South African diamond mines are closing due to weak sales and lab-grown stones

bookofjoe

https://www.wsj.com/business/diamond-mines-are-closing-and-s...

ggm

"The death of the diamond" Edward Jay Epstein (1983)

insamniac

similar to the lab-grown intelligence impact

davidhyde

Oh shame. The poor devils.

reid-rigo

Hope to see these headlines some day for the meat industry

wewewedxfgdf

Shorter: "South African diamond mines are closing due to lab-grown stones"

AdmiralAsshat

"Millennials are killing diamond mines!"

mlmonkey

I heard once that even if DeBeers stopped all diamond mining activity, their existing stockpile would last for a 100 years or more.

yogthos

uplifting news of the day right there

tedchs

> Demand for engagement rings gave thousands of South Africans steady work at De Beers. Now, weak sales and lab-grown stones are taking it away. So wait, on this Labor Day weekend, it sounds like the WSJ is pro-worker, but only if they're in South Africa?

glimshe

How will we survive without the safe and wholesome diamond mines? I guess we'll all have to be okay with the much superior and cheaper lab diamonds... The picture subtitle says everything that needs to be said about this: "Miners like De Beers have positioned diamonds as synonymous with love and devotion." Scumbags.

missedthecue

Brutal news for Botswana which was really breaking new ground in raising Sub Saharan living standards. 30% of their GDP and a huge portion of government revenues are diamond exports. And they had gotten to 100% formalized and child labor free supply lines

jonstewart

So lab grown diamonds are good and cheap enough I can finally buy my wife of 21 years a diamond ring?

hn_submit

The market for natural diamonds will cease to exist when you can buy lab-grown versions for a couple bucks. They wanted to differentiate between natural and lab-grown versions with the former being much more expensive. But that train has left the station since there's little to no difference in quality between the two. In fact, I once predicted there'd be huge scams where lab-grown ones would be repackaged and sold as natural ones and that would ruin customers' trust in natural diamonds. But it now seems that isn't going to happen because customers are voting with their feet and leaving natural diamonds behind.

thijson

I wonder if diamonds become cheap enough, and we are growing the crystal anyway, if we can introduce dopants and get interesting electrical properties.

MobileVet

This took way longer than I hoped & expected... the DeBeers cartel in full damage control has really squeezed everything they could from it.

lovich

Its not gonna be just diamonds, pretty much every gemstone is subject to the lab grown stuff. Im into gem cutting as a hobby so its been great for me to find stuff like these cheap ruby roughs[1] but yea, its gonna fuck up anyone selling the natural stuff. [1] https://www.etsy.com/listing/4443524661/lab-grown-red-ruby-s...

dyauspitr

Literally everyone I know is enlightened about this but still spent $5k on a natural diamond ring myself included. There something about it (probably just the high cost) that makes the ladies very happy even though they are “enlightened”/rational as well.

helpfulclippy

If we want to maintain having economic flex be an essential part of courtship lategame, let’s have new tradition should be donating two months pay to a non-profit to get some sort of well made certificate in her name. And then if she says “yeah I want you to donate to the Enslave African Children to Plunder the Earth For Frivolous Baubles Foundation,” you know, hopefully that’s a fucking bullet the guy just dodged.