Loath as I would ever be to bestow any kind of acknowledgment to the Ginger Whinger’s Duchess CaringSlut, on this issue I am firmly on her side.
The Duchess of Sussex once wore diamonds grown in a lab on a royal jaunt, but jeweller Eddie LeVian is not impressed.
‘I’m concerned people think it’s the same as a diamond,’ he tells me at the Tower of London, where his brand Le Vian hosted a show. ‘It’s misleading.’
Of course, he makes his livelihood pimping overpriced rocks for the ghastly De Beers diamond criminal cartel, so of course he would sniff at “man-made” diamonds as not being “the real thing” — although they actually are. Even if they were grown in a clean laboratory somewhere instead of having been hauled out of the ground by child laborers in Africa, their chemical composition, their hardness and appearance make them real diamonds, absolutely indistinguishable from their bloody African cousins.
Which of course makes the diamond industry quake in their expensive handmade boots, because it means the end of their tidy little cartel which has established itself by dint of creating an artificial shortage through the imposition of “controls” mostly illegal — ask yourself why De Beers doesn’t have an office in the United States (RICO coff coff ). And gawd forbid that diamonds should be priced at even semi-precious levels rather than as the horribly-overpriced geegaws they are.
So while the Duchess Formerly Known As Third Actress From The Right may well have worn said manufactured gems because of Evil Child Labor Exploitation — not actually a bad reason, for once — the fact remains that all the pouting about the diamonds being fake is being driven, as always, by the greed and self-preservation instincts of the fucking awful diamond industry.
Who are far, far worse a cancer on society than the Markle creature could ever be, try as she may.
I bought Wife 2.0 a lab-grown diamond and used the savings to up the size of the rock. The biggest giveaway is that it’s too nice, meaning that larger mined diamonds typically have a lot more flaws and discoloration.
Lab grown diamonds are such a “problem” for diamond merchants that the labs micro-engrave them so that jewelers can tell when they put it under a loupe.
I agree with Ravenwood.
Waaaaay back in the day (the sixties) I hung around with some art majors, some of whom were learning silver smithing. Linde had been making their Linde Star sapphires for twenty years then and their lower price was well known, as was the method for distinguishing the natural stone from a Linde product: Linde Stars have perfect stars and natural star sapphires do not. These synthetic gems were a route to a dynamite (i.e., marketable) piece of jewelry that starving art students could afford.
Way back in the day there was a science fiction story about a guy on a deep space outpost/colony. He was basically essential for the survival of the outpost but really didn’t give a rat’s ass because he was soon going back to Earth to enjoy the payoff of a shady financial deal when the statute of limitations expired. Until one day he became VERY interested in the welfare of the outpost and staying there instead of scurrying back to Earth. Why? News came that dirt-cheap synthetic diamonds had successfully broken the diamond cartel and diamonds were a dime a dozen. It turned out he’d squirrelled away is ill-gotten booty in natural diamonds which were now worth precisely zilch.