Posted on 03/28/2017 7:12:59 PM PDT by Ol' Dan Tucker
Yes. CZ's get cloudy and will abrade over time. The edges round off. A diamond? No. Try a Moissanite. Harder than a sapphire (Moissanite is 9.4 on the Mohs scale, while the sapphire is only 9). The Moissanite has almost two and half times more fire than a diamond.
The Russians are sitting on top of billions of carats of gem grade diamonds in a crater where a meteor hit. De Beers has millions of carats of gem grade diamonds warehoused both cut and uncut. Both of them will not allow them out into the market for the same reason: if they did, the price of diamonds would tank. There have been over a thousand tons of diamonds mined in the last century, not all of them gem grade, but enough of them are to drop the price to between $10 and $20 a carat.
It now costs between $100 and $200 to grow a flawless D grade 1 to 2 carat diamond in the lab using a gas-diffusion pressure onto a seed diamond. That is only one method of growing synthetic real diamonds that turn out flawless. Those methods could be scaled to grow diamonds at production levels that could get the price down to $1 to $2 or less per carat.
De Beers doesn't have a world-wide monopoly. There are competitors. The Israelis, Indians, and Russians are happy to go along for the ride. We even have a couple of diamond mine in the US that are public areas where people can go mine for themselves. Someone just found a seven or so carat F color, pretty clear diamond from which they think they can cut a four to five carat very nice gem grade diamond. . . and the kid who found it gets to keep it! It was just sitting on the ground.
There are synthetic rubies which are inexpensive. . . and emeralds also. But quality naturals of both are VERY expensive. I have several natural star rubies that have beautiful stars and have the very desired "pigeon blood" color. One 6.5 carat I picked up on eBay on an auction which was miscategorized and I wound up as the only bidder. Something like that as a loose stone I expected to go for around $750. . . but I wound up getting it for the $25 opening bid. it was not listed in Gems, or even jewelry, so no one else found it. I had it made into a beautiful ring for my lady. Another I have is in a man's natural gold nugget ring. That one is about 3.5 carats. Both have beautiful stars.
Way back, when I was managing a gun shop in Sacramento, a young man who had just gotten a security guard job came in needing to buy a gun for work. He didn't have the money to buy it, but he did have a gold nugget ring with a raw emerald mounted in it. He said he'd spent a summer working as a miner in South America and he had found the stone and had it mounted in the gold nugget and made into a ring. He offered to trade the ring for the gun. The owner of the shop told me to have the ring appraised. I took it to a jeweler I knew who offered me $8,000 for it on the spot. He said he though he could get a 5 carat flawless emerald out of what he said was a 10 carat natural raw emerald. The boss decided he didn't want to have anything to do with the transaction and told me to give the ring back to the customer. I was young and stupid back then. I should have bought the gun and done the trade myself. DUH! But, I don't know if I could have lived with myself if I had done that. Instead, I told him to go talk to the jeweler. He came back later and paid cash for the gun.
sure. Diamonds have carbon flaws. CZs don’t. And I’ve had more than a few CZs turn grey. I can fake out my friends with a one carat but a 3 carat CZ, no way -no flaws under a loop and I’m not in the social class of flawless diamonds. And the larger they are, the more they don’t have the platinum flash that diamonds do - they’re more ‘clear-ish’ if that makes sense.
I have real estate, art, and also about a 150 or so cut black diamonds, 5 carats and above, up to one that's 92 carats. I bought when they were really inexpensive. Now they've gone up a lot more than when I bought them. They were never mined from any De Beers controlled mine, so they weren't from a controlled market. They are cut in Israel and India. . . but apparently the hidden mine they came from has evidently been over run by one of the revolutions in Africa and has stopped production, the supply is drying up, so the price is rising. Who knows when or if it will open again. I just wish I had bought the 250 carat one I was looking at.
No, sometimes it is because it is art, in limited editions. Tiffany might make only one to ten of a particular design with a very beautiful flair. People pay to have something no one else, or only a limited number may have.
The Charles & Colvard patents on Moissanite expired in February two years ago. It was C&C who perfected the pure white Moissanite and sold them for years. Now, with competition, the price is coming down.
Several years ago my girlfriend and I were walking in a mall in the south peninsula of the San Francisco Bay Area. . . there was a jewelry store there that had a big sign saying everything 90% off! My girlfriend has a collection of jewelry worth north of $750K. . . and I have some that is quite valuable as well, including my 15 ½ carat solitaire black diamond ring. The girl behind the counter spotted my girlfriend's diamonds and gushed that she had to show us the $110,000 dollar ring they had just gotten in that day. We indulged her. . . she got a ring out of a safe that had about a two carat solitaire in what she said was a platinum setting. It was pretty plain looking. We could see the BIG BLACK inclusions in this stone from six feet away! With their 90% discount, it was on sale for only $11,000.
We did not disabuse her of her fantasy that it was a $110,000 ring. After we left the store, both my girlfriend and I agreed the stone was junk, probably worth less than a $1000 for a two carat diamond because of the HUGE black inclusions (there were more than one). The four grams or so of platinum in the ring itself was worth perhaps $220 at most at scrap metal prices. Add some for workmanship, markup, and $2,200 was too much to pay for that ring even at the 100% mark-up normal for retail jewelry.
When I shopped for an engagement ring circa 1971, I went to a jewelry store in Summit NJ, which was kind of THE place, as far as I knew. I said I wanted to buy an engagement ring, and they said, “how much are you willing to spend?” or the like. I said, I don’t know, I have more of an idea of what I want to buy, but the guy didn’t seem to get this concept, and we went back and forth a few times. Finally another guy came by and said, “Why don’t you show him some rings?” ... Excellent suggestion! So they did and I picked something out which I liked the looks of, and it was something like $500 dollars, I think. It doesn’t matter. It was a lot to me, but not beyond what I had in mind.
As a scientist, it was and is nothing but a token, but as a physicist, it was and is a diamond!
Tanzanite is rarer than any diamonds except red and untreated pinks. . . and much rarer than sapphires and rubies. Go for the deepest blue with red flashes you can afford. They come from only one mine and it's been closed for years.
We never buy retail. We always buy from estate sales or jewelry shows.
I don’t wear my ring at home.
I wear both when I’m out somewhere nice, but if I’m just running errands or something, only the wedding band.
I don’t need it to remember that I am married, but it does put others on notice.
On the mezzanine level are the *salon* rooms for private viewing; for the *high-rollers*. :)
Moissanite = laboratory grown silicon carbide.
Has some interesting uses in laboratory equipment.
Absolutely. The value of these common stones are completely artificial. Try selling one after you buy it. My wife and I made a conscious decision not to buy diamonds, even for her wedding ring -- though we can certainly afford it. There are new cubic zirconium blends out there that for anyone outside of a jeweler are practically indistinguishable from the real thing. We bought a ring from a place called Asha that really turns heads. A few of her friends are very jealous of her "rocks"!
...but often they are a guy's.
Oh my gosh. This is one of my all time favorite books & have reread it several times. Great love story too! I was just thinking about this book this past weekend.
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