to not want the industries to rewrite meanings of words.

What is a burger? If it looks like a burger and tastes like a burger I'm fine with calling it a burger. Nobody complains about halloumi burgers. Why is "coconut milk" OK, but "soy milk" is not? Blood sausage has nothing similar with the regular sausage. Hey, there are people who put pineapple on dough and call it "pizza"[1]. I agree that industries should not be able to intentionally mislead people, but informing cus…

Requiring pork, beef, etc to come from the actual animal sounds completely reasonable to me, and although I do like vegetarian products that try to taste like them, they should also be easily identifiable as not being the actual meat.

But burger, sausage and nugget are just about the shape. Restricting that only to meat is silly. Veggie burgers have been around for multiple decades. There's absolutely nothing misleading about that.

Also consider the many products that are something-flavoured (often fruit, but also other things) without containing the actual thing, yet clearly marketed with the thing they don't contain. Or fake chocolate. Pizza containing mostly fake cheese. Is that not far more misleading?

Re: South African diamond mines are closing due to weak sales and lab-grown stones

#172

Post by ammo1662 » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 2:24 AM UTC

msisk6 wrote: post #102

kstrauser wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally find lab grown much more beautiful, in that they’re an amazing accomplishment of mankind’s science and technology. So a tree got squeezed underground until it turned into a crystal? Cool, I guess, but big deal. Humans learned enough about how matter works to recreate those conditions at industrial scale? That’s amazing! I’d much rather wear a monument to our cleverness than a dinosaur mashed under a rock…

I've never been that interested in gemstones of any sort, but my understanding (from geology classes decades ago) is that natural diamonds on the surface of the earth result from some rather exotic processes. First, they form deep down in the mantle around 100 miles down. The only way they get up here is through rare and violent high velocity eruption events that bring mantle material up to the surface. Most are very…

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Re: South African diamond mines are closing due to weak sales and lab-grown stones

#173

Post by cjbgkagh » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 2:36 AM UTC

mcv wrote: post #117

cjbgkagh wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the privet to luxury was due to quartz watches taking their core business, and now Chinese superclones are in the early days of threatening their luxury business. At a certain point it’s hard to care about the residual difference.

I've heard that even experts can't tell those superclones apart from the originals anymore. Are they equally reliable?

I wouldn't know

Re: South African diamond mines are closing due to weak sales and lab-grown stones

#174

Post by andrewflnr » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 4:11 AM UTC

kstrauser wrote: post #74

andrewflnr wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a more honest and realistic take than most on the thread. Note that either way it's the provenance behind the gem that you find attractive, much more than any instantaneous quality of it like chemistry, lack/presence of defects, etc. It's the story.

It’s not only that. Lab diamonds are superior in every way I’ve heard of. The emotional appeal of their provenance is the sole remaining reason I’ve heard people claim that slave diamonds are superior. I contend that they’re worse there, too. In fact, the only reason I can imagine someone preferring mined diamonds is that they genuinely value the human suffering that goes into them.

I think it's more ignorance, only sometimes willful, than actually enjoying human suffering. Then again, voluntary human suffering is part of the story that sells art, so there might be some of that in there too.

Re: South African diamond mines are closing due to weak sales and lab-grown stones

#175

Post by pseudohadamard » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 5:47 AM UTC

hn_submit wrote: post #48

The market for natural diamonds will cease to exist when you can buy lab-grown versions for a couple bucks. They wanted to differentiate between natural and lab-grown versions with the former being much more expensive. But that train has left the station since there's little to no difference in quality between the two. In fact, I once predicted there'd be huge scams where lab-grown ones would be repackaged and sold a…

Every few years, going back to at least the 1980s, there's some new feature-length article about how $new_thing or $different_old_thing will make de Beers irrelevant within the next few years. I'm not old enough to know about earlier ones but I wouldn't be surprised if it went back to at least the 1950s and the flood of Soviet diamonds.

de Beers is still around, and doing well, having taken care of every threat that's come along, including the Soviet diamond glut. Some of the publications that speculated on their imminent demise are no longer around.