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A girl’s best friend: Now, with less cruelty

Jill

Man-made diamonds are now being graded by the Gemological Institute of America. Good news for people who like expensive jewelry but dislike the cruelty of the diamond industry. Bad news for DeBeers and other diamond companies, which have exploited entire countries, enslaved people, and caused a whole lot of bloodshed. Naturally, they aren’t happy about the whole manufactured diamond business.

But I sure am. And I’m crossing my fingers that they put the diamond mining industry out of business.

43 thoughts on A girl’s best friend: Now, with less cruelty

  1. There are also conflict free diamonds, mostly from Canada, which are mined using fair labor practices and without the shady business companies like De Beers benefit from, but are still natural diamonds (for those ladies and gents who prefer the “our love is as deep as the center of the earth” variety of diamond).

    One thing I would question about the conflict free diamonds, though, is how mining affects the environment. It’s not something I know anything about but I’d be curious of any one else has thoughts/data/links.

  2. It’s actually “GEMological Institute,” not “GEOlogical.”

    Just a minor nitpick, but as a geologist, I can assure you geology and gemology are quite, quite different 🙂

  3. I’d also wonder how eliminating mines (as opposed to forcing them to treat their workers decently) affects the economy in those countries where a mining job is the best available way to feed your family.

    You can also buy ‘estate’ jewelry, which tends to be cheaper (because, you know, who wants a used diamond?) and doesn’t put any money in the cartels’ pockets.

  4. Yes, buy estate jewelry. Where I live, it usually sells for half the appraised value. And there’s always eBay.

  8. Eh, I’m not so big on diamonds. I don’t buy them, because of the various issues mentioned above, but I don’t find them terribly pretty, either. Sure, they sparkle, but colored stones are prettier, IMO.

  9. No Raging Moderate, you’re not. But I’m not a jewellry fan at all. I’d rather spend the money on books, to be perfectly honest. I’ve received a few inexpensive pieces, but for the most part they just live in my beautiful jewellry box and don’t come out. And actually, I love the jewellry box more than the jewellry – I’ve always been charmed by beautiful boxes.

  10. Am I the only one who doesn’t understand the appeal of diamonds?

    Nope. But then I don’t wear any jewelry except earrings, and I tend to prefer colored stones or cute, quirky, funky stuff. Also I have no issues with fake stones. But then I am 19, maybe I will change when I grow older (I hope not).

    And if I ever got married (currently doubtful) I’d much rather get matching tattoos than rings… I hate wearing rings, I find them dreadfully uncomfortable.

  11. Am I the only one who doesn’t understand the appeal of diamonds?

    Actually doesn’t understand it, or just doesn’t share it? Becasue on the second point, right there with you. The appeal is pretty easy though:

    1. No matter how you pretty us up with morality and civilization, underneath all of us are just animal savages, and we like shiny things.

    2. It’s a great way to show off your wealth and generally be an ass.

  12. I proudly and happily wear a man-made diamond. It’s gorgeous, looks like the real thing, and cost a FRACTION of what a natural diamond would.

  13. Don’t forget LifeGems (R)! Turn your dead relatives into artificial diamonds – your choice of blue or yellow!

    It’s a bit weird, but it beats all heck out of the regular diamond industry – and the blue ones are very pretty.

  14. LMAO HOLY SHIT TAPETUM. Making sure that someone does that to me when I die is DEFINITELY going in my will, which I’m planning on making in the next month! 😀

  15. I really didn’t get the appeal of diamonds until I went to the Smithsonian. A reasonably-sized diamond with an expert cut has a way of playing with light that is unmatched with any other stone.

    But I’m a geek, so I’d rather have a good fossil.

  16. I’m with you, Jill. Fuck DeBeers and the whole diamond consortium. I remember watching something on Discovery or TLC a few years ago that discussed how man-made diamonds are manufactured, and they also covered the relatively brief history of this enterprise. At first the manufactured diamonds were crude, but as they started perfecting the process the man-made diamonds were eventually able to fool even the experts. The only way that they can now distinguish the difference between natural and artificial diamonds is that artificially produced stones glow when exposed to a black light. Otherwise even the most skilled jeweler would probably never be able to discern the difference. Some DeBeers spokesman they interviewed for the show still tried to say that these man-made stones were somehow inferior to their natural counterparts. His sole argument in defense of his thesis: Man-made diamonds aren’t “real” diamonds. Well correct me I’m mistaken, but isn’t a diamond simply a bunch of carbon atoms in a specific crystal bonding structure? And if both the man-made and natural diamonds fit these criteria then don’t they both qualify as diamonds!? Of course they do. That DeBeers dude was simply full of shit.

    Automotive gasoline is derived from crude oil. However it can also be extracted from coal, but generally it’s simply cheaper to make it from oil. (Cut off from their oil supplies in the latter part of WWII the Nazis resorted to extracting gas from coal, so it’s been done, and done on a large scale at that.) Anyway, if gas is derived from coal instead of oil does it make that gasoline “fake”? Hell no. Big business will do whatever it takes to maintain a monopoly, including dissemination of false information about their competitors. (Hell, they do much worse than that many times, but lies are still a potent weapon in their propaganda arsenal.) Dick Cheney is the poster child for the malevolent practices of big business. Need I say more?

  17. No worse than a Victorian mourning ring with somebody’s hair, I suppose.

    Diamonds are very pretty and shiny, and I admit to having spent time browsing the Tiffany’s site and coveting the “bubble” necklace with diamonds and sapphires. But I’d rather have the down payment on a house than a sparkly bauble, I think. (Although if somebody wanted to buy it for me I wouldn’t object. Hee.)

  18. I’m another one who prefers colored stones. My current favorite is mystic topaz. I rarely wear jewelry though. This sounds like a great alternative to regular diamonds though!

  19. The diamond industry wouldn’t be able to sustain its cruelty if the demand weren’t so high. I’ll grant that the diamond sellers have manufactured demand, but we as consumers don’t have to give in to the marketing. They don’t just market the diamond, they market the idea that a diamond should stay in the family. If you buy into that, once a diamond is bought, that’s it, it’s out of the supply chain. Demand for diamonds can therefore only be satisfied with new diamonds. Engagement rings are the worst, in my opinion. Men are supposed to spend an ungodly amount on a huge ass stone, and women are supposed to be buried with it or something. What’s up with that? There’s no reason for diamonds or diamond jewelry to be conserved this way. Unlike clothing and cars, diamonds don’t wear out. They can be reset and worn by a new owner.
    I also like colored stones – yellow diamonds are among my favorites. 🙂

  20. Women are supposed to be buried with their diamonds? Really? My grandmother was not buried with her engagement ring. My aunt has it and my mother has her wedding ring. Actually, I am to get my grandmother’s wedding ring because I’m the only one in the family who would want a plain gold band anyway and not anything fancy with stones, should I ever desire to wear a ring to indicate commitment to someone.

    I know nothing about jewelry.

  21. “A girl’s best friend”? That’s an odd tag line for a feminist’s post. Diamond is a pretty stone, I guess, but so is quartz, and a hundred and fifty years ago, aluminum metal was worth more than its weight in gold.

    The idea of the song “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” was that after the singer’s “sugar daddy” grows cold, as he inevitably will one day, if she’s been forethoughtful enough to get him to adorn her in expensive jewelry she’ll possess something of permanent value with which she can pay the bills after he’s gone. But when man-made diamonds implode the natural diamond industry (good riddance, I say) by running the price down by an order or two of magnitude, then not only will the gigolette of today not “prefer a man… who gives expensive jewels” but also any gigolette-in-retirement who “can’t straighten up when you bend / but stiff back or stiff knees / you stand straight at Tiffany’s” is in for a dismal surprise. She’s going to wish that she’d thought “Treasury bonds are a girl’s best friend” instead.

  22. As a geological engineer from Canada….

    1. Canada is one of the world’s top diamond producing countries. The second, next to Russia, I think.

    2. DeBeers is about to start mining in northern Ontario(of course).

    3. The enviromental impacts of diamond mining are much less than impacts of other types, because there is no chemical leaching process (like arsenic leaching with gold mining), and the minerals/rocks that diamonds are found in are silicates, and do not contain the sulfur compounds (and therefor the bad stuff) that metals are found in.

    It is obviously much more complicated than this.

    There are studies at the university that I attend that is monitoring and determining the environmental impacts of mining, both ground water levels and geochemical.

    Oh yeah, and go see the diamonds at the Smithsonian. They are beautiful. Who needs a coloured mineral when a diamond is a sparkling rainbow?

  23. Moissanites, made by Charles & Colvard.

    Super clear, literally almost as hard as a diamond. Many jewelers cannot tell the difference unless they use a testing device.

  24. “A girl’s best friend”? That’s an odd tag line for a feminist’s post.

    Come on, guys, do you really think that I was serious? I used “A girl’s best friend” because it’s a common diamond-associated phrase, not because I believe it. Christ.

  25. Diamonds have never done much for me. When my husband and I got engaged, it didn’t even occur to either of us to get a ring. Then my mother-in-law offered me her grandmother’s engagement ring: beautifully art-deco-ish. The first few days I wore it, I was constantly distracted by my sparkling hand, and now I understand a little of the appeal of diamonds. But spend actual money for one? Never.

  26. The diamond industry wouldn’t be able to sustain its cruelty if the demand weren’t so high. I’ll grant that the diamond sellers have manufactured demand, but we as consumers don’t have to give in to the marketing.

    DeBeers also restricts the supply so it can keep prices high. Which is another reason they don’t like the new artificial diamonds.

    Ever since I sat in a document review several years ago with a woman whose fiance had bought her diamond from a pawn shop because he’d found out after a previous broken engagement that diamond rings depreciate real fast, I refuse to even consider buying a real diamond anywhere but a pawn shop. And I like diamonds.

    This was before blood diamonds, too. Now, if I want a diamond necklace or something, I’ll get the fake ones.

    This

  27. Come on, guys, do you really think that I was serious? I used “A girl’s best friend” because it’s a common diamond-associated phrase, not because I believe it. Christ.

    You see, stuff like that is how feminists get stuck with the “don’t have a sense of humor” rap. God forbid anyone uses a turn of phrase not approved by headquarters.

  28. Well, I was just playing around, since that song lyric coincidentally leads up to the point I was going to make, I wasn’t questioning your feminist cred or anything like that. But my main question is, do you think anybody is going to want diamond jewelry any more, once a flawless one-carat stone can be got for a hundred dollars? Diamonds and gold are both valuable industrial materials, but the main thing for which they are treasured is their rarity, their exclusivity. If everyone could afford them, the people who now buy diamonds or would like to, won’t particularly want them. Nobody wears aluminum jewelry nowadays.

  29. I agree with Zuzu that pawn shops are an excellent place for jewelry, as well as antique shops and estate sales. Just that when you buy anything on the second hand market, you have got to do your own homework first and not assume anything a seller tells you is absolutely accurate.

    I just recently bought, at a pawn shop, a small bracelet with a variety of stones, my first piece real jewelry. Something to wear when I want to or have to, dress up, which isn’t often. For the matter of function, I’d rather buy a lot of sparkly, pretty jewelry with minor stones instead of one diamond.

  30. For anyone interested in the topic of the valuation of diamonds relative to that of the so-called “semi-precious” stones, I cannot recommend the article “Anti-Agate: The Great Diamond Hoax and the Semi-Precious Stone Scam” by Robert Proctor (Configurations 9.3) highly enough (it’s in the Project Muse database, for those who can get to it). Here’s the first bit:

    The value of a thing differs from the so-called equivalent given for it in trade . . . and if the economist were honest, he would employ this term—”price”—for trade value. But he has still to keep up some sort of pretense that price is somehow bound up with value, lest the immorality of trade become too obvious. Karl Marx, 1844 1 Diamonds are expensive because they are plentiful and ugly; agates are cheap because they are rare and beautiful. Apart from making my dismal science (economics) colleagues wince, there is a grain of truth in this improbable paradox, which has to do with the history of value and the ends to which “precious gems” have been put. The value of stones has changed over time, and there is little that is inherent in the nature of the diamond to exalt it over purportedly lowly agates and other “semiprecious” stones. “Little,” as we shall see, but not “nothing.” That observation leads to my first thesis: that there is a conspiracy of sorts that props up the value of diamonds and other “precious stones”—a joint embrace, one could say, between manufacturers and consumers, bilkers and brides, with intrigues and subtleties unparalleled in the annals of consumer culture.One of my larger hopes is to upset this priority of precious over “semiprecious” stones—by suggesting that it was a cascade of social [End Page 381] and political events that rocketed diamonds to the top of the gemstone hierarchy. 2 The primacy of the diamond has to do, I will argue, with a complex confluence of cultural currents, including the timing of their discovery; the manner in which they were marketed; changing legal relations surrounding marriage, especially the softening of “breach of promise” statutes; the growth of cross-ethnic intercourse; the rise of mass consumer culture; 3 and (not to be overlooked) intrinsic exploitable qualities of the stones themselves—notably hardness and homogeneity—which rendered them ideal for a new kind of “social currency” that emerges at the end of the nineteenth century, serving to facilitate the marital bond. 4

  31. the guardian has a good story today titled “are diamonds ethically clean?”

    I have a .. err.. friend (? I don’t want to not claim her as a friend, although I know that my partner and I hang out with because.. it’s a bit like watching a train wreck. I’m sure, as I’m posting this, she’s someplace posting “I have this crazy feminist .. er.. friend? who..”) who works in the diamond industry who swears up and down that all diamonds are clean now. It’s good to see an article explaining “well.. yes, but no.”

    I don’t know. I would never ever wear a diamond for a multitude of reasons, (not just because I have a tendency to lose things.) But in addition to that, even if it were clean, I wouldn’t want to be promoting the idea that something like a diamond was cool, and that you should pay money for it. And even if you could get over the world politics of the whole thing, your local diamond merchant is kissing up big-time to your local right-wing politicians.

  32. Why single-out diamonds? Is it because they’re an obvious luxury good, something anyone can do without?

    I mean, how “clean” do you think the gasoline in your train or car or taxi really is? There’s a baby seal on an Alaskan shoreline that would like to comment on that, I suppose.

  33. Why single-out diamonds? Is it because they’re an obvious luxury good, something anyone can do without?

    I mean, how “clean” do you think the gasoline in your train or car or taxi really is? There’s a baby seal on an Alaskan shoreline that would like to comment on that, I suppose.

  34. Enh, I have a diamond engagement ring, but I like other sparkly gems better too. The ring is pretty and I wear it, but the reason that I have it is because I didn’t specify exactly what I wanted when I was asked. I said, “I want something sparkly, not too expensive, and not fake. Surprise me.” And because the husband isn’t terribly imaginative about that sort of thing and he took a pretty old fashioned friend of mine with him for judgement purposes, I got the standard, little less than half a karat, diamond engagement ring. But he was very sweet about it and was so worried that I wouldn’t like it that I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I prefered sapphires and emeralds. He knows now, but we’ve been married almost nine years and it holds considerable sentimental value for me now.

    And I have a gorgeous opal necklace that my uncle mined himself someplace in Australia when he was on sabbatical over there in the 70s, had set and gave to my mom. I’m not at all sure of its value, but it’s really pretty and I wear it a lot.

  35. I’ll second the recommendation for moissanite. My engagement ring is moissanite – it’s sparkly and pretty, but it was a fraction of the cost of diamonds. I had considered colored stones, but moissanite was even cheaper than something like sapphires, and while I like topaz a lot, I’m tough on rings, and I wanted something hard.enough to withstand all of the banging around it was likely to take. I also like knowing that if I were to lose it, it wouldn’t be all that expensive to replace it. I can’t imagine walking around with thousands of dollars on my finger.

    (I offered to get my fiance his own engagement ring, but he opted for the engagement bicycle instead.)

  36. Nobody wears aluminum jewelry nowadays.

    Speak for yourself (okay, fine, it’s a lot more rare, but there’s some neat looking stuff out there).

  37. Why single-out diamonds? Is it because they’re an obvious luxury good, something anyone can do without?

    Because they’ve been so relentlessly and successfully marketed as a sign of love that their price has been driven up enough so that militants in Africa hack off people’s limbs to get them so they can finance their wars?

  38. Why single-out diamonds? Is it because they’re an obvious luxury good, something anyone can do without?

    I think you just answered your own question. It is actually a lot easier and more practical to take a simple “nobody buy this, it’s harmful” approach to something that serves a purely decorative function than to figure out a fix for something that’s been incorporated into the infrastructure in a much more serious way.

    Plus, it’s kind of hard to have a blog post about issues of concern without y’know, singling out specific issues. It’s not definitively precluding the possibility that people here will address something else tomorrow.

  39. Hey, now. Diamonds are very handy to have around when your kid is learning about the hardness of various minerals (“No, go ahead, try scratching Mommy’s ring with the nail. See?”). Or if you get trapped in a sunken pirate ship and need to cut open a window to escape, like in Curse of Monkey Island.

  40. Hmm, no other physicists here?

    I can’t stand diamonds because they have a boring crystal structure. (Opals, now….ooh, lovely interference patterns. And alexandrite and andalusite are the Bomb because of their color changes.)

    Boyfriends always get a kick out of my anti-diamond rants.

    I’m just waiting until we can produce synthetic diamonds in 1 cubic meter chunks.

  41. Hmm, no other physicists here?

    i am. 🙂 and i agree, diamond’s kinda boring even if it is hard and has awesome thermal conductivity properties. i used to work with sapphire (aluminum oxide) substrates – i don’t wear jewelry so i didn’t start wearing them, but they were pretty. if i had to choose the prettiest crystal structure, i wouldn’t choose diamond. of course, i would also take lentil loaf (or raw lentils, if it came to that) over chicken so i might not be the right person to be judging these things. 😀

  42. ruxandra — You should check out the article i cited above. The author works in the history of science. He posits that one of the reasons that the diamond was able to become the broad signifier it is was due to its boring sameness. He holds up agate as a stone of infinite difference (and one that one can find oneself). I’m partial to amber since I like its name in ancient Greek (elektron!) and that it was once tree sap. With bugs stuck in it.

  43. I mean, how “clean” do you think the gasoline in your train or car or taxi really is? There’s a baby seal on an Alaskan shoreline that would like to comment on that, I suppose.

    Or the Nigerian villager who standard of living has plummeted since oil drilling began. This is a valid point. However, we don’t have the option of boycotting blood oil. We can’t tell which gas pump has the ethical oil and which gas pump has the blood oil. We might even argue that all oil is blood oil. However, our society is built on the availability of cheap petroleum products. We can do our best to reduce our consumption of said products, but we can’t really opt out. OTOH, our society is not built on the availability of diamonds. We can opt out of the diamond industry but not buying them or by buying only certified non-conflict diamonds.

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