who was the retired US Army brigadier general?

I just found my new AI startup idea.

The diamond industry rests on a foundation of scarcity, authenticity, and trust. Natural diamonds, formed over billions of years deep within the Earth, carry with them the perceived weight of geological time and rarity. Even as lab-grown diamonds have entered the market, they’ve been largely relegated to a secondary tier—often cheaper, cleaner, and detectable by experts using magnification, fluorescence, or spectroscopy.

But what if that boundary were no longer secure?

Imagine a lab—not just producing flawless synthetic diamonds, but intentionally crafting imperfect ones. Not random junk, but lab-grown stones designed to mimic the organic flaws, growth patterns, inclusions, and structural anomalies of natural diamonds. Growth striations that looked chaotic, inclusions that mimicked trace mantle minerals, carbon isotope ratios engineered to blur distinctions—each detail carefully introduced not to perfect the product, but to make it convincingly flawed.

Could such a diamond fool a trained human appraiser using nothing more than a loupe and a red laser? Likely, yes. Because human detection relies on consistency: natural diamonds are expected to have certain types of imperfections, while synthetic diamonds have their own telltale signs. If a lab set out to replicate the known categories of natural flaw types—say, a dozen distinct inclusion/grain pattern archetypes—and then mixed production batches to simulate geological diversity, the resulting diamonds could pass as authentic to the naked eye.

The key wouldn’t be randomness, but deliberately simulated randomness—structured noise, chaos engineered for plausible deniability. Variations in temperature, pressure, contamination, and growth interruptions could be modeled to approximate the same turbulent conditions found in the Earth’s mantle, scaled down in time but up in intensity.

Why hasn’t this been done already? Likely because most synthetic diamond labs focus on purity, reproducibility, and yield. But for a lab—or a state actor—with different motivations, the payoff could be enormous. Whether as a way to undercut the global diamond supply chain, to seed markets with indistinguishable fakes, or to challenge Western control of the "natural luxury" narrative, the incentives are clear.

And if it has already been done? The implications are profound.

It would mean that the boundary between “natural” and “synthetic” diamonds has already eroded, not with improved detection, but with the failure of detection. It would turn the diamond industry into a high-tech arms race, where advanced AI spectroscopy and forensic-level isotope analysis become the only way to re-establish certainty. And it would expose just how much of luxury is built not on objective material difference, but on the fragile scaffolding of trust.

It’s also worth noting that diamonds for jewelry have very little to no used market value or appreciation. Natural diamonds might be worth the premium if they could be a store of value like gold, but that isn’t the case. I think that is a clue to the absence of a fair market dynamic.

> What I find most interesting is the weight put on the ethical side. I think it’s overstated. When the issue became big, the Blood Diamond movie, sales of lab grown did not markedly increase.

It was not a switch that was pushed the moment the movie went out. In the grand scheme of things, the movie was not even that popular. But there definitely was a realisation that diamond prices were completely artificially inflated by an oligopoly, and that there were many issues with how they were sourced.

Just because demand did not follow a step function when the file was released does not imply that ethics are not relevant.

But one big reason lab-grown diamonds are so much less expensive now is economy of scale. Something had to start increasing the demand to enable that. Especially considering the large marketing investment against lab-grown gems by established players, trying to make them seem “tacky.” The ethical issues have been a very capable counter-message to that.

I think it's a generational thing. Younger generations genuinely cared about the implicit exploitation and violence in the industry, older didn't.

See also: views on climate change, adoption of renewable energy, etc.

Years and years of “diamonds suck” make a mark. It’s an evergreen topic online for a long time, and the people looking at engagement rings in 2025 have been aware of the shittiness of the diamond business for years.

The mining, corrupt trade practices, etc are all well known and sometimes subject to enforcement action.

More people have caught on to the many terrible things about natural diamonds over time and now we are finally at the tipping point for lab grown to dismantle the unethical natural diamond trade. The idea of lab grown needed time to gestate with the public, which has been manipulated for decades about the “value” of natural diamonds. Even when lab grown became a thing, the natural diamond trade did its damnedest to manipulate the public on the quality of lab grown vs natural. Coincidentally, natural diamonds are overvalued due to decades of market manipulation by a monopoly.

I don't think those are orthogonal.

Natural diamonds are more expensive, and they therefore have a conspicuous consumption element to them. That could be valuable as a means to gain social cachet. Except you'd have to speak loudly about how they were natural.

And in doing so you are loudly proclaiming you don't care about human suffering it took to get the diamonds. That's probably fine in very wealthy circles, but in upper middle class/upper-upper middle class circles, it's likely quite gauche.

If the natural ones didn't have this faux pas attached to them by default, then they might carry more interest as a "I saved up for these" class indicator.

I think it reached a tipping point. It used to be that there wasn't much of a cost advantage, so people assumed you bought the real thing. Now that the lab-made diamonds are super cheap, many people will assume you bought one of those. When that's the case, people feel like they might as well buy the cheaper ones. It's like people buying natural mined diamonds are chumps. No one will know you spent more unless you talk about how it's natural (and that makes you annoying).

My then-gf (now wife) and I watched a movie together about an African man whose village got raided, him put into slavery to search for diamonds and his son becoming a child soldier by the same people and their struggles to get free, and finally pawn off a pink diamond to one of the largest diamond companies in London. At the end of it, she finally came to realise that the diamond trade was really quite shitty. And we had a long discussion about the whole thing, as well as the growth of the synthetic diamonds industry and how they’re much better on the supposed 4C properties as well as on price.

Yet in the end she still wanted to get a ring from one of the big names because that’s what she grew up with and what she had always dreamt of since young.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

What I find most interesting is the weight put on the ethical side. I think it’s overstated.

Virtue-signaling has always been a thing, and apparently quite useful for marketing to certain segments of the population.

Nah it’s also environmentally, mining is bad. And if there is an alternative with no mining, people will opt for that.

What you're seeing in the drop of value of diamonds also reflects the general shift in tastes of different generations with income. I'm a person that likes to go to flea markets and antique stores on the rare occasion and the value of the same items on the market has drastically shifted in the last 10 years as boomers are no longer in the collectible age bracket. Younger people don't really care about Tiffany jewelry

People love to claim the moral high ground, believing themselves so much better. So much more noble. So much smarter.

But at the end of the day, they always do the exact same thing - buy whatever is cheaper. Doesn't matter if it's produced with slave labor, or child labor, or the product of corporate government coups.

They put all that out of their mind, and just buy the product. They rationalize it or conveniently forget it or just pretend it doesn't apply to them. Whatever will get them past it.

A similar topic: Does anyone think things like solar and wind are being used out of the goodness of anyone's heart? Concern for the next generations? A desire to give clean air to our youth? Sympathy for sufferers of all of the horrible diseases and respiratory problems? Concern about lands lost to rising seas?

No. It's because they got cheaper than fossil fuels. Anything else is fantasy.

I actually predict in a few years it will become more fashionable to wear other jewels over diamonds given the rate the prices are crashing at. When diamonds are competitive with all the other gemstones, people start looking at those the same way too

> When the issue became big, the Blood Diamond movie, sales of lab grown did not markedly increase

Other people would still assume you might have bought a blood diamond, so instead of buying a lab diamond, I would expect these people to have bought another gem if they bought a gemstone at all.

What about the size of the market as a whole? Was there a drawdown during the period in question?

Is it possible that people decreased purchases of diamonds altogether in response to ethical qualms (in favor of other jewels or precious items), and then were later motivated by price to go with lab-grown diamonds?

i think you overlooked a general revulsion towards monopoly and therefore DeBeers, their laughable (though long effective) marketing, though agree it's mainly economic.

Not necessarily.

When prices are equal, I'd wager the decision is: "if prices are equal why wouldn't I buy the "real" thing? I'll just try and justify to myself that it's sourced correctly".

When the price of the grown diamonds falls, the decision might be: "Ok, so grown diamonds are cheaper AND more ethical? Ok, I'm definitely buying grown".

If the ethics factor didn't exist, "real" diamonds would still retain the kudos and still be valued highly over "nice but fake" diamonds.

It's the ethics factor that pushes the decision over the line.

As an n=1 economic animal, that's what my behaviour would have been anyway.

When I was a kid in the 80s my mother worked at a jewelry store and CZ diamonds were already considered cheap fakes at the time. The price was not comparable to the real deal because nobody was buying them at diamond prices.

They were simply dismissed as more trash belonging in the gold-plated case. It's hard to appreciate how much less informed people were back then - we're talking pre-internet. The adults around me couldn't explain scientifically what the actual difference was between a CZ and natural diamond. Just one was a fake, held little value, and was a sure way to lose your fiance.

Calling them "lab-grown" is part of the propaganda against them.

Like they're alive or there's some weird chemicals involved.

It's not silly stories when evil corporations with deep pockets are outright lying, like ads with doctors smoking.

>That's just part and parcel of being human.

Also part and parcel of being a human being is logic and empathy. Anyone who possesses one of these traits, never mind both of them, should find it easy to choose the product that isn't literally the product of human suffering an exploitation.

> wanting a mined diamond. The whole idea behind a diamond engagement ring is a marketing exercise backed up by a cartel,

> That's just part and parcel of being human.

Yes, but what kind of human?

Is your company in abrasives or machining? I'm curious because I assume that lab-grown is actually preferred over mined because the crystalline structure may be more homogenous.

A chip of concrete has more "complexity" than any diamond. But somehow I bet Graham's wife isn't wearing a piece of Blue Circle's finest.

Yep. In the context of what should be a very simple crystal structure, "complexity" is another word for "defect".

I have an outdoor fireplace filled with shattered tempered glass. It's like, rough, chunky glass pebbles.

It's much much more complex that a solid sheet of tempered glass, and it catches the light and reflects it in sparkling ways.

Maybe these so called "complex" diamonds create more interesting light interfaces?

He's an earth sciences geek, so he prefers natural diamonds' relationship with the earth. This aesthetic is irrelevant for most people.

Better question: Why should you aesthetically prefer a diamond to cheap glass?

It can result in interesting color centers.

Like all other forms of carbon, diamonds will combust in the presence of oxygen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bfa-cKDzYSg

I'd disagree with that. The prospect of a natural diamond is that it's unique (I mean, not visibly I suppose) and millions of years old.

I'd say it's like AI music or art - something made by a machine, for some reason, just doesn't have any "soul" to it.

I'm not actually entirely convinced in my argument, but there is something there...

I've bought some lab created diamonds made with CVD. THey're great. If anything, they're too clear.

I recommend to all newly engaged couples to buy them and save the money for more important things like raising children or buying a home.

And if you look on eBay, you can get CVD diamonds for even less. (At a bit of a risk, of course.)

I’m not sure diamonds are popular because of what they are but what they represent.

Every gem out there is “the crystalline form” of something. Diamonds are (were?) the expensive crystalline form. And plenty of people equate “expensive” with love, or care, or respect. Even if the same people would never be able to tell the difference between diamond and cubic zirconium, knowing it’s the cheap one makes it less valuable in other ways. This depends on the person, of course.

If it’s not diamonds it will have to be something else that shows “I put my money where my mouth is”. A simple metal wedding band is the same wherever it’s made but a famous jeweler will charge an arm and a leg more than your local shop for the same amount of precious metal, same effort, and same result. And yet Tiffany’s isn’t going out of business for the same reason. It’s what it represents.

I am curious to see if tastes or fashion shift towards other rarer or more expensive gems not yet manufactured cheaply en masse.

The entire point of a diamond is that it’s expensive. People buy them for status. Otherwise there are lots of gems that are much more prettier, but they are not as expensive. It’s like saying people will stop buying branded clothes because unbranded clothes have the same or even a higher quality for a fraction of the price. Kinda misses the point.

It was never about the rocks. Like nearly everything else in the economy it's really about attention.

You shouldn't have gotten a 2 carat diamond that cheap at that time. Either you got a really great deal for some idiosyncratic reason or your recollection is off.

Here's an example article from the era: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/2004/02/14/y...

Inflation is probably why the number is higher now.

A year ago I picked up a 1ct hearts and arrows (D/E. VVS1/2, IGI certificate) from AliExpress for $360. I can see the hearts and arrows and it tests as diamond. A few months later an article came out about how lab diamonds stack up against mined, and the author had also bought one with similar characteristics from AliExpress for even less.

I just checked the same store and they're (not H&A but same other stats) running around $125 plus a $14 tariff.

According to the inflation calculator at bls.gov, $2000 in June 2005 has the same buying power as $3,317 in June 2025. So in real terms the price is about the same.

The _new_ price has doubtless gone up, as inflationary valuation benefits to the manufacturer / vendors.

The resale value of your item has gone down.

A price appreciation of about 75% over roughly 20 years.

So can many other dangerous and environmentally exploited industries. Doesn’t mean it’s a good thing

Agree, though it should be noted that diamonds are far from the only things like this - other questionably useful social status symbols include "luxury" fashion (low quality made in low wage countries...), or even just having the latest iPhone

Personally felt this too, though I think I hate dishonest marketers and adversarial business-customer relations more broadly.

For some reason my ideal vision of capitalism is where a company simply makes a product that solves customers' problem and makes them happy, receiving a fair amount of money in return for their efforts. No corporate propaganda campaigns or anti-consumer shenanigans needed, just a solid [thing] for people who need [thing].

Interested to hear potential problems with this approach in the replies.

When I saw the headline I immediately thought: "couldn't have happened to nicer guys /s"

Why is it that everyone seems to have a soft spot for industries that have some kind of monopoly, suddenly losing that monopoly.

Isn't diamond too brittle for all these applications?

> Diamond threads are forever!

Haha, upvoted for this, if not for the effort :D

If the chemical composition is the same, yes.

> But there is something about diamonds that makes them divine: carbon atoms crystallizing and bonding over millions to billions of years to form structures

It does not take millions of years to form a diamond. It takes hours. The million years are atoms sitting around doing nothing before that, and then diamonds sitting around doing nothing while some of them are eventually pushed to the surface.

You can say the same thing about any mineral. There is nothing special about carbon or the diamond structure. If anything, zircons are much more significant, being the oldest minerals we can find.

> rated on a scale of color, clarity, cut, and weight.

This is nothing special. The colour of lab-grown stones can be varied almost at will, and the rest is still an issue with synthetic stones.

> Naaaaah let's just make it in a lab it looks the same.

That’s the thing, though: it does (yes, some synthetic stones have specific defects related to how they were made and they tent to be too perfect if anything, but they still have the exact same property). It’s like complaining that the meat you are eating comes from a farm instead of being hunted.

> People are being priced out of art and beauty and it's a shame economics and corruption make real diamonds dirty.

Quite the contrary. Gemstones become more accessible to more people. The diamond industry made its bed, being completely corrupted from extraction to distribution. When stones are cheap we can have discussion about their beauty instead of their prices.

I'm all in for finding beauty in our daily lives, but I'm not sure diamonds are more special than other things we take for granted. Oil and helium have also taken millions of years to form, and yet no one spends a second before buying a plastic duck or inflating a balloon. And if the point is that diamonds are shiny and pretty (which is a fair reason for liking them) there are other types of stones around just as good.

Unfortunately, De Beers controls the natural diamond supply, and they leave much to be desired in corporate ethics.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Beers#Legal_issues

It’s not just that, the economics of diamonds is completely fabricated. Idk about these days, but debeers used to buy up the vast majority of mined diamond, not to sell but to hoard or destroy them to maintain scarcity.

I’m not even sure that all of these recent stories about lab created diamonds to come out aren’t actually a PR pitch to advertise “natural” diamonds, an effort to emphasise the difference in the public psyche.

Anything public facing that positions diamonds as expensive, desirable, or valuable can usually be traced back to the cartel. It’s super common in movies and other media.

If the value is in perfection. Why would I not pick one that is bigger, has less flaws and less impurities. It is like would I prefer natural rain water or artificially purified water without microplastics and pfas and so on... My pick should be clear.

I’m curious, how old are you? Age range works.

The article emphasizes that this is a generational thing and I’m wondering which generation you fall into.

there are many naturally occuring objects that have a similarly dramatic timeline

the point is that westerners are completely drunk on the marketing from de beers and its cost lives, not to mention the disgusting machiavellian exploitation of what was once an innocent courtship gesture into an aggressive commercial enterprise, chiefly profiteering the hopelessly young and naive.