Valentines Day: lets talk about diamonds.

So, since I’ve been bombarded with radio and billboard ads from jewelry stores for weeks, I feel compelled to post on diamonds. I like diamonds; they’re my second most favorite form of carbon after buckyballs. However, unlike buckyballs, diamonds, contrary to the jewelry industry, aren’t that rare. In fact, they’re kind of common in nature, but the diamond industry has carefully controlled production. Besides artificially increasing the price, the industry, espicially the deBeers group, has conducted a wildly sucessful marketing effort to supplant more traditional engagement gemstones with large diamonds, and to encourage women to avoid used diamonds.

Despite the fact that I am a budding member of the most capitalistic of all professions, I find the artificial market manipulation of the diamond industry irritating. So, the invention of extremely high quality artificial diamonds warms my heart. Not only are artificial diamonds a nicely ironic end-run around the contrived market value of natural diamonds, they avoid all of the nasty moral baggage connected with natural diamonds. Frankly, there's something close to a 1-in-20 chance of buying a conflict diamond in the natural diamond industry even with the Kimberly process, and it is practically impossible to check the origin of a polished natural diamond. On the other hand, the synthetic ones are serial numbered, and completely traceable.

So, if you're in the market for a diamond, consider a synthetic one from Gemesis, Chatham, or Appollo. Not only will your diamond buying dollar buy a larger and higher quality stone, you get to proove yourself smarter than the deBeers marketing, and avoid guilty feelings about civil unrest in Africa and AlQuida diamond money laundering.

I should mention that one of the companies that makes artificial diamonds alledgely allows customers to provide their own carbon. As much as I like the artificial diamond concept, making jewelry out of humans or domestic animals is completely insane. I would much prefer to think that lifegem was a scam than that people were walking around with fluffy or grandma on a ring.