alt Hacker NewsWell, that goes for some diamonds.
There's another kind that are made by man. In recent years -- over the past four or five years -- there has been an explosion in synthetic diamond production, largely driven by factories in China and India. There are a lot of those factories (spurred by the relatively easy availability of the necessary production-line equipment) and they're all in cutthroat competition with each other, so there has been a race to the bottom on price.
You can get huge, very high-quality diamonds now for a fraction of what they used to cost. Like 95% off. It's crazy.
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I'm often reminded of this classic tweet:
> it's actually crazy we figured out how to grow real diamonds that are cheaper and better quality than the real thing and so many people are still like, no thanks the suffering is what makes it special.
Links and examples? Last I checked, this applied to industrial diamonds, not jewelery.
>"You can get huge, very high-quality diamonds now for a fraction of what they used to cost. Like 95% off. It's crazy."
The thing is though, what's the point? Unless you're trying to actually pass your diamond as real, there's literally no difference between that $1500 lab grown gem and a $5 piece of costume jewelry. No one but a jewler will ever tell the difference, so why pay anything at all? With real diamonds today you are paying for that certificate of providence, which is what actually gives it any value. Used diamonds of course are worth nowhere near their retail value, but used lab grown are worth zero, both monetarily and sentimentally. Grandma's heirloom Tiffany engagement ring will have meaning in the way that a lab grown no name ring ordered online will not, even if they are completely indistinguishable.
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Could you distinguish between them if you weren't told?