“In the past few years, lab-grown diamonds have become indistinguishable from natural diamonds to the naked eye…” reports the Wall Street Journal. This creates a problem for diamond-mining company De Beers. HughPickens.com writes:
While synthetics make up just a fraction of the market, they have growing appeal to younger buyers — a headache for mine owners, who are under pressure to cut supply and lower prices, because traders, cutters and polishers are struggling to profit amid a credit squeeze and languishing jewelry sales… “Martin Roscheisen, chief executive of Diamond Foundry Inc., a San Francisco synthetic-diamond producer with a capacity of 24,000 carats, says he believes nearly all diamonds consumers purchase will be man-made in a few decades,” reports the Journal. “To counter the threat, last year De Beers helped launch a trade association with other producers to market the attraction of natural diamonds. It also started marketing a new, cheap detector called PhosView, that uses ultraviolet light to detect lab-grown stones that quickly screens tiny synthetic diamonds.
It always seemed like a waste of money to me. After all, it’s literally raining diamonds on Saturn.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Scientists at De Beers Fight the Growing Threat of Man-Made Diamonds