Why are lab diamonds still overpriced? How do they do it biz?
>>61008635"Lab-grown diamonds are significantly less expensive than natural diamonds, with costs that can be 70-95% lower, depending on the diamond's characteristics and the specific market. For example, a 1-carat natural diamond could cost between $2,500 to $18,000, while a comparable lab-grown diamond might only cost $416 to $1,536. The price difference is due to the more efficient and faster production of lab-grown diamonds compared to the costly, time-consuming, and resource-intensive process of mining natural diamonds.">FLAWLESS QUALITY>LESS EXPENSIVE
>>61008635>what is return on investment do you want them to hand you free diamonds or something, commie?
>>61008635
>>61009113
>>61008635>why not buy a laboratory diamond? it looks the same but is cheaper>why not buy a superfake watch? it looks the same but is cheaperjewelry exists to advertise one's statusif you even consider doing such a thing, your status isn't high enough to even bother
>>61009175And no one actually cares about other peoples status. Humans buy expensive crap so they can suck themsleves off in their own head. >>61008635They arent actually, zirconia is like a few dollars and you need a microscope to tell the difference from a diamond. These high prices are just a scam to trick people with disposable income.
>>61009113>(((peoples))) 1.00 CT. (((Certified))) diamond solitaire (((engagement))) ring>$̶5̶8̶9̶9̶
>>61009104>>61009112I dont get it. They make these lab diamonds with almost 0 cost after buying the equipment. How can somebody legally charge me hundreds of thousands of dollars for it?
>>61008635Though technology is changing, the process is still pretty insane. Formerly HPHT (High Pressure High Temperature) was the standard, but industry is moving towards CVD (Chemical Vapour Deposition). I dont really know CVD but my old job was made up entirely of people that worked in a local HPHT diamond manufacturer, which closed because the price of electricity rose by £0.01The way they all described the process was insane, people in the press rooms wearing bomb disposal outfits when a crucible had an error, the immense pressure firing fragments of graphite through concrete walls and smashing windows in cars outside the building. Insane pressures, insane amount of power neededThese enormous presses only produce rough diamond, you've still got to cut and polish the diamonds into jewellery. Whether diamonds are rare or common compared to public perception is one thing making them overpriced, sure, but no matter how inflated the rarity is they are STILL the hardest material, and all material hardness scales are exponential. Diamond being a 10 is exponentially harder than sapphire at a 9. Hard materials take a LONG time to cut and polish, and diamond can only be cut with other diamond. This will always keep a baseline value on a cut-polished diamond
>>61011914Isn't this machine a literal legal money printer? I suppose the equipment is expensive but once you get it, you print diamonds and sell them to retards (people will never stop getting married, sometimes more than once) the machine literally and unironically pays itself, then it's infinite profits even if you sell diamonds for pennies
>>61011952Again idk about the newer CVD processes, but as far as the HPHT we had locally, it was profitable by margins of electricity usage, as soon as the price of electricity increased it was no longer profitable and the company relocated to south africa. In that regard it was a bit like old bitcoin mining, profitable one day, a drain the next
>>61008635>>61009104Natural diamonds are overpriced by like 300% and if all the vaulted diamonds were released to market lab grown would crater to 1/100th of its current price. Gold is way more valuable and expensive than diamonds, and any other gemstone for that matter.t. Worked with jewelers for twenty years
Personally I really love Moissanite which is dirt cheapSadly its relegated to "thats not diamond, thats a fake its just moissanite", but I think its gorgeous. It's slightly more brilliant but actually has basically double the fire, or higher refractive index. I got a 3ct one for like 50 dollars and its just absolutely gorgeous, wish it had a better reputation
The white man has replaced diamonds. You guys are just either brown, jewish or blind
>>61008635its a controlled market by the owners
>>61012015T-thanks anon
>>61008635The absolute top tier CVD labs are selling to industry (optics, semiconductors, etc) instead of the jewelry market. Also, diamonds have a lot of "cultural momentum" and it will take them a while to fall out of favour.
>>61009175those "fakes" come off the same assembly line as the "real" ones. people are stupid and shallow that's why they pay for names.
>>61008635The diamond cartel is fucking dangerous.
>>61012030Why doesn't someone work out a way of making artificial diamonds that look exactly like natural diamonds, flaws and all?
>>61012540That's what CZ is for and it's cheap as fuck. And don't forget that lab grown still requires a baseline small natural diamond to grow artificially around it. So lab grown is still semi natural at its core.
>>61012540They do, but diamond market is very stable and "boring" compared to many other precious gems, so laboratories skilled enough to make forgeries like that do other gems instead.There's a gem hunter guy on youtube, who is technically Russian, but only visits Russia like once in 2-3 years.He became a multimillionaire travelling around the world trading rare gems in the past few decades, and has long videos (in Russian) talking about pretty much every aspect of gem hunting, from gemology to dealing with scammers and bandits in rural Africa.One of the videos was about synthetic forgeries of natural precious gems, who makes them (Usually respected state universities with high-end equipment) and how they get into the market. The universities themselves don't do anything illegal, simply creating synthetic gems "mimicking" real ones is never a crime, and neither is selling those gems correctly labeled as synthetic. But after a chain of proxies they often lose their "synthetic" label, and find their way to places you would never expect to find them at.The craziest case he brought up was when he was offered to buy a Russian-made synthetic gem (offered as natural at x1000 the price, obviously) right at the mining site on fucking Madagascar, IIRC.And in regards to the quality of said forgeries, they are sometimes impossible to distinguish from their natural counterparts even at a lab.Things go like this, first some university develops a new technology of making those gems. They make some, they sell some.Then, several months later, they will be doing a presentation at some international conference and at the end they will add something like "Oh, and by the way, several months ago we developed and patented a completely new method of making natural-like (for example) tourmalines, inquire for details :)" after which all of the respected gem labs will have to pay up for the info just so they can develop a method of detecting said fake "natural" gems.
>>61015166An example from his website of some of the gems he sold to investors.Top date/price is when he sold them.Bottom - their market value some time after.None of them are exactly mooning, but still pretty good.
>>61012540There are wasy to do this with some other gemsSee: Synthetic beryl (emeral) and quench-cracking>>61015176Gemcutting as a hobby is one of my goals
>>61008635Insider here.They're not. They're still going down in price as Chinese CVD companies competeand they're dragging natural prices down too. Big diamond are doing their best to set the two apart, but you need a $10,000 machine to do so. Either the price of both crashes and diamonds become irrelevant, or they successful market them as different products and the industry stays alive
>>61017954If I wanted to get a big diamond for funsies, where would be the best place? Is Ebay legit?
Interesting thread.qrd on gem market? What are the low/middle/high tier gems?
>>61017086Yeah, gemcutting seems really cool, but only as a hobby.According to the same gem hunter guy, even the best gem cutters in the region, true artisans with decades of experience only take a few bux for their work, so the real challenge is finding them among low-skilled fucks who will ruin your gems.It's actually kinda crazy how cheap their labor is considering that this labor is what defines the value of the product.Uncut gems are not worth much at all, compared to the end result, because even if you have decent "material" to work with, a large raw gem with no obvious imperfections, it's only through cutting and polishing that un-obvious flaws will come to light, that will have to be cut away, making the result much smaller and cheaper than expected. And if the gem cutter himself damages the gem, well fuck.So to summarize, you might buy a large and very promising raw gem for <1000$ directly from the mine, give it to the cutter who will work on it for <20$ and the end result might have market value of >500000$ (if the gem is perfect inside-out, and no fuckups) or the result will be a bunch of small shards barely worth 1000$ (if it was internally brittle/cracked and/or gem cutter fucked up).
>>61018863Anything but diamond. Some retard anon bought all the blue zircon in the world and then disappeared
>>61021123>500000$ Added another zero here by mistake, lol.Meant to say 50000$Gems worth over half a million like large, perfect, and natural paraiba tourmalines are probably way over 1k$ raw.
And to share some more gem hunter's wisdom around.>>61018863The most important part about investing in gems is verifying that you are investing in real, natural gems with actual market value.Remember, a single successful scam with just one piece of colored glass could result in hundreds of thousands of dollars for the scammer, in other words - a happy retirement, considering what regions these gems and people selling them come from. This means, there is more scammers around than in fucking crypto. And they will try their very best.So whatever gem you decide to buy, it MUST be certified, and not by some bullshit lab Mbeke Ngubu opened in their garage with only equipment there being the printer he produces his "certificates" with.A large, internationally renowned institution (they exist even in Africa), usually associated with some university, that maintains an online database of certificates, so that you can verify your physical certificate with a QR code to said database (that points to the valid fucking address, not Mbeke's fake clone).And you also MUST be able to learn and process what the certificate says. For example, a certificate might say that the gem is a natural spinel that was "treated" by some process that certificate will either not explain at all, or give a very brief explanation of. To someone like ourselves who doesn't know shit about gem processing this might sound okay, we are buying a real, natural gem and "treatment" is probably just a reference to it being cut or something.And in reality, the gem IS a natural spinel but of completely inadequate quality, it's real worth is 1/1000th of what we are buying it for and the "treatment" was heating it up and glazing it with glass or something. Pulling the exact process out of my ass here, cause I don't remember specifics. And AFTER (or ideally, during ) the purchase you should have it certified once again, this time in one of the top 3 labs in your own country.
Just realized I didn't once say his name, lol.The gem hunter I was talking about is this guyhttps://www.youtube.com/@SinnerGemsThe channel is in Russian, but maybe there is auto-translate or something.His website, https://sinnergems.com/catalog you can check some gems out, if only for price reference.
>>61021296Good shit anon, do you invest or focus on anything?
>>61021384I'm not the gem hunter, I'm just translating the information I've learned from his videos, because I myself found it interesting.As for me, I love moonstones and will probably invest about 5-10k in one, but they are not "investment-grade" as in, they do rise in price but very slowly.From the gemhunter's website - this is what he considers to be "investment-grade" (and has on his hands, so the list is non-exhaustive) as in having potential to go up 30% or more per year. The gems pictured are:1. Spessartine from Tanzania.2. Lagoon tourmaline from Afghanistan.3. Black Star sapphire from Thailand.4. Tsavorite from Tanzania.5. Zircon from ???Кapaт = carat, and below that is price, duh.He also spoke very highly (and often) of the investment potential of paraiba tourmalines, but they are VERY expensive.Do what you will with this info.
>>61011785How indeed?
