Recently the world’s biggest jewelry retailer, Pandora, announced it would switch from mined diamonds to lab-produced. Like many press releases, the reality of the change is somewhat less than first glance. To being with, Pandora makes 85,000 types of jewelry, and the switch applies to new designs going forward. A tiny but growing portion of their sales will gradually switch to fake diamonds. Only those gems are hard to call fake. Gemologists cannot distinguish between mined and artificial – diamonds is diamonds, so to speak now.
The ability to produce industrial grade diamonds has existed for decades, but recent improvements in the process have speeded and cheapened the manufacturing. The manufacturing cost is about 10% of mining, and likely to drop further. The diamond industry has been essentially run by a monopoly enjoyed by global giant DeBeers, which dismissed the news with confident remarks about how people would not settle for anything but real. Keep in mind these are the folks that likely started the whole engagement ring should cost three months salary scam. This whole racket has amused me for years.
Diamonds are not particularly rare, but often hard to get to, and the only reason they have high value is because we’ve been convinced they do. Cheap indistinguishable lab-grown diamonds could prompt both blatant cheating (if it is cheating) with enormous profits, drastic price erosion or even collapse, or most likely both.
This sounds familiar to ag. Organic products have standards of production but not chemical purity, for example. Something is organic because it has an organic label, not because it is chemically proven to be different. Ditto with genetically modified materials. While tests do exist for those, in use they are identical. GM corn tastes and cooks like non-GM. Proponents of both sell something like DeBeers, a feeling about the product, not a demonstrable difference.
In the case of diamonds, I don’t see how unlabeled substitution won’t happen. Taking a seller’s word was credulous before the Great Trust Evaporation of the last decade; today it seems simply gullible. Nobody’s health will be harmed by such inevitable diamond duplicity. In fact, diamond mining is nasty and dangerous, not to mention energy intensive.
I have no problem with folks being choosy about foods – for legitimate reasons or unfounded fears. But paying more for mined diamonds is like asking to have your pocket picked.
