This month’s Smithsonian has a pretty good article about laboratory-created diamonds, which are getting so good they’re starting to fool professional jewelers, and have cartels like De Beers running scared.
Apollo’s directors worry about theft, corporate spies and their own safety. When Linares was at a diamond conference a few years ago, he says, a man he declines to describe slipped behind him as he was walking out of a hotel meeting room and said someone from a natural diamond company just might put a bullet in his head.
I believe it. Diamond cartels are infamously sleazy and corrupt, and no better than heroin or cocaine druglords. They spent decades and millions of dollars into creating this phony mystique around a bunch of sparkly rocks, and that companies like Apollo and Gemesis might yank that out from underneath them is probably keeping them up at night.
Natural diamonds aren’t particularly rare. In 2006, more than 75,000 pounds were produced worldwide. A diamond is a precious commodity because everyone thinks it’s a precious commodity, the geological equivalent of a bouquet of red roses, elegant and alluring, a symbol of romance, but ultimately pretty ordinary.
I wonder if the advertising gurus for the cartels actually believe the bullshit that comes out of their mouths, or just think everyone else is stupid enough to:
“Diamonds are rare and special things with an inherent value that does not exist in factory-made synthetics,” says spokeswoman Lynette Gould. “When people want to celebrate a unique relationship they want a unique diamond, not a three-day-old factory-made stone.”
It’s a fucking rock, you asshole. It’s not particularly rare or special; and the way the industry equates it with love, fidelity, and some kind of sick ownership of the recipient (who is almost always female) pisses me off. De Beers likes to feign innocence and claim that they’re just reacting to consumer desire, but that’s total crap and they know it: Diamonds as engagement gifts were practically unheard of until after WWII, coincidentally (yeah, right) right around the time that De Beers coined the slogan “A Diamond Is Forever” and aggressively ramped up marketing.
Like most open-pit mines, diamond mines cause erosion, water pollution and habitat loss for wildlife. Even more troubling, African warlords have used diamond caches to buy arms and fund rebel movements.
I’ve always disliked natural diamonds and said that if I saw them lying on the ground, I wouldn’t bend over to pick them up. I hope the lab diamonds eventually put diamond mining and the fuckers who buy and sell them out of business.
