How do blood diamonds and artificial diamonds not cancel eachother out?
To keep the prices of diamonds up, the diamond industry has invested heavily in convincing people that artificial diamonds are no good, and only natural diamonds, coming from the industry and properly certified, et al, are worth anything. I’m not sure this is a correct assessment. There is a tremendous push within the created gemstone market led by companies like Chatham to educate customers on the benefits of gemstones grown in labs, and I’m not aware of any ad campaigns from DeBeers or elsewhere trying to undermine this. The reason is that the vast majority of people simply don’t like created gemstones. I sold jewelry for about a decade, and I come from a very, very long line of jewelers. I tried very hard to sell created stones over natural, especially those who didn’t have a lot of cash to spend. But for every ten customers I dealt with, maybe one went for the created stone. Reason was simply that they don’t perceive them as real, as Pastabagel
Wired had an interesting article about synthetic diamonds recently. If you page through they say some things about the problems of current synthetic diamonds (too small, usually have a lot of flaws, basically not-good-for-jewelry). It’s also possible (especially according to the article) that synthetic diamonds will start winning–but this is only if the companies mentioned can get a solid, reliable production of gem-quality diamonds, which is something that hasn’t been possible previously.
I understand the whole market effect of “real” versus “artificial” diamonds. However, when selling blood diamonds, one doesn’t announce “these are blood diamonds”, so, likewise, if a government decided to sell artificial diamonds instead of mined diamonds (and when I say “artificial diamond”, I’m not referring to cubic zirconia, etc., but artificially made true diamonds), there would be no need to announce “these were made in a lab, not dug up”. So I don’t see how that would factor into this. So far, what I’m getting as the primary causes of my not understanding the relationship between the two is that: • I was wrong in assuming that artificially producing diamonds is cheaper than digging them up (thanks, delmoi) • Perhaps I thought so because when people have talked about artificial diamonds being cheaper to produce than digging up real diamonds, they were saying “labour standard adherent diamond digging is more expensive than lab creation”, but when slave labour is used instead, digg
