A Diamond is Forever (and also not that rare)
One would argue that diamonds are expensive because they are rare and are one of the most resistant and hardest things known by men.
Guess what… diamonds are not that rare.The whole industry almost came to a disaster when tons of diamonds began to be taken from mines found on South Africa in the beginning of the 20th century. De Beers began reinventing the diamond in the late 1930’s to the U.S. public and late 1960’s to the world and making use of it’s industry monopoly managed to control the market.
The most unbelievable thing is that De Beers makes use of it’s dominant position to gain even more sources to diamonds. Zimbabwe has recently tried to commercialize it’s diamonds refusing De Beers offer to buy all of them, so De Beers threatened to flood the market with diamonds that would lower the prices and sink the possible income from Zimbabwe diamonds.
The most curious thing is that today is possible to make synthetic diamonds in laboratory, costing only €80 to make, with all the natural diamonds material characteristics (or can even be potentially better), worthing thousands of euros by today’s standards. They can only be distinguished from natural diamonds by spectroscopy in infrared, ultraviolet, or X-ray wavelengths.
So why are diamonds expensive if they aren’t scarce nor rare and there are ways of producing them? Well you must ask De Beers, but by now I believe you know the answer to this question.
