Comment by bsoqk
12 hours ago
> The market for natural diamonds will cease to exist when you can buy lab-grown versions for a couple bucks.
Just like the luxury watches market ceased to exist when you could buy quartz watches for 10 bucks.
12 hours ago
> The market for natural diamonds will cease to exist when you can buy lab-grown versions for a couple bucks.
Just like the luxury watches market ceased to exist when you could buy quartz watches for 10 bucks.
Well the privet to luxury was due to quartz watches taking their core business, and now Chinese superclones are in the early days of threatening their luxury business. At a certain point it’s hard to care about the residual difference.
I've heard that even experts can't tell those superclones apart from the originals anymore. Are they equally reliable?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privet
This may have been a nerd-snipe for Harry Potter fans, but I still struggle to interpolate an acccurate word there. "pivot to luxury"?
Yes ‘pivot’ somehow a double typo or perhaps some weird autocorrection. Sorry about that.
Except in this case, the quartz watches would be better quality than the luxury watches
I'm not sure your analogy has teeth.
Mechanical watches are a luxury item when the intricate craftsmanship is highly valued, even though they're completely obsolete compared to even the simplest quartz movement.
That analogy doesn't hold for natural diamonds and the comparison therefore falls flat on its face.
The quartz watches are (way) better at time keeping.
And the rest is just a matter of paying for luxury.
The main reason the analogy doesn't really help is that the mechanical watch market absolutely cratered, and it's only being propped up by enthusiasts of cool machines.
Diamonds can't really have that. They've already scammed the general population into using slave diamonds at monopoly prices for 30 years longer than they needed to, but no one is _passionate_ about slave diamonds.
It's a poor analogy because mechanical watches and quartz watches aren't perfect substitutes and aren't purchased for the same reasons. Everybody's phone keeps better time than a watch; absolute accuracy isn't the exclusive measure.
Lab diamonds and mined diamonds are literally identical products.
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