Stupidity Watch 1

How Lab Diamonds Destroyed De Beers It’s all about the timing. If you look at the last 10 years of the diamond market, specifically the "Lab Grown" sector, it is impossible to explain the current reality with standard economics. You have a market that held steady for years, then collapsed by 80% in the span of three months, exactly coinciding with a G7 embargo on Russian naturals. The "Russian Lab Diamond" doesn't exist. It is, and always has been, a Russian Treated Natural. The technology they claim is for "growing" stones is actually the technology for laundering them. The standard claim is that 98% to 99% of all diamonds sold in the jewelry industry before lab diamonds were Type 1a or 1b that can contain nitrogen, a little nitrogen tints the diamond yellow so a Type 1a or 1b diamond rated by the GIA as being in the I-J-K range would look distinctly yellow against a stark white background, lots of nitrogen creates the fancy yellow diamond colors. SI ...

      A Summer of diamonds. On June 2nd 2024 it was announced that De Beers, the diamond giant, was getting out of the lab-grown diamond industry with their LightBox brand that they had been running for 6 years, and that they were slashing the prices of lab grown diamonds from $1,500 a carat down to $500 a carat, and when I went and looked at the LightBox website I found that they were selling near-white diamonds. This was a surprise to me because the last time I checked around 10 years ago there were no near-white or white lab grown diamonds. Since the 1990s people have been talking about lab grown diamonds, and there were always Russian startups talking about how they could do it, but it never panned out.      Apparently the problem was that they were trying to do it too quickly, they were trying to grow diamonds in the span of a day or less by manipulating the pressure, the temperature, changing ways to apply the pressure, changing everything except for ...