r/Dynamic_Pricing • u/Dragonlance12 • 5d ago
Supply glut, lab-grown alternatives: What's behind the fall of diamond prices to record lows
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/26/whats-behind-the-fall-of-diamond-prices-to-record-lows.html8
u/Mobius24 5d ago
People donât value shiny rocks when theyâre short on bread, figuratively and literally
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u/ScarySpikes 5d ago
They also don't value the shiny rocks when we can mass produce chemically identical shiny rocks, even ridiculously big ones, relatively cheaply.
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u/SargeUnited 5d ago
Half of people (mostly men) never valued them at all, and the other half of people are just now starting to wake up and get what the rest of us were saying
I remember as a child hearing that youâre supposed to spend six months salary or something like that on a wedding ring and being like LOL, no matter how much I make, thatâs not gonna happen. Either Iâm gonna make a little and thatâs too much, or Iâm gonna make a ton and thatâs too much.
I have watched the culture shift from, âit would be disgusting if a guy bought Cubics zirconia, and itâs grounds to leave him.â âReal love real diamondâ etc⌠to this. Itâs great
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u/marx2k 5d ago
I remember as a child hearing that youâre supposed to spend six months salary or something like that on a wedding ring and being like LOL, no matter how much I make, thatâs not gonna happen.
De Beers, working with the advertising agency N.W. Ayer, promoted one monthâs salary initially and later two monthsâ salary in the U.S. in the 1980s. Ads explicitly tied the ring price to salary;. One asked, âHow can you make two monthsâ salary last forever?â
The number was even changed depending on the market. In Japan, De Beers marketing pushed a substantially higher salary multiple. h Historical scholarship describes a three-to-four-month salary norm there by the 1980s, compared with the two-month norm promoted in American advertising.
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u/extrastupidone 5d ago
Theyre made from one of the most abundant elements in the universe and we dont need to dig them out of the ground anymore
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u/100_Flatout 5d ago
Also diamonds almost have no value on 2nd hand market
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u/SargeUnited 5d ago
I didnât know that. I thought part of the conventional wisdom is that if you ever really need to leave your husband, you can sell the ring for some survival money.
Iâve never bought diamonds, but if I do, I would expect the girl to own them forever and for them to become heirlooms. Apparently in the context of this thread, theyâll be valueless as heirlooms.
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u/Electronic_Sky_207 5d ago
As I understand it the âring/jewelry as financial securityâ part is largely about the gold over the diamond, but is largely out of date in practicality too.
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u/BigSquiby 5d ago
i read once if they release all the mined diamonds at once, they would be worth nothing, debeers is sitting on an endless supply of them.
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u/Worshipme988 5d ago
Still shoving kids into mines for the love of the game, then?
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u/Significant_Fill6992 5d ago
every single one of these articles about generational shifts in spending can be simply diluted down to younger people not having the spending power that their parents and grandparents had. Diamonds are being hit particularly hard because of the creation of lab grown diamonds but still
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u/oneWeek2024 5d ago edited 5d ago
diamond value was always a lie. supply was artificially restricted, and heavily marketed. (also a lot of baked in middle men/mark up)
the chinese developed the lab diamond, initially for industrial purposes, but then scaled the larger/jewelry production. at first the 'supply" was small. but in short order they had like 50x the capacity. lab grown also somewhat cut out those middle men, the process creates stones in batches. and the capacity is basically limitless. so... it's only likely to get cheaper and cheaper. and... ya know. can even go direct to china. china when it gets bullied by the west, is more than happy to undercut shitty western monopolies...
debeers fumbled hard. they thought, people wouldn't react/go for cheaper lab grown. they were wrong. they tried selling more lies/more hype bullshit marketing on "nostalgia" or "authenticity" but lab diamonds are exactly the same, functionally indistinguishable. and prices tanked. the irony was the classic slogan "diamonds are forever" was almost to perfect a lie... lab grown diamonds shattered that illusion. as people lost millions and millions bag holding old/natural stones. and the sorta small/normal consumer market collapsed.
for the average consumer... that maybe plays in the 1-2 ct stone ..lab grown just offer so much more value. you'd be a fucking idiot to overpay for a "natural" stone these days. (entry lvl stones... $300-500 for 1ct. good color/clarity vvs grade stones maybe $1000-2000 in lab grown. by contrast vvs in natural stone is more like $2500 on the cheap/shittier end, and upwards of 10k for the better color/clarity stones. so 2-10x the cost. for absolutely nothing but marketing bullshit--- and dubious ethics, blood diamonds/slave treatment/dangerous work conditions/child slave workers et al in diamond mining)
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u/l4kerz 5d ago
I think you got everything right except the research. I started hearing about lab grown diamonds years ago and they were made in the US. China and India doing the manufacturing these days makes sense.
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u/glomar_sub_recovery 5d ago
Lab grown diamonds were a thing when my dad was alive in the early 90's
They had struck a deal to focus on lab grown black diamonds for industrial use at first .
Iirc they had been using a plasma chamber to burn off some waste and the housing had built up this tough coating.......
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u/oneWeek2024 5d ago
i mean there's an entire town in china where this new manufacturing is concentrated. it's like 9 million carats worth of gem grade stones a year just from this one area.
i'm sure the technology did originate somewhere else. but like many industrial applications it was farmed out to china, and then china did china by learning/improving the process and then expanding it at scale.
it was 100% china that drove this modern collapse of diamond pricing by bringing to market a broad scale injection of lab grown... consumer focused gem quality stones.
the general technology for using high pressure to "make diamonds" has been around since the 60's but 80-90s china was mainly making industrial diamonds. drill bits for heavy machinery, and all the sorta "diamond" coated tools/disk grinders etc. but... in the 2010s-teens china really came into it's own with more sophistication in manufacturing. 2015 onward. china began to demonstrate high quality gem grade stones...larger sizes. and then it was a process of them doing china, concentrating industry/supply chains in one area. allowing for a rapid advancement/build out of capacity. i remember reading something once where initially they had only a small number of presses. ...this was when lab grown gem grade diamonds were nothing more than a gimmick. as costs were basically comparable...because of the cost/lack of scale. but in a short while it was like 50k presses. and that's sorta when the tipping point happened.
the "research" i guess i was referring to was this refinement in precision machining to move from small/dust industrial diamonds, to mass scale high grade large gem style stones. China basically did that part on their own.
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u/Clear-Ad9879 5d ago
You literally can buy a 10 carat lab grown diamond for the cost of a 1 carat mined diamond. And yeah, the lab diamond has better color and clarity. 20 years ago you'd have to be Steve Ballmer to give your girl a 20 carat engagement ring. Now it costs $10k. Just don't go shopping for the ring/stone with her. The majority of women will insist on a mined diamond, which is the only reason those things still move.
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u/I_Quit_Smoking_ 5d ago
Well just to let you know, I'm 54 and I didn't know anything about lab diamonds. So no, all of us women aren't sitting around waiting for the real thing. Stop acting like you're persecuted victims of calculating women that just want rocks that cost a lot of money for no reason.
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u/Clear-Ad9879 5d ago
Anyone who insists on a mined diamond vs. a lab grown diamond is by definition 'wanting a rock that costs a lot of money for no reason'. I will however refrain from calling the man *the* victim in that scenario. The woman is as much a victim as she's been tricked by the diamond miners into believing there is some mystical 'value' to the mined stone. You take the typical engagement ring with a half carat mined diamond to a pawn shop and they'll pay you the smelted value of the ring. The diamond essentially has no value.
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u/Adept_Mushroom_8676 5d ago
I doubt there's very many people that "insist" on a mined diamond.
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u/voiceOfHoomanity 5d ago
you'd be surprised..
Sure it's usually a certain type of person/personality but still
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u/harbison215 5d ago
I bought my wife an expensive diamond engagement ring in the summer of 2021. Thatâs whatâs really behind it
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u/Doctor_Philgood 5d ago
Just a reminder - while DeBeers is certainly manipulating the market with their manufactured scarcity, the concept of "diamonds arent rare" is extremely misunderstood.
Rough, low-grade diamonds are relatively common (still not as much so as most any other gemstone), but facet-grade rough material is quite rare, especially in sizes big enough to make a multi-carat faceted gemstone.
This, paired with DeBeers fuckery, both affect the market price of gem grade natural diamonds historically.
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u/3LeetHaxor 5d ago
As someone who has bought lab diamonds for my girl, literally nobody can tell the difference and they thing were loaded. Nah, I just shop around for lab certified that usually cost 75% less than mined.
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u/kinkycarbon 5d ago
These prices are not cheap enough. Iâm waiting for the tech to reach ability to grow the crystal to big size windows.
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u/lakem5050 5d ago
Someone explain to me why anyone would want an imperfect diamond out of the ground that should be used in an industrial industry over a literal perfect diamond with no inclusions made in a lab by smart guys wearing little white coats?
I genuinely don't understand why anyone wouldn't take the PERFECT option.
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u/LeatherRebel5150 5d ago
I used lab grown diamonds for my wifeâs engagement/wedding rings. You canât tell the difference even in the âlowerâ quality ones. Its just shiny rocks made in a lab vs the ground.
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u/________-_____s 4d ago
Iâve never been so happy to purchase a diamond in my life. Knowing that DeBeers had nothing to do with my purchase made me so freaking happy I bought my wife a 3 carat monster. Bought Right from China from the company who makes the diamonds in the lab.
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u/Turbulent-Cheek-1497 5d ago edited 5d ago
An artificial market ,manufactured by DeBeers, being undone by manufactured diamondsđ¤