Stupid kills. In this case, being uneducated about the various states of carbon

Adding to the pot-stirring that De Beers and others incited, a single page ad appeared in Variety a few months ago, paid for by the Kalahari Bushmen of Botswana, who were driven from their land by the government to make way for diamond mining. Their ad directly addressed DiCaprio, asking for help which then came in the form of several Survival International advocacy efforts.

2008-02-20: Finally a situation where the diamondoid surfaces warning sign makes sense.

Designer Wong makes engagement rings that can kill you. The razor-sharp diamond point is set into the ring so it can’t get knocked out when you smash someone’s face in, and the edges of the ring are really soft so it won’t cut into your skin during the pounding. It’s romantic because it means, “Will you marry me” but it also means, “I can’t always be there to protect you so if some jerk won’t stop bothering you, puncture him with this.” The diamond sharp edge will also cut skin down to the bone (with a minimum 1 karat stone – but the larger the better). Or it may simply be used to tag hard surfaces, like cars and windows for S.O.S. messages or that last will and estimate when pen or paper (or lawyers) aren’t conveniently around.

2008-06-16: Extremely cheap diamonds will hopefully do away with the “diamonds are forever” crap this country’s brides are infatuated with.

“This is a virtual diamond mine. If we were in Africa, we’d have barbed wire, security guards and watch towers. We can’t do that in Massachusetts.”

2008-10-27: Can’t wait for those to be done in volume, and the retarded engagement ring industry to die.

The most exciting aspect of this new annealing process is the unlimited size of the crystals that can be treated. The breakthrough will allow kilocarat diamonds of high optical quality

2012-09-18: That’s a lot of engagement rings. Diamond rings are now even more broadcasting your status as an idiot to the world.

Russia has just declassified news that will shake world gem markets to their core: the discovery of a vast new diamond field containing “trillions of carats,” enough to supply global markets for another 3 ka.

2015-01-07: No more Diamonds, with the exception of the engagement ring nonsense, of course.

Even my own diamond-business owning, non-millennial father is turning away from jewelry when it comes to gift giving. Sure, he’s made my mom a handful of statement pieces over the years, but at the same price point, he’s more likely to gift something that has actual purpose, aside from aesthetic value. The last few birthdays and Christmases have yielded vacation getaways, iPhones of every generation, even a smart home thermostat. What hasn’t shown up under the Christmas tree in the last 5 years? Diamond anything.

2015-03-18: Diamond scams

We were called hip-pocketers, because we lived from one deal to the next: Your business could fit in the wallet in your pocket. You bought a used Rolex at a pawnshop for $1000 from the kid who’s just paid $500 for it, hurried it over to your watch guy to hit it on the wheel and make it look new, replaced the old worn buckle with a South American counterfeit for $50, and resold it to your friend who owned the jewelry store a few blocks over for $2200, $2275 if she wanted a counterfeit leather box. She could retail it the same day for $3500. We “worked the float” back then, in the ’80s and ’90s—that meant the few days you had between when you paid for something with a check and the check actually hit your bank account. If you flipped the gold you’d bought with a check the same day, you had a few days of free money. Of course, you tried to make money on every deal, but often you were moving so fast that you had to lose money here and there, waiting for the bigger score that ought to come if you just kept hustling fast enough.

On the icky details of this criminal hustle

I’ll tell you how it’s done. Let’s say you have a 14-karat gold ring that weighs 15 grams. First you weigh it and show the customer that it’s 15 grams. “Now we multiply that by 14 for 14 karat and divide it by 24 for 24 karat, which is what it would be if it were 100% gold,” you explain to the seller. “That gives us the price for your 14-karat gold. Multiply that by 15, for 15 grams. Now, 14 karat is 56% gold and 44% base metal, which burns off at the smelter, so we multiply that by 0.56. Finally, we deduct 10% for the smelter, and 15% for my profit. Most gold buyers will charge you 20 or 25%, which is a reasonable profit margin, but we do such high quantity of gold-buying here that we can afford very low margins. That gives us a final figure of…” You get the picture. The customer’s ring is worth $280 in real gold value. But you just offered $120, with a seemingly sound mathematical justification. And you’ve left yourself plenty of wiggle room if they want to haggle your profit down from 15% to 10% or even 7.5%. The real key to this scam is that you’ve deducted for the impurity of 14 karat not 1x but 2x: first, when you calculated the per-gram price and again when you “deduct for the base metal.”

2016-06-07: Time for a 1M carat synthetic diamond to end this silliness

Lesedi La Rona could, if skillfully cut, yield an even larger stone—the largest polished diamond in history. He described the Lesedi La Rona, a single piece of rough some 3 ga old, as “almost ungraspable.”

2023-05-06: It’s happening. Too slowly because people are dumb, but still.

33% of all engagement rings with center stones purchased last year were created in a lab. That’s 2x the number from 2020. As the technology to make lab-grown diamonds has improved, production has increased and retail prices are falling. Their growing popularity, especially among younger consumers, has caught the attention of jewelers and watchmakers — and is challenging traditional diamonds that are mined from the earth.