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.
Diamonds are great....
...as tools in the hands of the working class.
My wedding ring was 30 dollars on Etsy. It has just as much meaning as a 10k diamond to me.
Mine was literally a piece of stainless Steel my mate turned into a ring. Even made me spares, love them.
I got my wife her dream ring with synthetic stones. Her idea.
She's a keeper. Screw these dumb traditions engineered to indebt.
I am interested in purchasing a glow in the dark wedding ring
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
Please Gen Z, finish killing this Industry off.
Trust us we are. It's not like we can afford them anyway
And even if we could, why buy some stone to wear if one could buy 10l gas for the same price?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But if you don’t buy her a real blood diamond how will she know that you love her enough to support slave labor?
I have prime.
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
Saw a story about a wedding ring where instead of a diamond the ring was jeweled with the couple's birth stones fit together into the shape of a heart, which honestly I think is WAY better and probably WAY cheaper too.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Moissanite
Dont opals lose their shine or something over time due to being hydrophilic?
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.
You're getting ripped off, too. The price is artificially inflated, because it's controlled by a cartel.
My gf asked me to not give her a ring when I'll propose, but a zweihander instead :D
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.
we can achive what the earth can in a matter of months or we can chuck kids in a pit ...humanity chose
Wait, wait, go back a second. Are the child death pits still an option? Can we retroactively volunteer ourselves?
But it's the dried up blood from the child slaves that dug them that make diamonds so pretty!
I bet they are selling real diamonds as lab diamonds.
Naw, synthetic diamonds are cheaper, there's no point selling natural ones and pretending they're synthetic.
You spelled Diamond Mafia wrong.
No, no, they are just earning less.
