Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined

worksinprogress.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 511 posts

Re: Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined

#191

Post by onlypassingthru »

justinparus wrote: post #145
djtango wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because synthetic diamonds are indistinguishable to the naked eye (IIRC a trained eye with a magnifying glass can spot faint nitrogen impurities which are characteristic of natural diamonds) the thing you're really paying for is the piece of paper, the certificate. You're not really paying for carbon allotrope. So it's less like gold which is fungible and a more natural form of money. Diamonds feel more like an NFT..…

Agreed. So much so I wonder if they engrave all lab-grown ones, so they don’t get mixed up easily with mined and ruin their price.

If I'm not mistaken, diamonds get etched with a serial number when they get graded so you can look up the history later.

Re: Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined

#192

Post by trhway »

Animats wrote: post #105

That's a good article. The whole history is there. The commercial side has made huge progress, too. Look up "diamond making machine" on Alibaba. You can buy a high-pressure, high temperature six sided press for about US$200,000. A chemical vapor deposition machine is about the same price. De Beers, the diamond cartel, has an R&D operation, Element Six. They sell synthetic diamonds for lasers and other exotic applicat…

>diamond windows for lasers 10cm across

sounds like may be soon we'll see diamond wafers for the chips (especially as the price of processed wafer from a fab increases, the cost of the source wafer itself is becoming less important) Add to that X-ray lithography, and the Moore's Law will continue for quite a while.

Re: Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined

#193

Post by fennecbutt »

hammock wrote: post #127
Animats wrote: post #105

That's a good article. The whole history is there. The commercial side has made huge progress, too. Look up "diamond making machine" on Alibaba. You can buy a high-pressure, high temperature six sided press for about US$200,000. A chemical vapor deposition machine is about the same price. De Beers, the diamond cartel, has an R&D operation, Element Six. They sell synthetic diamonds for lasers and other exotic applicat…

Incredible, great info. We are now living in the Diamond Age.

Where's my magic book then. And my atomic fabbers! Lemme 3d print a phone.

Re: Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined

#194

Post by LtdJorge »

Balgair wrote: post #185
biomcgary wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diamond eyeglasses? The lenses would still be cheaper than the Luxottica frames.

I know this is a bit of a throwaway comment, but I'd never thought of diamonds for eyeglasses. And, honestly, that would be really really cool. Yeah, there are other materials with better refractive indices and that are tougher and cheaper and dont shatter. Sure. But if we can get diamonds down to something that could be made into lenses for the (very high end) retail market, man, that would just be so cool !

I'd rather use the diamonds to manufacture the laser machines that do eye surgery and remove glasses lol

Re: Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined

#195

Post by danielodievich »

Synthetic diamonds from "cremains" (ash from cremation) have been a thing for a while. That ash is mostly carbon with other elements. "Wear your grandma" is thankfully not a slogan. My teenager children's recent answers to "would you want this" were "ewww gross absolutely not".

Re: Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined

#196

Post by iteratethis »

vlachen wrote: post #165
batch12 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now we just need artificial diamonds that are flawed enough to be indistinguishable from real diamonds.

Just like the "distressed wood" trend caused a booming business of making products that all have the exact same "distressed" pattern. History doesn't repeat, but it certainly rhymes.

I know somebody that works in a wooden floor business. They take perfect new wood and move it through a cylinder that drops pebbles on it. They sell it for 2-3 times the price of undamaged wood.

Re: Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined

#197

Post by [deleted] »

murukesh_s wrote: post #46
jajko wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They never had any value, apart from specialized ie glass cutting tool. Only when DeBeers realized they could push some fictious heavy marketing 'to prove your worth to woman you are asking to marry' for those shiny stones nobody wanted to buy, people who didn't know better got manipulated into buying them. They are supposedly very common in universe, and probably in deeper Earth too. Correction is healthy and benefi…

>They never had any value They had immense value in ancient world. They were valued much more than gold - due to their rarity. Southern India was the only known source for mining diamonds in ancient world [1]. They were used as currency and was valued higher than gold. In fact there were wars fought for diamonds. There is a saying about Koh-i-Noor, one of the most famous Diamond - "If a strong man were to throw four…

[deleted]

Re: Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined

#198

Post by JonChesterfield »

acchow wrote: post #110
gwbas1c wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's based on supply and demand. In 2012, when I was shopping for an engagement ring, a natural 2ct diamond cost $250,000. (I bought a 2ct moissanite for much, much less, and my wife is very happy with it.) When I looked in fall 2023, a natural 2ct diamond cost $20,000. That's a loss of over 90% of value, not counting inflation! (Now the supply of diamonds is much higher, and the demand for natural diamonds is much l…

> also wonder if impurities will become fashionable, just to show that a specific diamond is actually natural and can't be made in a lab. Why can’t you add impurities when manufacturing a diamond? “Doping”

You get them whether you want it or not, at least some of the time. Entropy and so forth. The synthetic ones with worse imperfections are cheaper.

It's probably possible to guess by inspection whether the imperfection properties imply mined vs lab grown, with some level of accuracy.

Source for the existence of imperfections is reading through lists of specific diamonds a few years ago. The synthetic ones didn't vary much in colour but did vary in number and distribution of inclusions.

Re: Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined

#199

Post by acchow »

BeetleB wrote: post #129
xhevahir wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think lavish spending on weddings and engagements is an "American phenomenon," you're badly mistaken. Read up on weddings in India, Armenia, Cambodia, Afghanistan...

While I agree with your point, I also agree with GP's point. The difference between you and him is what you consider "lavish". For many, spending $20K on a wedding is "lavish".

Measuring across countries in a $ figure doesn't quite capture it. I'd use something like percentage of annual disposable income

Re: Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined

#200

Post by dimgl »

poisonborz wrote: post #158
istrice wrote: post #138

I started looking into diamonds two years before I proposed to my now wife and went really down the rabbit hole of the chemistry, history, and marketing behind diamonds. Lab-made was a no brainer, I got a flawless and huge stone for the price I would have paid for a crappy 1ct from DeBeers. My only regret is that whatever I paid for the diamond will still be way over-market in a few years but well, had to get married…

Why and how became diamonds a necessity of marriage in the US? Did your fiancé really expect a diamond, and would have she be disappointed by something that has only worth to you?

Women expect it. It's that simple.
Post reply on HN