In 1948, diamond firm De Beers launched a advertising marketing campaign with the slogan “A diamond is without end.” Fifty years later, the corporate created one other marketing campaign justifying the value of diamonds with the slogan, “Is not two months’ wage a small value to pay for one thing that lasts without end?”
Now, De Beers is aggressively chopping costs to convey gross sales up, and you should buy a diamond-making machine for $200,000 on Alibaba.
It is a signal that diamond manufacturing is democratizing, reviews Ars Technica.
Previously 5 years, lab-grown gem gross sales have burgeoned and made the value of mined stones much less interesting, in accordance with diamond knowledgeable Paul Zimnisky. The lab-grown diamond market was $13 billion final yr and is predicted to achieve about $22 billion by 2031.
Ankur Daga, CEO of the effective jewellery firm Angara, estimated that half of all engagement rings offered this yr may have lab-grown stones, a major bounce from 2% in 2018.
“The diamond business is in bother,” Daga informed CNBC in June.
As of press time, pure 1-carat diamonds price round $4,000 whereas lab-grown diamonds of the identical weight go for round $620.
How a lab-grown diamond machine works
The 44-ton machine makes use of high-pressure excessive temperature (HPHT) know-how to take a diamond seed, or a tiny diamond particle that begins the entire course of, and rework it right into a lab-grown diamond. Alibaba focuses extra on business-to-business merchandise, so the machine they’ve on the market would doubtless be purchased and utilized by an organization with specialised data.
Lab-grown diamonds are as much as 90% cheaper than pure diamonds and look precisely the identical to the human eye. They will solely be informed aside with particular tools in a skilled gemological lab.
Additionally they do not carry the identical environmental and social issues as naturally discovered diamonds, which should be mined in unsafe situations.
Even with this sort of development, and machines just like the one offered via Alibaba, Zimnisky says that naturally-found diamonds will nonetheless have a spot sooner or later.
“Human want for uncommon and beneficial objects runs fairly deep inside us,” Zimnisky informed NPR. “I do not suppose that is going to, unexpectedly, change.”