Those Lifegem diamonds are obscenely expensive. The biggest is less than a caret and it’s $20,000!
Do you think wearing your diamond-converted dear dead grandma or dear dead golden retriever is sentimental or goulish?
I vote ghoulish.
Ghoulish. Just no. But I don’t like cremated urns either.
How does that compare to the cost of a burial plot, headstone, fresh flowers for eternity, and gas money for your loved ones to drive to the cemetery?
I’m intrigued by manmade diamonds. I want a pair of diamond stud earrings (.5 carat TW $5300 at Tiffany). I just went on the Brilliant Earth website and could get a pair (TCW 1 ) pair for less than half the price.
The memento mori thing is very Victorian. Remember, people used to wear jewelry made out of the hair of the deceased. Talk about ick.
I wonder what will happen to the value of diamonds. I have heard that the supply is unnaturally suppressed by the diamond “cartel.” I have a couple of diamonds (approx. 1 carat, natural) I inherited. They aren’t stupendously valuable. They are old ( early 20th century, pre-conflict) although the lives of the people who found them were probably not great. I don’t feel guilty about them. I gave one to my D as a college graduation present. She can get it reset in any way she wants.
To follow-up to my earlier post, I am happy to share a picture or two of my engagement ring if anyone wants to see what man-made diamonds look like on a real person. (They’re the same as any other diamond but… you know…)
well I’d love to see it, @romanigypsyeyes. I love jewelry.
As you can see, Romani, at one point I was fascinated with gemstone science!
Mr. spent half an hour on YouTube watching things being burned in liquid O2. Imagine your ex-fiancé breaking the engagement and asking you for the ring back… And you send him a video of that rock being burned in liquid O2? Perfect. B-) Except if the rock was CZ… 
lol.
@romanigypsyeyes I would love to see a pic
I wish I knew about them 3 decades ago when I received mine. I’d never heard of them. We actually purchased my diamond on our 5th wedding anniversary and had it mounted on my 10mm gold band. Although We purchased a nice size diamond, I wouldn’t have been opposed to an even larger one at half the price.
Synthetic gem quality white diamonds were not really available until fairly recently. Previously the process produced only poorly colored stones, which were used industrially or could be enhanced to produce fancy colors. Today’s manmade are quite nice looking in the nearly colorless range.
Ahhhh…too bad.
There’s an article in the latest New Yorker that involves making a diamond from part of the ashes of a famous Mexican architect.
I’d love to have diamonds made from the ashes of my golden retrievers.
^^^ yellow diamonds?
Maybe it’s something to put in our wills now - “and no diamonds made out of my bones, dammit”.
Diamonds are NOT a commodity and are not traded as such, so thinking of them as valuable is as useful as thinking of your used car as valuable. Well, not quite that bad, but not like stashing away gold coins either.
@romanigypsyeyes - I would love to see a photo of your ring!
If their prices weren’t so obscenely high, I kind of like the idea of having some of my loved one’s carbon forever. My DH has volunteered to have a bit of his chemicals forever in a pendant between my breasts.
I think you are going to want to edit that last sentence, dragonmom. It sounds a little ickier than what I think you meant to say.
And I thought I was the only one with a dirty mind.
Yikes, that will teach me to leave before right after a post! Edit, edit, edit!
I’m a bit of a rock nut, and I’ve always been fascinated with gemstones. (Dragons like gems, lol)
A few things that I’ve learned about diamonds:
- Not rare. Not rare at all. The vast majority of the diamond trade is a vertical monopoly controlled by a few companies. Diamonds are actually pretty common. There was a fascinating story about a diamond mogul who had an entire hold of a tanker filled with diamonds, and he almost chose to sink the ship because the diamond market was not doing well at the time and he was worried he'd take too much of a loss. Can you imagine if he'd done that?
- White sapphires and white zircon do not have the refractive properties of diamonds. They're not at all the same. Same with cubic zirconia-much lower refractive index and lower on the mohs hardness scale.
- A certified diamond from a pawn shop and a certified diamond from Tiffany's are both diamonds ;).
I think that Moissanite is marketed as a synthetic diamond, but I haven’t seen one in person yet to evaluate if it has the same fire as a real diamond.
My fascination with diamonds lies with the fact that they’re incredibly, incredibly old. They are ALL between 1 and 4 BILLION years old. That to me is just so cool.