Honestly, fuck the diamond industry
Honestly, fuck the diamond industry
131 comments
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Honestly, fuck diamonds in general. Normalize jewelry with unnatural laboratory gems. The old gems are boring, bring on the synthetic glowy gems.
Edit: damn, you can get chunks of reject sapphire made for F35 fighter jet windows on their new store. They've got some pieces over 1kg.
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Diamonds are great....
...as tools in the hands of the working class.
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I am interested in purchasing a glow in the dark wedding ring
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Those look interesting
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They are so fucking cool. If I had the money, I'd have a room that's just these gems+blacklights. There are some that change color based on the wavelength of UV light they're exposed to. Some glow a different color under UV than they do under normal light. Some are both fluorescent and phosphorescent, meaning they light up in response to UV, but then they can maintain their glow temporarily. Some change color based on the angle you view them at. They're so fucking cool.
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The mechanics of extracting diamonds is baffling. Hell, even gold. Cutoff grades (where it is no longer feasible to mine economically) for gold is about 2.5 grams per tonne of overburden... that's a fucking metric shitpile of waste rock, some of which is ML/ARD (Metal leaching or acid generating).
I find the whole thing fascinating, and mining can be done responsibly, but it is not an easy thing in general
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Holy shit I need blacklight jewelry! I got lab alexandrite and lab moissanite for my wedding ring, but I didn’t know I could get SCIENCE gems! And I do a ton of confocal microscopy where we use dichroic for splitting the wavelengths! Thank you for this link, I’m def buying all my jewelry from here from now on!
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Please Gen Z, finish killing this Industry off.
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Trust us we are. It's not like we can afford them anyway
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And even if we could, why buy some stone to wear if one could buy 10l gas for the same price?
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My nightmare of a previous boss called my moissanite engagement ring "cheap" and "trashy," and treated us to a 30-minute speech about how if it's not "real" diamond, it doesn't count.
I hope sucking down those Marlboro blacks takes care of that problem of a woman sooner, rather than later, and in the meantime the gorgeous rainbow sparkle of my pretty ring is made all the more beautiful for the complete lack of child slavery that went into making it!
... I also just realized that horrible harridan didn't have an engagement ring, or even a boyfriend, and now some things make sense.
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We all have these people in our jobs, don’t we? I‘m practicing to engage them with a therapist rn. Have been through abuse when I was young and they love to dump on me. My new goal is to pin a notice on my wall that I get for telling the next bully where to stick it (in public). Lets see how that goes.
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"I consider this harassment inappropriate for a workplace. I'd rather not get HR involved."
Key words from the employee manual or even better, HR training. No emotion, just stating facts. Don't trust HR, but management knows that more than anyone. They use it as a bludgeon against employees all the time, they know it could be turned against them just as easily.
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Moissanite is a perfect replacement of a diamond. Definitely agree that it looks great, better off putting the money towards something that will actually enhance your life.
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It's got a higher refractory index than diamonds.
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I would have just sat there quietly and when she finished answered her with "well, that's your opinion"
I don't care if I depend on my job and my boss is a POS, my self worth is more valuable than any job.
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Average employer. I bet they only see diamonds as legitimate because of the slave labour put into them.
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The diamond industry sucks don't get me wrong. But the real culpurists are the dumbfuck diamond buyers.
My friend is a diamond salesperson and told me a story about one of their customers. They were looking at different pieces and the customer kept asking about the purity of the diamonds in the piece. Whenever my friend said it's "SI," the customer would be visibly disappointed and would ask for "VS" or "VVS" which are purer. My friend then got annoyed a bit and told the customer that purity doesn't matter once you reach "SI" since the impurities are not really visible by the naked eye. He even showed the customer 2 pieces with one looking 10 times better than the other but has SI diamonds and the non-pretty piece has VS diamonds. He asked the customer to tell him which is which and the customer wrongly said the SI one was more pure. Even after he revealed his ruse and showed that purity doesn't matter much, the customer kept asking for more pure pieces as if nothing happened.
These "people" literallly are willingly being lied to, and they like it. If a diamond buyer saw a piece, told you they love it, told you they would buy it, then you told them it's a synthetic, they would be disgusted. It's bullshit from all sides and they deserve eachother.
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I feel like the high-end buyer's don't care about how much they like their possessions, they care about how expensive their possessions sound when described to others. They couldn't tell that the SI was less pure, but they knew they couldn't describe it to their friends as the purest, so they didn't care.
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Funny thing is that this comes from middle class people. There's still VVS and flawless diamonds which are significantly more expensive. But they can't afford one that looks any good. Given the choice they'd absolutely burn their money to buy those though.
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There's a concept, 'conspicuous consumption,' that people will use products in such a way for their social power regardless of anything else. So getting higher quality diamonds, whatever imperceptible difference it has, is still worth it to be seen as affording the higher tier. One of the ways in which market economies poison the brain.
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The people who don't deserve this are the slavers who make gorillians off the abusive trade, plus the slaves who are forced to work the mines.
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If it's wedding ring, the marketing has been about how the purity of the diamond is symbolic of the purity of one's love. So picking an uglier, but purer, diamond then coild be about prioritizing love over beauty or whatever in that person's head.
So not necessarily exclusive to people wanting to present themselves as wealthy, that sort of emotional manipulation convinces broke people to blow their savings on a ring all the time.
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But if you don’t buy her a real blood diamond how will she know that you love her enough to support slave labor?
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I have prime.
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Look up moissanite. It’s literally the cheaper, superior diamond. The fact that it exists just goes to show how inflated the diamond market is
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Moissanite is chemically different to diamond (SiC vs C), has a different crystal structure, and is less hard. You can also get actual lab-grown diamond, but they are quite expensive. But you probabaly won't be able to tell the difference anyway.
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Usually you can tell the difference. Lab grown diamond is pure while rock grown diamond is imperfect.
But you have to look at it under a magnifying glass to tell, and know what you’re looking for.
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But also, who cares that it's less hard? I'm not using it for a drill bit, it's a cosmetic piece. Literally it's only function is visual. And moissanite is superior. All the visual markers that are used for beauty in a diamond it surpasses. And some quick googling I did to confirm that also showed me that diamond is only barely harder ("With a hardness of 9.25, moissanite is the second-hardest material used a gemstone." a diamond is a 10.) and it turns out, less likely to break in some cases. "Moissanite doesn't have a cleavage plane, while diamond does. (This is an internal plane along which a diamond crystal can easily split)" So if you hit a diamond in the wrong spot, it can still crack. Moissanite does not have a weak spot.
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It’s like 93% as hard but has better better optical properties which is what matters.
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A strategy that has been working well for me is "Never buy jewelry of any kind ever because it's completely pointless."
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Don't hang around people who demand you consume in order to get their approval. They are empty people who will not support you.
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If your significant other would be upset with a brass ring for an engagement ring, I don't pity the misery that will be both of your lives.
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Opals are the superior stone and they actually look awsome. Transparent glass like stones are so boring. They are also much cheaper and not harvested with child labor.
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Moissanite
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Dont opals lose their shine or something over time due to being hydrophilic?
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Jade gang
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My wife's is made of a purple sapphire as the main stone with a small diamond on each side. She loves the purple. The diamonds I didn't pay for, they were her grandmother's that I got from her sister.
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Hematite. The most metal gemstone.
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Technically man-made diamonds are also the diamond industry.
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The Kimberley certification process for diamonds has been entirely co-opted and no longer serves the purpose of ensuring you are not buying blood diamonds. All the NGOs that matter have already walked away considering it a lost cause.
If you buy natural diamonds, there is a good chance you are supporting criminal enterprise and warlords.
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You're getting ripped off, too. The price is artificially inflated, because it's controlled by a cartel.
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My gf asked me to not give her a ring when I'll propose, but a zweihander instead :D
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A diamond sword is going to cost a hell of a lot more.
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Just craft one yourself, it's not that hard. Chop a few trees for the wood, craft the workbench, dig down a bit for the diamonds and there you go!
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She sounds like a keeper!
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Player 2 has entered the game! Congrats to both of you
My partner and I just bought our own rings since we both have pretty particular tastes haha
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I've never even thought of that! How cute!
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You should put a ring on that. Oh wait.
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Penguins don't own property, silly
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Capitalist penguins do
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I got my wife a moissanite ring. Looks great and just about as strong as diamond. It is time to use advertisements as guide what not to buy.
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I bought my wife a moissanite ring and she refused it. Chinese girls man...
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Blood diamonds "the suffering makes them special!"
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"It builds character"
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we can achive what the earth can in a matter of months or we can chuck kids in a pit ...humanity chose
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Wait, wait, go back a second. Are the child death pits still an option? Can we retroactively volunteer ourselves?
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has anyone else been getting tons of ads (on streaming services mostly) literally about this? i keep getting these ads about how you should only purchase natural diamonds because only they matter or something and put some pretty woman in the ad to convince you. it's pretty disgusting to make a commercial promoting diamonds stolen from the global south and brushing off synthetic diamonds even if they are literally the exact same rock.
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It’s not true love if no one dies in the mines.
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Ahh a true romantic I see.
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But it's the dried up blood from the child slaves that dug them that make diamonds so pretty!
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All right she left and the kids are scared what's my next move
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Knight in D2
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You spelled Diamond Mafia wrong.
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Quality synthetic diamonds are still bloody expensive.
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the point here is about logistics, not giving diamonds to the poor.
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They look tacky as shit regardless of whether they are mined, synthesized or fake.
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I disagree. Shit does not look tacky. Ok, it is tacky, probably, but in different sense.
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No, no, they are just earning less.
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And the absurd thing is that we probably should use natural diamonds for jewelry, as it is a waste to synthesize such a common rock. If they weren't hoarded and aggressively marketed as something you have to have, they could just be a neat rock some people are into, there wouldn't be child slaves dying to dig them out of the ground.
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https://www.ebay.com/itm/195430621450
Do I trust ebay? Not really. Is this a fair sized diamond, cut, for $10? It claims to be.
edit: my bad, synthetic diamonds are also known as moissanite and aren't actually diamonds. Here's a link to two lab grown diamonds, cut, for like $30
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And they are literally the same thing, which is very funny to me. Like, they are flawless diamonds, so now apparently the imperfections are what cost money? Except the cost of natural diamonds is higher when they have fewer imperfections? Diamonds are bullshit.
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Nah, people are bullshit. Diamonds have uses for grinding and cutting.
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I searched Moissanite last week and found a website that charges thousands upon thousands for moissanite jewelry.
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If anyone wants a really deep dive into the diamond industry, a recent episode of Search Engine (podcast by PJ Vogt, for anyone familiar with Reply All) is all about this: https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/why-are-we-still-buying-diamonds
It’s a fantastic episode.
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I bought my wife a 'fake ' diamond ring for the engagement ring.
She couldn't tell her snooty friends that though, so she went and bought herself a very expensive ring with real diamonds.
She had the ring I bought her melted into my wedding band. I hate jewellery though so had no intention of wearing it. I agreed to wear it for a week after we got married. I've never worn it again. I haven't even seen it since that first week. Over a decade. I wonder if it's just lost, or she has it somewhere still.
I don't care enough to ask.
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Sounds dysfunctional, but then you said a decade has passed, so maybe not.
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it's hard to know the extent to which the comment represents the marriage. otoh, if one were to read their comment and leave thinking "sounds like a normal, healthy marriage to me", that imo would be a premium red flag on the reader.
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Nerevar, you foolish mortal! I have heard your lamentations about the cost of diamonds and how they are too expensive for how common they are. I agree, and I know who to blame. The Bear Company, which holds a monopoly on the diamond industry, is rigging the supply to keep prices high. They use propaganda to create a demand that is disproportionate to the real value of diamonds. What fools they are to think that they can hide such deception from me. I, Lord Dagoth, master of these lands, see through their shallow deceit and call for justice. Now please leave. I have to write upset words on this piece of parchment to show the world how angry i am. Nerevar, do you have a stick with you? Maybe also a stapler? Nerevar please go to the next trader and aquire a new Edding for me. I have let the cap open for too long and now my Edding has dried out.
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Is this how you honor the Sixth House and the tribe unmourned?
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the alchemists could've been successful, and all the gold mine barons would've been: so, actually, well, you can't see it, but I assure you, and the experts will agree, that there is actually a very fine, yes, a very fine distinction (if you can notice it, it really means you have a refined sense of taste, yes) in shimmer between ersatz, synthetic gold from the alchemist, and that the rare, natural from the earth. Ah . . . . well yes, you're right, the natural gold is ever so slightly duller, but, you see
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DeBeers have massive investments in the synthetic diamond industry. They are actually world leaders and have known that it's possible to produce higher quality diamonds at a much lower cost. They make a killing selling synthetic diamonds to industry.
131 comments