I’ve been getting podcast ads lately for “natural diamonds” which is badmouthing man made diamonds and a it give a couple very true facts about how 80% of the diamond’s value stays in the community and it’s all legal and above board and definitely no one dies for these diamonds.
The stupidest part is synthetic diamonds are just as good for anyone but the most discerning of jewelers, but people still don’t want them.
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© 2006 Josh Kaufman. Content last updated: May 21, 2006
I mean, this is still all true, but damn. Why is boingboing reporting on a nearly 20-year-old site in response to news about the diamond industry? One could argue the existence of that site and people’s knowledge of all that being true is part of why diamond sales were in the crapper anyway…
boingboing has really gone downhill since most of the original team left and it became an ad-infested mess.
While I agree we shouldn’t be using them for jewelry, diamonds are factually very important and incredibly valuable to manufacturing.
They’re the only thing hard enough to cut and shape tungsten carbide, which is instrumental in basically any complex machinery work.
the ones in tools are man made and they’re a lot cheaper to buy
Depends on the tooling you’re going for. Synthetic diamonds are great for creating abrasives, which makes up the majority of industrial diamond tools.
But for a lot of machining where you need a large cutting head, industrial diamonds are a little too small. I think most synthetic diamonds are less than a millimeter in diameter. They can be made larger, but they take a long time and aren’t very cost effective.
The vast majority of diamonds mined are industrial grade, especially the larger ones. So you end up using a bit of both depending on your application.
Interestingly, moissanite (per the source referenced by the article) exceed diamonds in hardness (“toughness”) as well.
I saw that as well, but I think cut hardness must be jewelers terminology. As far as actual hardness diamonds are a 10 on the mohs scale, moissanite is a 9.25, and tungsten carbide is usually around 9-9.5.
I’ve heard that diamonds brought to the surface from the depths below change with time cos they don’t experience the pressure anymore.
