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 as natural ones and that would ruin customers' trust in natural diamonds.
But it now seems that isn't going to happen because customers are voting with their feet and leaving natural diamonds behind.
willsmith72 1 hours ago [-]
> there's little to no difference in quality between the two
Lab grown can be way better quality. To me it was a no-brainer considering the ethical concerns, then add in the cost difference. The only argument I've heard for natural is "I like the imperfections". Sounds like brainwashing to me. They're chemically identical
The mining industry should die
kstrauser 1 hours ago [-]
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.
andrewflnr 49 minutes ago [-]
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.
kstrauser 43 minutes ago [-]
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.
eagerpace 13 minutes ago [-]
Which is absolutely hilarious given they spent decades "teaching" consumers about imperfections and how you can pay more to avoid them!
Loughla 1 hours ago [-]
My spouse lost the main stone on their ring. We were able to get another that was twice the size and WAAAY better clarity and quality for about half of the price of the first one.
It's astonishing that it has taken this long to have this kind of impact.
x0x0 45 minutes ago [-]
there goes their veblen goods...
bsoqk 1 hours ago [-]
> The market for natural diamonds will cease to exist when you can buy lab-grown versions for a couple bucks.
Just like the luxury watches market ceased to exist when you could buy quartz watches for 10 bucks.
cjbgkagh 59 minutes ago [-]
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.
Loughla 1 hours ago [-]
Except in this case, the quartz watches would be better quality than the luxury watches
I'm not sure your analogy has teeth.
literalAardvark 35 minutes ago [-]
The quartz watches are (way) better at time keeping.
And the rest is just a matter of paying for luxury.
The main reason the analogy doesn't really help is that the mechanical watch market absolutely cratered, and it's only being propped up by enthusiasts of cool machines.
Diamonds can't really have that. They've already scammed the general population into using slave diamonds at monopoly prices for 30 years longer than they needed to, but no one is _passionate_ about slave diamonds.
tptacek 16 minutes ago [-]
It's a poor analogy because mechanical watches and quartz watches aren't perfect substitutes and aren't purchased for the same reasons. Everybody's phone keeps better time than a watch; absolute accuracy isn't the exclusive measure.
Lab diamonds and mined diamonds are literally identical products.
tedchs 3 hours ago [-]
> Demand for engagement rings gave thousands of South Africans steady work at De Beers. Now, weak sales and lab-grown stones are taking it away.
So wait, on this Labor Day weekend, it sounds like the WSJ is pro-worker, but only if they're in South Africa?
brookst 2 hours ago [-]
Nah, they’re pro-De Beers
kstrauser 1 hours ago [-]
Given the infamous conditions of diamond mining, to me that reads like “won’t someone think of the jobless slaves?” Someone no longer being forced to slave away in the mines is not exactly a great loss to workers rights.
“De Beers: Because the tears of children make it sparkle!”
delfinom 2 hours ago [-]
At least they aren't blaming millennials still.
MobileVet 1 hours ago [-]
This took way longer than I hoped & expected... the DeBeers cartel in full damage control has really squeezed everything they could from it.
thijson 1 hours ago [-]
I wonder if diamonds become cheap enough, and we are growing the crystal anyway, if we can introduce dopants and get interesting electrical properties.
davidhyde 4 hours ago [-]
Oh shame. The poor devils.
wewewedxfgdf 3 hours ago [-]
Shorter:
"South African diamond mines are closing due to lab-grown stones"
mlmonkey 3 hours ago [-]
I heard once that even if DeBeers stopped all diamond mining activity, their existing stockpile would last for a 100 years or more.
johnnyApplePRNG 2 hours ago [-]
It would probably last 1,000 years, now.
Since nobody wants to buy them anymore.
senorrib 3 hours ago [-]
That’s not even close to being true.
loloquwowndueo 2 hours ago [-]
You both need to provide citations my dudes.
margalabargala 2 hours ago [-]
The first person hedged their statement with "I heard once" so it's likely true regardless of whether the rest is accurate.
In a similar vein it has been said (by me, just now) that DeBeers is actually already out of diamonds and manufactures then de novo from the compressed ashes of orphans.
bdangubic 1 hours ago [-]
I heard that De Beers donated 99.6% of all of their profits so I am not sure what all the hoopla is about them
margalabargala 56 minutes ago [-]
Right but I heard that the recipient of the donation was the Epstein-Trump Boarding School For Children.
mcphage 2 minutes ago [-]
Well, I heard it was the Epstein-Trump Boating School For Children, which taught vulnerable youngsters how to get away from Epstein’s child-rape island.
loloquwowndueo 2 hours ago [-]
“I heard” = hearsay. Citation needed. (I mean, I heard the earth is flat - but it’s not)
ninjalanternshk 52 minutes ago [-]
AI coughed up a bunch of references that put their stockpile estimate at around a year. Might have been more at one time but nothing close to 100.
missedthecue 3 hours ago [-]
Brutal news for Botswana which was really breaking new ground in raising Sub Saharan living standards. 30% of their GDP and a huge portion of government revenues are diamond exports. And they had gotten to 100% formalized and child labor free supply lines
hedora 2 hours ago [-]
The did away with child slavery in the mines, but severely exploited female adults instead:
I'm not trying to read your comment as whataboutism, but it did get me wondering: From a moral or ethical standpoint, if there is a gradient route from "very immoral to moral", but it involves first going from "very immoral" to just plain old regular immoral - do we view it as an improvement or a deficiency? Is there a route that involves going from very immoral to moral in one direct step?
For example, exploitation is bad, but child exploitation is worse. So moving from just child exploitation to adult exploitation is a positive move that still results in an abhorrent status quo. On the other hand I can't think of an example where we went from child exploitation --> no exploitation of any kind...
harimau777 3 minutes ago [-]
I think that the key could be that getting rid of child labor is meant to trick people into thinking that they were not immoral to purchase. However, that doesn't work if they just switched to a different kind of slavery.
aaron695 2 hours ago [-]
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bastawhiz 2 hours ago [-]
Botswana's diamond mining industry is exactly one company: Debswana, a 50/50 joint venture between the government of Botswana and De Beers.
Which means, when you think about it, that half of one subsidiary of De Beers is effectively producing ~one third of Botswana's GDP. Really puts into perspective how exploitative De Beers is.
missedthecue 1 hours ago [-]
This is a difficult conclusion to draw given that the implied counterfactual is the assumption that Botswana could have had similar results sans De Beers. I don't think that's at all obvious. If my problem was that I had raw diamonds a few hundred meters underground and wanted to turn them into dollars, I'd probably call the preeminent experts on mining, refining, and marketing diamonds as well.
The venture began in 1969 and as difficult as the economic situation there is now, subsaharan africa was an even worse place then. So I think your counterfactual needs put into perspective. Additionally in 2013, the state created the 100% owned Okavango Diamond Company to export diamonds using the institutional knowledge they'd gathered over the decades.
bastawhiz 14 minutes ago [-]
> The venture began in 1969 and as difficult as the economic situation there is now, subsaharan africa was an even worse place then.
False. The sixties were one of the better decades (economically) in sub Saharan Africa. The region was richer than much of Asia, with the exception of a few places like Congo and Ghana.
> the assumption that Botswana could have had similar results sans De Beers.
De Beers was created by Cecil Rhodes, who essentially guided the British to establish the Bechuanaland Protectorate. The British economically ravaged the area and left it one of the poorest places on the planet. It's wild to say they wouldn't have done it without De Beers when they were essentially guaranteed they couldn't do it without De Beers by the guy who founded De Beers, literally less than a century before Debswana was created.
Anything in the 21st century doesn't change the fact that one private entity has extracted more value from a desperate country than they deserve for decades. Had the British, I don't know, left Botswana with such luxuries as "paved roads" maybe they would have had more economic leverage in 1969.
missedthecue 5 minutes ago [-]
What exactly is false? You're asserting that 1960s Botswana was more industrialized than it is now?
BurningFrog 1 hours ago [-]
I would describe it at showing how poor/unproductive the rest of Botswana's economy is.
Or is the theory here that De Beers somehow keeps the part of the Botswanian economy they don't participate in poor/unproductive?
bastawhiz 3 minutes ago [-]
De Beers was founded by the guy whose colonial governance helped make the region as economically depressed as it was. When Debswana was founded, De Beers was taking something like 85% of the profits from Botswana's natural resources. That's like if I burned your house and farm down, then a few later I discovered oil on your land and offered to help you drill for it in exchange for a little over an eighth of the profit. What choice do you have?
41 minutes ago [-]
2 hours ago [-]
bossyTeacher 2 hours ago [-]
Hopefully, the have foreseen this and they have diversified adequately. Relying on a single source for most of your income is never good. Whether that is diamonds or oil. Hopefully they got their own sovereign fund up and running/
How will we survive without the safe and wholesome diamond mines? I guess we'll all have to be okay with the much superior and cheaper lab diamonds...
The picture subtitle says everything that needs to be said about this: "Miners like De Beers have positioned diamonds as synonymous with love and devotion."
Scumbags.
SoftTalker 3 hours ago [-]
Good.
jonstewart 2 hours ago [-]
So lab grown diamonds are good and cheap enough I can finally buy my wife of 21 years a diamond ring?
Loughla 1 hours ago [-]
Yes. And there are a ton of companies that sell just loose stones, so you can take it to a locally owned shop for the ring and setting, thereby keeping more of the money in your own community.
ninjalanternshk 39 minutes ago [-]
Not to be this way but can you not go to a local jeweler and buy a ring with a lab-grown diamond in it, no assembly required?
3 hours ago [-]
lovich 58 minutes ago [-]
Its not gonna be just diamonds, pretty much every gemstone is subject to the lab grown stuff.
Im into gem cutting as a hobby so its been great for me to find stuff like these cheap ruby roughs[1] but yea, its gonna fuck up anyone selling the natural stuff.
"The death of the diamond" Edward Jay Epstein (1983)
486sx33 3 hours ago [-]
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reid-rigo 4 hours ago [-]
Hope to see these headlines some day for the meat industry
doodlebugging 44 minutes ago [-]
A better target would be the oil and gas industry. When you look at this diamond situation it looks like in approximately one generation, demand for natural diamonds dropped low enough that the effort to mine new diamonds became uneconomical.
This happened because the ease of obtaining lab-grown diamonds that could be much higher quality, made lab-grown diamonds more attractive because buyers, who may already have been squeezed by other unfavorable economic realities found no reason to purchase natural diamonds at a higher price point.
If we could see a shift like that in energy source preference from one generation then perhaps we could destroy the incentive to produce more oil and gas or make it so uneconomical for use a motor vehicle fuel that it became a specialty product that was produced only to supply a niche product line.
We have a similar opportunity now with electric vehicles, solar panels, battery storage, etc that we can make a large dent in the volume of crude oil and natural gas required to power our economies. Developing nations have an advantage in a way because they have less legacy infrastructure to support that requires oil and gas. They can adopt the new big thing and just roll with that saving their citizens lots of money and environmental consequences associated with use of hydrocarbons fuels.
More than 35 years in the oil and gas industry. This is what I learned.
We should invest in developing nations to bring them up to speed with best available technologies. If we waste too much time we will see continents like Africa with 56 (?) nations become a flash-point for the next round of resource wars (oil and gas conflicts) that will be pushed on them by foreign operators attempting to make as much of the O&G money as possible before the world gets the message and abandons their destructive products permanently. We are already seeing some of this today. Millions of lives are in the crossfire. We have an opportunity to make a difference and we should take it. Old and young in developed nations should adopt next-gen tech ASAP so that kill these dino-corps before they kill too many more of us.
SoftTalker 3 hours ago [-]
If we can replace the taste, appearance, and texture of a medium-rare rib eye with lab grown meat at a substantially cheaper price, we will.
0xcde4c3db 1 hours ago [-]
True, but it's also the case that in some places and subcultures we're already at a point where meat with certain qualifications in some contexts is a Veblen good, and the rhetoric around it is very much a quasi-mystical blend of notions of purity and vitalism (see e.g. paleo/primal/ancestral diet influencers). That edge, almost by definition, can't be produced in a lab, and if we were really being purely rational/utilitarian about these things, I doubt we'd be eating as much meat as we are today.
kstrauser 55 minutes ago [-]
I love a good cheeseburger. I’ve enjoyed ones from Michelin restaurants and from local holes in the wall; I’m not choosy. To me, the taste and texture of a cheeseburger is one of the best testing things on the planet.
I do not eat cheeseburgers to feel manly or dominant. I eat them because they are delicious. If I could have a plant-based or otherwise non-meat burger that tastes as good as the real thing, I’d eat it. Impossible burgers are getting close and I’ve had my fair share of them, but they’re not there yet. They’re near enough that I’m confident we’ll get there soon.
TomJansen 3 hours ago [-]
>substantially cheaper price
why substantially cheaper? Break-even would be fine too, no? And as a plus, lab-grown meat is much more ethical.
I also think that replacing 'cheap' meat like ground beef would already be sufficient and would make a huge impact, there is really no need make it difficult for ourselves and try to replace rib-eye.
fooker 2 hours ago [-]
For me, it would have to be mass produced and about an order of magnitude cheaper.
I'd rather not be testing/tasting experimental lab stuff. And mass production bringing down the price with economies of scale is the real proof that the technology is ready.
willsmith72 1 hours ago [-]
there's nothing holy about eating real animals (unless you're religious)
i'm no vegan, but if identical lab-grown alternatives are available at near same cost without the hormones, antibiotics, emissions, I'll take it
fooker 1 hours ago [-]
Identical is the point here.
The test of 'identical' to me is going to be mass production with economies of scale. I surely don't have the equipment to test whether it's identical, nor would I trust the marketing.
skeledrew 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe there's something about lives being taken to provide the food that appeals to certain people.
wonderwonder 3 hours ago [-]
I don't think most people are going to grab lab grown out of the grocer fridge if normal beef is available for the same price. I know I would not. But if its 25% cheaper I'm happy to try it
loloquwowndueo 2 hours ago [-]
I would for the same price as it doesn’t involve killing a cow. That’s a plus for me!
wonderwonder 3 hours ago [-]
Agree, as long as it's meat. Lab grown meat from cells is meat.
The reason impossible never worked was becuase it wasn't meat.
Very few people are going to trade meat for soy and vegetables
fooker 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah impossible was targeting a weird small niche.
The intersection of 'vegan by all means', 'loves the taste of meat', 'does not care about ultra processed food', 'enough money to go for the expensive option'.
No wonder it did not work.
nkrisc 2 hours ago [-]
Even though I do eat meat I still enjoy black bean burger patties far more than Impossible because a black bean patty is tasty in its own way and not trying to replicate meat.
A black bean patty or similar is a tasty bit of food that works well in a burger form.
I like meat but not every meal I eat needs to have meat in it. Give me tasty (and cheaper) alternatives to meat and I’ll eat them in place of meat sometimes.
moate 2 hours ago [-]
IDK what "never worked" means here, the market cap for Impossible/Beyond alone is still over a billion dollars. You can still get an Impossible Whopper at any Burger King in the US.
There's plenty of issues with selling meat alternatives, I don't think you're the person to speak to them for some reason...
fooker 51 minutes ago [-]
You're off by ~40%.
Their combined market cap seems to be around 600M.
bluefirebrand 2 hours ago [-]
According to Google AI
"The global beef industry has a total market value of approximately $465 billion to $526 billion"
Impossible/Beyond barely exists in comparison
hedora 2 hours ago [-]
Modern beef is unhealthy for humans due to grazing conditions. Maybe the lab grown stuff will be closer to conventional farming output.
jonstewart 2 hours ago [-]
Hopefully most people here getting ribeyes aren’t getting them from the same factory farms that supply McDonald’s and sell other cheap kinds of beef. A ribeye is an occasional luxury and best bought from the farmer.
This just opens up the door for meat that isn't inspected before sale. That's not ideal, really.
There are farmers everywhere who will sell you a cow. There are small butcher shops that will process it.
This is a solution in search of a problem, in my opinion. It will only benefit already massive corporation farms.
vlyan 47 minutes ago [-]
the demand for diamonds is artificial, the demand for meat is very much organic. the only thing stopping most people from consuming more of it is the cost -- driven by demand.
Gibbon1 21 minutes ago [-]
There are a number of efforts to grow vat grown protein. That's producing food without plants even.
Rendered at 02:18:45 GMT+0000 (UTC) with Wasmer Edge.
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 as natural ones and that would ruin customers' trust in natural diamonds.
But it now seems that isn't going to happen because customers are voting with their feet and leaving natural diamonds behind.
Lab grown can be way better quality. To me it was a no-brainer considering the ethical concerns, then add in the cost difference. The only argument I've heard for natural is "I like the imperfections". Sounds like brainwashing to me. They're chemically identical
The mining industry should die
I’d much rather wear a monument to our cleverness than a dinosaur mashed under a rock.
It's astonishing that it has taken this long to have this kind of impact.
Just like the luxury watches market ceased to exist when you could buy quartz watches for 10 bucks.
I'm not sure your analogy has teeth.
And the rest is just a matter of paying for luxury.
The main reason the analogy doesn't really help is that the mechanical watch market absolutely cratered, and it's only being propped up by enthusiasts of cool machines.
Diamonds can't really have that. They've already scammed the general population into using slave diamonds at monopoly prices for 30 years longer than they needed to, but no one is _passionate_ about slave diamonds.
Lab diamonds and mined diamonds are literally identical products.
So wait, on this Labor Day weekend, it sounds like the WSJ is pro-worker, but only if they're in South Africa?
“De Beers: Because the tears of children make it sparkle!”
"South African diamond mines are closing due to lab-grown stones"
Since nobody wants to buy them anymore.
In a similar vein it has been said (by me, just now) that DeBeers is actually already out of diamonds and manufactures then de novo from the compressed ashes of orphans.
https://www.freedomunited.org/news/botswana-diamonds-ugly-tr...
Things like marital rape are still legal there.
For example, exploitation is bad, but child exploitation is worse. So moving from just child exploitation to adult exploitation is a positive move that still results in an abhorrent status quo. On the other hand I can't think of an example where we went from child exploitation --> no exploitation of any kind...
Which means, when you think about it, that half of one subsidiary of De Beers is effectively producing ~one third of Botswana's GDP. Really puts into perspective how exploitative De Beers is.
The venture began in 1969 and as difficult as the economic situation there is now, subsaharan africa was an even worse place then. So I think your counterfactual needs put into perspective. Additionally in 2013, the state created the 100% owned Okavango Diamond Company to export diamonds using the institutional knowledge they'd gathered over the decades.
False. The sixties were one of the better decades (economically) in sub Saharan Africa. The region was richer than much of Asia, with the exception of a few places like Congo and Ghana.
> the assumption that Botswana could have had similar results sans De Beers.
De Beers was created by Cecil Rhodes, who essentially guided the British to establish the Bechuanaland Protectorate. The British economically ravaged the area and left it one of the poorest places on the planet. It's wild to say they wouldn't have done it without De Beers when they were essentially guaranteed they couldn't do it without De Beers by the guy who founded De Beers, literally less than a century before Debswana was created.
Anything in the 21st century doesn't change the fact that one private entity has extracted more value from a desperate country than they deserve for decades. Had the British, I don't know, left Botswana with such luxuries as "paved roads" maybe they would have had more economic leverage in 1969.
Or is the theory here that De Beers somehow keeps the part of the Botswanian economy they don't participate in poor/unproductive?
The picture subtitle says everything that needs to be said about this: "Miners like De Beers have positioned diamonds as synonymous with love and devotion."
Scumbags.
Im into gem cutting as a hobby so its been great for me to find stuff like these cheap ruby roughs[1] but yea, its gonna fuck up anyone selling the natural stuff.
[1]https://www.etsy.com/listing/4443524661/lab-grown-red-ruby-s...
This happened because the ease of obtaining lab-grown diamonds that could be much higher quality, made lab-grown diamonds more attractive because buyers, who may already have been squeezed by other unfavorable economic realities found no reason to purchase natural diamonds at a higher price point.
If we could see a shift like that in energy source preference from one generation then perhaps we could destroy the incentive to produce more oil and gas or make it so uneconomical for use a motor vehicle fuel that it became a specialty product that was produced only to supply a niche product line.
We have a similar opportunity now with electric vehicles, solar panels, battery storage, etc that we can make a large dent in the volume of crude oil and natural gas required to power our economies. Developing nations have an advantage in a way because they have less legacy infrastructure to support that requires oil and gas. They can adopt the new big thing and just roll with that saving their citizens lots of money and environmental consequences associated with use of hydrocarbons fuels.
More than 35 years in the oil and gas industry. This is what I learned.
We should invest in developing nations to bring them up to speed with best available technologies. If we waste too much time we will see continents like Africa with 56 (?) nations become a flash-point for the next round of resource wars (oil and gas conflicts) that will be pushed on them by foreign operators attempting to make as much of the O&G money as possible before the world gets the message and abandons their destructive products permanently. We are already seeing some of this today. Millions of lives are in the crossfire. We have an opportunity to make a difference and we should take it. Old and young in developed nations should adopt next-gen tech ASAP so that kill these dino-corps before they kill too many more of us.
I do not eat cheeseburgers to feel manly or dominant. I eat them because they are delicious. If I could have a plant-based or otherwise non-meat burger that tastes as good as the real thing, I’d eat it. Impossible burgers are getting close and I’ve had my fair share of them, but they’re not there yet. They’re near enough that I’m confident we’ll get there soon.
why substantially cheaper? Break-even would be fine too, no? And as a plus, lab-grown meat is much more ethical.
I also think that replacing 'cheap' meat like ground beef would already be sufficient and would make a huge impact, there is really no need make it difficult for ourselves and try to replace rib-eye.
I'd rather not be testing/tasting experimental lab stuff. And mass production bringing down the price with economies of scale is the real proof that the technology is ready.
i'm no vegan, but if identical lab-grown alternatives are available at near same cost without the hormones, antibiotics, emissions, I'll take it
The test of 'identical' to me is going to be mass production with economies of scale. I surely don't have the equipment to test whether it's identical, nor would I trust the marketing.
The intersection of 'vegan by all means', 'loves the taste of meat', 'does not care about ultra processed food', 'enough money to go for the expensive option'.
No wonder it did not work.
A black bean patty or similar is a tasty bit of food that works well in a burger form.
I like meat but not every meal I eat needs to have meat in it. Give me tasty (and cheaper) alternatives to meat and I’ll eat them in place of meat sometimes.
There's plenty of issues with selling meat alternatives, I don't think you're the person to speak to them for some reason...
Their combined market cap seems to be around 600M.
Impossible/Beyond barely exists in comparison
Perhaps you're anticipating this:
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/sep/4/trump-allows...
There are farmers everywhere who will sell you a cow. There are small butcher shops that will process it.
This is a solution in search of a problem, in my opinion. It will only benefit already massive corporation farms.