Obsolete Cut
In the future, the price of every diamond, regardless of cut, color, clarity or carat, will approach $0. How could this be possible? Aren't diamonds some of the most valuable objects on Earth? Haven't diamonds become almost mythical in love? Don't thousands of people each year die mining diamonds because they are so valuable? How can Invest Like a Farmer make such a bold prediction? Read on dear readers.
For those not in the diamond industry, you have never had it better to purchase a special diamond for your true love. Prices over the past 20 years first stagnated, then started falling, and have now completely collapsed. Mind you, for the diamonds considered "natural" they have gone down at a slower rate. But the writing is on the wall.
Using technology developed in the 1950s for producing diamonds for commercial use, think saws, grinders, lasers, etc., retail diamond creation has advanced at a pace akin to the size of PCs. What was once the size of a garage, now line rows upon rows of desk-sized pressure & heat kilns in multiple diamond farms around the world. These machines are "seeded" with small diamond specs and churn our diamonds with similar or better characteristics of natural diamonds. Color, clarity, and carat can all be custom-grown. The final "c," cut, is still finished with some of the old techniques.
Natural diamonds are considered those stones mined from the the earth which were created by the heat and pressure of the Earth over thousands of years. Chemically they are identical to man made diamonds; both are a form of the element carbon.
The implications of this science are monumental, but as usual mainstream media has completely ignored it. The wealth destruction to nearly every married household is significant, especially for those large-diamonded second & third wives. Kidding, aside from a national perspective we're talkling ~100M+ diamond rings being reduced in value to the gold or platinum in their settings plus some notional value of the stone. Cumulatively this is the in $500B-$1T+ range.
De Beers and the diamond monopoly is in a tough position now. They will need the mother of all marketing campaigns to convince the public that a natural diamond, a stone typically mined in Africa by poorly paid laborers under miserable conditions run by dictatorships bent on turning these diamonds into cash...yes the proverbial "blood diamond"...and then shipped for additional low cost labor to India for polishing typically by children, then a final polish in Antwerp then off to New York and beyond is BETTER than a man made stone which can be had for a fraction of the price and minimal social or environmental impact.
The only marketing campaign powerful enough to do this would be to pay the world's most powerful influencer to let her boyfriend know she prefers a natural diamond. I'm thinking De Beers could give the diamond industry one last gasp if it launched a "Love is Natural" diamond campaign. And yes, this would almost certainly involve Travis Kelce proposing to Taylor Swift with a large natural diamond.
