Anyone have any experience with them?
Yup. My engagement ring is a man-made blue diamond surrounded by man-made white diamonds.
Plenty of compliments, much cheaper and more ethical than mined diamonds, and exactly the same as mined diamonds.
There was a thread on this a while back. There are many people out there who hate man-made diamonds but chemically and physically they are exactly the same as mined diamonds. A diamond is a diamond is a diamond.
@romanigypsyeyes did you get yours at a store, online?
Of course, the artificial ones come without these 4 Cs: conflict, child labor, cartels/corruption, (high) cost.
I think they are required to have a teeny number engraved on them because that is the only way anyone can tell that they’re not natural diamonds. Pretty amazing.
S is engagement ring shopping. Unfortunately, he refuses to look at lab-created diamonds because he considers them “fake.” I’m all for them for ethics and price. I bought a lab-created diamond ring ($40ish) for myself a couple years ago, just to see how it compared to my real diamond (H inherited from his great grandma). It looks pretty good. Maybe an expert can tell, but people don’t look that close. (He’s looking at center diamond flanked by two light blue sapphires.) IMO, if the stone is small enough, they’ll think it’s real 
Not to be confused with CZ… these are chemically, physically, and optically identical to the “natural” ones.
http://www.brilliantearth.com/lab-created-diamonds/
Not cheap, either! The $40 diamond must have been verrryyyy small.
@partyof5 Mr R had a friend who is a jeweler. We went to her (she worked in a jewelry store on the other side of the state). We had designed the ring via emailing back and forth and then she ordered a few of the blue diamonds for me to check out and decide which one I liked.
I did buy a man-made garnet stone over the internet. For something like a diamond though, I’d want to see it in person or have a 100% return policy if I didn’t like it.
ucb, yes… but in the context of what I said, I thought it was pretty clear that they are identical on a molecular level.
I’d be shocked if there are $40 man-made diamonds.
CZ is NOT a man-made diamond. They are two completely different things and should not be confused.
There’s also natural white Zircon
Here is the old thread - it starts off talking about synthetic sapphire but morphs into diamonds at one point. I think everything that can be said about this topic was said 
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parent-cafe/1859869-need-cc-advice-synthetic-sapphire-p1.html
S has really drunk the DeBeers marketing koolaide deeply.
^I bet man-made diamonds are way cheaper to produce, and have a much lower profit margin, but pack the De Beers massive marketing campaign.
The “two month salary” rule and “a diamond is forever” are the two gems (pun sorts intended) of De Beers advertising slogans.
Not meaning to hijack this thread but is the whole “two month salary” rule still a thing among some groups of people? I’ve never, ever heard it in my circles except as a joke.
The Xmonths salary is another DeBeers successful marketing scam
I wouldn’t personally rely on the two month rule, no. I think people spend what makes sense for their particular station in life. Maybe that’s modest, maybe that’s splashy. Who knows.
My H wasn’t working when we got engaged (he was in medical school) do he dipped into his savings. He had a figure in mind, but I have no idea how he came up with it. I guess it was “enough to buy a quality nice ring, but not enough to impact long term savings goals.” That number will be different for everybody.
When shopping for a diamond for “the ring” we discussed the 2 month rule (years ago, when it was a pretty “popular” rule). The first thing my future hubby asked, and I should mention who has a career in finance, was, “Is that gross or net?”
Synthetic diamonds have been produced for a long time that match the naturally occurring ones, and yes, they can be hard to tell apart even by an expert. Actually, from what I remember, synthetic diamonds are technically more perfect than the ‘real ones’, and my wife a while ago worked for a wholesale jeweler and there was a lot of talk of the fear of diamonds becoming a comodity item with how good synthetic diamonds were getting. They aren’t that cheap to make, though, synthetic diamonds, while a fraction of the cost of quality natural ones, still take some work to make. Plus natural ones because they are scarce will always be more…
You can turn your beloved pet or grandma into a diamond, because diamonds are forever…
Just need to protect from a fire, becaue diamonds will burn.
http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2009-08/burn-diamonds-torch-and-liquid-oxygen
Just when I thought I’d seen everything…