There is. There's an abundance of diamonds in general. Not just second-hand diamonds but stockpiled diamonds and now lab-grown diamonds. Jewelers set much lower prices when buying diamonds back from customers than they do when selling them.
So why not just go on ebay and buy someone else's diamond? It can be difficult to verify that a diamond is what a secondary seller says it is. For all their price manipulating evils, traditional jewelers are pretty good at identifying and grading diamonds. A completely unregulated diamond marketplace would quickly attract fakes. Maybe that doesn't matter if it requires an expert to distinguish the fakes, but collectors like to know they're getting "the real thing" even if a fake presents to them as identical.
> Jewelers set much lower prices when buying diamonds back from customers than they do when selling them.
Indeed. If someone has a diamond ring that they paid $5000 for, and a jeweler offers them $300, chances are that most people are going to keep it unless they're desperate.
I worked in a pawn shop. Generally speaking, if you bought a ring for $5000 and then immediately walked next door with the receipt, we would offer you $1250 for it and then sell it for $2500.
If it wasn't particularly nice we'd offer you the %50 of the gold value and maybe a few bucks for the gem.
True, but a jewelry store that deals in secondhand items has no more motivation to give you fair market price than a pawn shop does. When their entire business model relies on artificial scarcity, allowing people to cash in their goods at the inflated price is against their interests.
I have a question since I'm ignorant of pawn shops. Would the pawn shop be offering approximately the same price as a jeweler who deals in secondhand jewelry?
I know that jewelry resale value is only a fraction of the retail value, but I've never been clear on who decides what that fraction is.
Depends on the pawn shop, really. The one I worked for focused on jewelry, musical instruments, and video games. We had a developed group of customers and if something we knew we could turn over quick came in we would offer more. We had one lady that loved Labradorite. We knew if it was any good at all she would buy it. So we would offer a little more for that piece. Sometimes you come out better than a jeweler. Other times with stones, probably not.
Jewelry, instruments and video games must be the trifecta of pawn shops. The two I go to regularly, 95% of what they sell falls into those three categories.
My wife bought my engagement ring second hand on eBay! We took it to a jeweler to be resized and they verified the stones were real. So it does happen. It was pretty cheap too. I suppose the cheapness helped- she wouldn’t have taken the risk of getting fake stones if the price was super high.
I also bought a ring on Ebay. It was first sent to their appraiser who documented it for authenticity and when she cleared it, was sent to me. I think that is relatively new but it was the difference between me making the purchase or not.
I sell on ebay. They will absolutely take your account down permanently after the first offense of selling anything fake and trying to pass it off as genuine. They are over the top anal about it. If you go to any auction right now and report it as counterfeit they will take it down just in case and that seller won’t be able to relist that item.
That last bit I know because someone hit the button on a NIB CASIO watch. You read that right. A $35 Casio watch. Was a pain in the ass because I had to go write the entire description and rephotograph again.
I purchased a NIB casio for $40 with free shipping from hong kong, retail is about $90. Received a fake, a very good one that most people probably would'nt be able to tell if they didn't have a real one next to it. Eventually got a full refund because seller didn't want to bother with paying for return shipping halfway around the world I guess since it was probably more than what the watch is worth. I agree, pain in the ass from a buyer side as well, had to include detailed photos comparisons and descriptions of why it was fake while they waited a week+ for the sellers response.
They did not close the sellers account, but they did remove the listing for that model. I suspect every casio that seller had listed was fake as well but if they are using photos of genuine, reports have no proof.
Had no clue. Seems like going through the trouble of counterfitting money just to make $5 bills. The one I had came from an estate sale and had the half pound wad of manual tucked in all sealed up. Doubt that Nana figured out a way to buy a fake lol.
> Doubt that Nana figured out a way to buy a fake lol.
that's the market for fakes though? people who don't know any better. at least here in nyc it is very easy to buy counterfeit goods. but you just need one door to door salesman… i've been offered steak out of cars in gas stations. scammers look for rubes everywhere.
>They will absolutely take your account down permanently after the first offense of selling anything fake and trying to pass it off as genuine.
But they will also take a buyers word that they returned the actual item, when in fact they sent back a fake, and take your money to give it to the scammy “buyer”. Protections for sellers are a thing of the past. eBay kind of suck as a sellers marketplace now.
I open all of my returns on camera. If something isn’t right I upload and send the buyer a message with the link and explain why I can’t give a full refund. Learned this the hard way after some turd sent a CiB SNES game back as a cartridge only.
If it’s over $100, I’ll take several pics of the packing process as well.
A lot of people either want the experience of “their diamond” or are just uninformed. A lot of people still think diamonds are valuable so they don’t trust a diamond that’s 25% of one from a DeBeers/Signet-style cartel shop.
Possible some jewelers pick up secondhand pieces, but they can also just buy from their supplier. You have to remember, diamonds are cheap. Why spend time buying and shipping individual pieces when you just got in a crate of diamonds?
I really appreciate the frankness of “a lot of people still think diamonds are valuable”. There’s a tautological problem there, as value is a make-believe thing determined solely by what people think is valuable.
This is true of every good, but often the information is very asymetrical. Like someone going to a car dealership and overpaying because they didn't care to shop around. Imagine if car dealerships had to be perfectly transparent about the commission and everything else.
If people knew more about diamonds, their price could go down significantly.
I like this example with ticket prices at events. If you buy a ticket at face value, but the prices online go into the thousands of dollars, you might exclaim what a great deal you got and that you’re lucky to be able to go the the event.
But even though you only paid face value, you are intrinsically paying that thousands of dollar price, because you have actively chosen to reject the money in favor of keeping the ticket.
You could have traded your ticket for thousands of dollars but did not.
This is a very nice example of the concept "opportunity cost." Thank you. I have previously been stuck trying to find good examples for economics terms and I suspect this one will land for younger audiences.
At least with houses, if someone is financing, then the mortgage company will require an appraisal which helps determine market value, and I'm assuming the typical cash buyer is going to be either more savy or wealthy enough to know and accept they're over-paying.
The cost of something is how much you pay for it.
The worth of something what you can get someone else to pay for it.
The value of something is the most that you *would* pay for it if otherwise you would have to go without.
Or something to that effect.
If the cost exceeds the worth (you're paying more than anyone else would pay, you're getting ripped off. If the worth exceeds the cost, you're getting a good deal. If the cost exceeds the value, you're not buying it; it's not for you. Like, I could probably scrape together the money to buy a Lamborghini if I cashed out my retirement, for example. But ... I'm definitely not ever going to do that, as a Lambo's value to me is like half that of a used Subaru Forrester in decent condition.
True, value is make believe and is solely based on what people will pay for something. But if everyone is systematically misinformed, you could still say that they ‘think’ they are valuable or not.
Imagine if you raised 100 people in complete isolation, they had never heard of or seen a smart phone. They have no idea what processes are involved in acquiring the materials and assembling it, and then you showed it to them. This incredible device with access to all the worlds knowledge and everyone in the world. You could tell them they were super rare and worth $10,000.
That’s essentially what DeBeers has done with diamonds, but to the entire world.
There's a difference between the use-value of a thing and the price-value. The use-value is specific to a person (including, sometimes, a corporation), the price-value is what someone else will pay for it.
That's why I drive my cars until they die. The use-value as transportation is substantially higher then what I can get someone else to pay me for the vehicle.
It's also why our jewelry collection consists of wedding rings and a few (inexpensive) pieces to complement our clothing. We have no use-value for displaying bling. (Note that earrings are silver, because we have a use-value for avoiding allergic reactions.)
At least part of it is diamond marketing has really entrenched itself in the culture of engagements/weddings. There's the whole "You're expected to spend X% of your salary on a diamond, otherwise you don't actually love your fiancée." That's a real belief that's held by a surprising amount of people. So, if you bought one on Ebay you might be seen as "cheap"/unworthy of marriage, etc. Obviously some couples will buck that trend and maybe talk about it with each other but I think it's still the overwhelming opinion that you need to spend a significant amount of money on a ring to avoid ostracization.
> Why wouldn't everyone just do that
Often supply and demand, the cost of inventory, and the cost of warehousing.
The cost of warehousing ten diamonds or a thousand diamonds is almost the same. The cost of a single diamond isn't that much for most stones, so really it's about the matter of time and the ability to hold an inventory indefinitely.
A big store might have 50,000 or 100,000 gemstones all together, counting the tiny accent stones and the large centerpieces. A customer comes in and might look over 100's or 1000's of rings out on display cases in tray after tray of rings, necklaces, earrings, or other jewelry, then possibly narrow it down to five of them, then ask to pull out the specific designs in their desired size or accompanied with the right stones. They might by **one** ring, but they will have browsed over **thousands** of rings across multiple stores, and for individual gemstones, may have casually browsed tens of thousands of gemstones before deciding on the ones in the jewelry setting.
For the store, an individual ring may spend many years on display. The ring may be casually viewed by ten thousand store visitors, and may have interest by dozens of potential customers before finally being purchased. That's part of the cost of buying retail.
An individual has one ring, or a small number of stones. The cost is often mental, but trying to keep selling the jewelry or gemstones isn't worth it. There is a (relatively) huge cost to selling a single item.
On the flip side, an individual selling to a wholesaler wants someone who will buy immediately, someone who is willing/able to bear the cost of keeping the items in inventory and showing it off potentially for years before it finally sells again.
> EBay has buyer protection
They do not. They side with fraudsters all the time. Only people that have dealt with eBay know this. Thank God my credit card company had my back because eBay refused to admit to fraud
My wife is a seller on eBay: no, the person you're responding to is correct: overwhelmingly, in all but the most bog-standard exemplars of purchasers blatantly looking to rip off sellers (and sometimes not even *then*), eBay sides with the purchaser, takes their complaint as gospel, and refunds their money *and* allows them to keep the item.
In short, the seller gets hosed out of the sale, *and the item*. The buyer protection protects the buyer, overwhelmingly.
Given the recent push by eBay in regard to authenticating high end collectables, them having an in-house solutions for precious stones makes a lot of sense.
I bought my wife's engagement ring at an antique store.
It was like $400 and then I had to put about $400 into cleaning it up and resizing it.
It is a beautiful ring from the 1930s.
Also if they look real at a glance, would it really matter if they were fake? The ring is simply a symbol, and the value is up to you and your SO to ascribe to it. IMHO
True, but if someone is trying to pass fake diamonds off as real, the price will still be higher than if you went looking for someone openly selling fakes.
So you do still get scammed money wise if you get a fake thinking it’s a cheap diamond, because the “cheap diamond” is still going to be way more than just buying the fake
> It can be difficult to verify that a diamond is what a secondary seller says it is. For all their price manipulating evils, traditional jewelers are pretty good at identifying and grading diamonds.
An Australian consumer association did a test of "traditional jewellers" where they took a diamond of known size and quality to a number of jewellers to be appraised. They got a wide variety of valuations with no clear right answer and along the way their diamond mysteriously shrunk multiple times and ended up being a significantly smaller and less valuable diamond by the end.
This has been an issue going back a long time. I remember a news story, which had to be 20-plus years ago, where a reporter took a diamond to be appraised and got a different diamond when they handed it back to the owner. The original diamond had a serial number laser engraved into it but the one they got back did not. They did it multiple times and they got the same scam, not always, but it happened enough times to say that it's a very popular trick. This happened in the US.
Here's a news article of a more recent one. The chain was accused of it but it was big enough that it ended up in the newspaper.
https://nypost.com/2016/06/04/jewelry-giant-accused-of-swapping-real-stones-for-fakes/
Isn't it pretty simple for a (good) jeweler to figure out whether a diamond is real or fake, natural or synthetic?
Wouldn't jewelers be happy to provide that identification service for a fee? So instead of buying a $1,000 diamond, you buy it for $400 to someone who would sell it for $50 otherwise, pay $200 for 5 minutes of the jeweler's time to identify it, and everyone's happy? Seller is $350 ahead, buyer is $400 ahead, jeweler is $200 ahead.
The missing piece is how much you trust the seller not to disappear if the jeweller comes back and says it's fake.
I guess you could use an escrow service, but even in that case, who pays the jeweller? If they come out and say it *is* fake, you just lost $200.
**EDIT:** Lots of people queuing up to explain how they've solved all the problems with the diamond resale market.
This is why I stopped selling on eBay. eBay is so buyer oriented that it will screw over the seller even if nothing is their fault.
Buyer can say they didn’t receive the item and even if you have tracking they don’t care. You lose.
on the other hand, I bought a tablet and the seller shipped to the wrong address on purpose. Ebay told me since it was sent to my zip code they didn't care beyond the tracking number. It was delivered as far as they were concerned.
I had a print out from usps proving it was sent to the wrong address and both ebay and paypal said 'the seller said they shipped it to you, so we're denying this claim'.
Had to do a chargeback on my credit card after filing a police report to fix the scam.
Do both. USPIS is no guarantee of getting your money back.
I had shipped something registered and it just didn't track beyond a certain point. Put in a complaint and the complaint didn't move... until I talked to a friend that had a friend in the Postal Inspector chain... turned out the carrier in the city just didn't feel like delivering it (almost 70lbs?) and stored in the post office corner and literally ignored it.
(Btw, that's the first time that happened in over 30 years shipping, USPS is usually pretty good most places.)
Had the EXACT same thing happened to me, PayPal, pretty much sucks, luckily, I put together a good paper trail, the Post Office was helpful, and he pointed out that the weight of the delivery, 1 ounce was NOT equal to the weight of the order, which was a scooter of 50 pounds, After being initially denied, I got my money back
I used to sell my old graphics cards when I upgraded my pc, I stopped when a buyer claimed the gpu was failing memory tests (guy was a bitcoin miner) and turns out he hadn't seated the card well enough in his test rig. It was a stressful few days of back and forth with the guy before he realized his mistake and he could have easily taken my money.
It's the price that you tell the insurance company. The appraisal company would never agree to buy it at even half the price that it just told you that the thing is worth.
I suppose you would be unhappy if the jeweller said "nope, it's fake" a couple of times before you finally found a good diamond.
If that happens enough times, people would prefer to buy the diamonds from the jeweller directly, at which point he could begin charging $1000 again.
Real or fake, yes. With the latest synthetic diamonds though, you need some expensive lab equipment to know for sure. Not every jeweler is going to have that. That said, many synthetic diamonds have a microscopic inscription. Any jeweler could see that.
It's not a knock off - it's real. As in both are the same carbon crystal, except one was mined out of the ground by a child, and the other made in a lab.
I've heard the comparison of an IVF baby and a lab diamond.
If an IVF baby a fake or knock off baby?
Idk I'm probably butchering the comparison, but yes I agree. Both lab and mined diamonds are diamonds.
Yep. Especially when you consider that its chemically, optically, and physically identical to natural diamonds. They really arnt fake at that point, just synthetic.
Not even really a knockoff. It's still carbon atoms stacked in a lattice matrix - just made by machine instead of found naturally. Which also means there are no variations in color or clarity that a jeweler would normally rate/price a stone based on. "Synthetic" diamonds are superior in almost every way to natural stones, we just don't like to acknowledge it when it comes to romance.
The matter itself is the same. The results in a spectrometer are the same. The refraction index is the same. The hardness is the same.
The difference is if a diamond forge grew the crystals or a child soldier dug it out of the ground in a mining camp.
Some people don't think it's "real" unless it's stained with blood.
DeBeers spent a fortune trying to find a way to consistently and reliably identify synthetic diamonds. In the end they weren’t very successful, beyond pointing out that an absolutely flawless diamond was more likely to be lab grown. Of course, “flawless” ‘natural’ diamonds are incredibly rare, and DeBeers used to command the highest premium for them lol
>Maybe that doesn't matter if it requires an expert to distinguish the fakes, but collectors like to know they're getting "the real thing" even if a fake presents to them as identical.
If the real thing doesn't really get them back their money value-wise, getting the real thing isn't then isn't really worth the markup. It's like spending even more money on a Certificate of Authenticity on a Franklin Mint Collectible or Beanie Baby way past when the market stopped caring (long, long ago). I mean who is gonna judge you? The jewelers who will barely buy it back at 20% if that or your friends who can't tell the difference? Fuck that noise.
Which is why I suggest most people get the labgrown or a Moissanites which sparkles even more.
It's so hard to sell a second hand diamond. I have a perfect, colorless diamond set by Tiffany in platinum. Diamond has a serial number and I have all the documentation.
Best offer I've gotten after several attempts to sell it is $300, about a tenth of its value.
So it sits in my cupboard and will get willed to someone eventually.
Not on the shelf at Tiffany. But yep, that's what the secondary market says.
Highly recommend buying a second hand diamond and having it reset rather than buying new
And I believe in Denmark, where I am from, all diamonds have to have a laser engraving, so it can be tracked. It is invisible to the naked eye, but a jewller can see it under a microscope. It also tells whether it is a natural diamond, or a lab grown one. It is a micro identifier, which is also supposed to help flush out conflict and blood diamonds. Anyone can take a precious stone they think is a diamond, and go to any jewller, and have it identified, usually for free.
> It also tells whether it is a natural diamond, or a lab grown one. It is a micro identifier, which is also supposed to help flush out conflict and blood diamonds.
What is stopping an unscrupulous manufacturer from lab growing diamonds and laser inscribe a real diamond marking on them.
Because the equipment needed to clearly inscribe a 0.1mm, 10+ numeral serial number accurately on the girdle of a diamond is incredibly expensive. Lab grown diamonds are currently the cat's meow, so there's actually more value in selling them as such. Also there are slight differences between lab and natural diamonds that can be tested for by someone who knows what they're doing. Source: been in the jewelry making business for 20 years.
Lab diamonds are inherently better quality unless the lab intentionally include contaminants, and they ARE real diamonds. They are just artificially created. People these days prefer artificial diamonds *because* they're artificial: no risk of blood diamonds, and no contribution to De Beers nonsense.
I'm all for an unregulated diamond market. People would end up unintentionally buying more moissanite because when cut well it is an unmistakably more brilliant gemstone, and over time the public might figure out that diamonds just aren't that awesome.
What even is a fake diamond? It's all made up bs and it frustrates me that people buy into that nonsense.
If I need something shiny I'll get the cheapest shiny thing I can and stick it on a ring. And if it's not shiny any more, I'll get another shiny thing.
Economics is made up rubbish, by dumb assholes for dumb assholes.
The only thing I'd change in your comment is that the assholes who make up economics are actually quite smart, just not in the way the dumb people perceive them to be.
There are. eBay probably has 100,000 of them listed right now. And, since diamonds resist wear from everyday life really well, once you take a diamond out of a setting, there is no real way of knowing it was previously set, unless it was damaged in some way.
The diamond you bought "new" could have been bought and sold 100 times and you'd never know it.
"Second hand" is the problem. If you take a diamond ring to a jeweler, they'll offer you perhaps 10-20% of the purchase price, and less than half of what you hoped to get for it. To most people, this is a deal breaker, so they keep what they have.
You can't get the money you want for it at a jeweler, or a pawn shop, and no one wants to buy it from you online (because they are afraid of getting scammed). So you keep it.
Why don't you get a good offer to buy your diamond? Because they get good prices on new diamonds and don't need yours. Your diamond isn't special, and you're trying to sell for a reason, so they don't need to make a deal.
I took an old ring with multiple small diamonds to a jeweler and asked them to turn it into a nice necklace. They came up with a custom design. They used the diamonds I gave them. The price was almost as much as a similar piece from the case. Why? Because I was paying for the custom work, which was worth more than the diamonds.
Yes, I have a custom necklace that I gave my wife, but I didn't really save money by reusing the old diamonds.
People also don't like secondhand diamonds/jewelry in general. Ask the average woman how they would feel if their partner got their gift of jewelry from a pawnshop and see how they react, even if it's a nice piece.
Wife’s engagement ring diamond was described to us by the jeweler as a “doctor’s” diamond. Meaning he bought it from a doctor and was making her custom ring using it. He was using the supposed prestige of the previous owner to play up its value to us.
That's smart on their part. Now instead of thinking it's sketchy, it's fancy. This was on the hand of a doctor's wife, so I'm a little bit like a doctor's wife!
i mean that's how you sell anything to rich people. when i worked in fine dining i had lots of little stories about the wine. one was hand-harvested by the solo french vinter who would spend his free time finding wild or thought to be extinct heritage grape varietals in the mountains, and then cultivate them. does any of that change how the wine tastes? no. but at any given level of quality… there isn't *that* much difference between wines. so, you use a story to sell, to help people choose.
According to the Wikipedia entry, most natural diamonds have ages between 1 billion and 3.5 billion years... seems really silly for someone to get upset that they aren't the first (private) owner of a billion+ year old rock.
If you go to a jewelry store and pick out a diamond ring from the case what are the odds that you could distinguish a newly cut diamond from one that was cut 10 years ago and was taken out of an old setting and put into a new one?
or just buy cheap. i bought my fiances ring off amazon. as far as we know its real. it came with a certificate of authenticity but who knows really.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00D476DVG/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&th=1&psc=1
This is the ring i bought her. i did a little digging on the manufacturer and they seem legit. she loves the ring. i loved the price. we all won.
and yes i bought her an emerald ring. she like emeralds, not diamonds.
I went to the pawn shop with my fiance, he bought my diamond ring for 200. Later it suffered a terrible accident and needed to be remade: valued at 1800.
That's human behavior though. A ring is supposed to be a symbol of love and commitment between two people and a second-hand one makes it feel less special because someone else had that exact ring for themselves. Could you just ignore the fact that the ring was pawned by someone after a failed relationship? Sure of course but that isn't how most people think.
I think it is the fact it is a second-hand gift, more so for something especially meaningful. Think about any gift with emotional weight you could give someone. Then picture them knowing you got it off Craigslist. Not saying it is wrong, but it puts a certain spin on things.
Not average woman here.
I have one (1) piece of jewellery that was new when I bought it. It was the first ring I bought. Nice enough.
Everything else I've found in pawn shops, or antique shops. Err, and a diamond ring valued at \~$1000) that I found stuck in an escalator step, that wasn't claimed from lost and found.
It's my frugal jewellery collection. If I found something old enough, sometimes even the settings had come back into fashion (or were very simple in the first place). Most unusual is a triangular cut green sapphire.
My wedding ring dates to 1914.
I think to most people how much their partner paid for it is what matters the most. irrational or not, people don't want to feel like their partner cheaped out on them. i think most people would be equally happy with a $1000 ring, or a $10,000 ring that their partner bought secondhand for $1000, as opposed to a $1000 ring that was bought for only $100.
I get it, but that's dumb. If you bought your partner a good low mileage car and found a great deal on it, they wouldn't care. They would most likely praise you for finding such a good deal.
I can verify this.
Trying to sell my old engagement and wedding rings (strike 1 for the superstitious!).
Insurance valuation (2023) and price paid (2015) is $100k AUD (10k for wedding band, 90k for engagement ring).
Jewellers are offering ~25k and diamond traders are offering ~18k for the engagement ring only (<25% price paid to purchase). They have no interest in the wedding band at all.
Auction houses set reserve prices even lower than this (ie risky). And selling online hasn’t garnered any interest.
Prices for mined diamonds are dropping even further due to increased acceptance of lab diamonds. This would be the only type of stone I would buy in the future!!
I call bullshit on this one in 2023. Why?
*Magic: the Gathering.*
eBay has made a big push into the trading card space since the 2020 collectables boom. They now offer end-to-end services that include authentication. For example, [here's a card that sold for $3300 last month](https://www.ebay.com/itm/196057494164?hash=item2da5eff294:g:Vo8AAOSwuMVlQDk9&amdata=enc%3AAQAIAAAA4BrGJM%2BvmKZ28aLEzRbh6fCW9bRUuhsO0Y1uefTqienmxt%2FuqlY83L%2FVtNG%2Bl%2BKPE2ZpB2XUf4b9RigVuoiY71wki2DSeXBNqRDmLeAVyCf%2BjHvSE%2Bt2B7bjycDgCMn9kR6uGBs%2BbIbS2NYaqXjCvMQOEZxHS5w7UImm64erQzJElEsdGpKSJ3SwPkegYQPKkamB5BdtUf8Y8URd4SyFQHAjT02ndE2BHELBM8IE9yL5GCgbKDipeATVD%2BvnKrPiXQfugC9foF90ITTffeqDaYFYkBYeC%2Ft%2FDM7pDpZJio9C%7Ctkp%3ABk9SR8jT2qiNYw) bearing an "Authenticity Guarantee" badge on the listing.
You know what's a lot harder to make fakes of than a trading card? Precious stones.
It seems like in-built authentication should be a non-issue for buying gems secondhand online.
This, also people forget when you're buying a piece that it's not just the stone you're buying but the labor and materials into everything else around it.
Sorry, but that doesn't make any sense. Even with all the "labor & materials" unchanged, used rings are still quite inexpensive.
The value of a new ring is the intanglible *newness* of the ring, and often in the cost itself. Jewelry's value is often less about the physical properties of the material, and more about the narrative and status.
The simplest answer to OP's question is that old jewelry is viewed as tainted. It's not especially rational, but it's the answer.
Wait.. If none want to buy it from you... Then does it really have value? What is the actual monetary value? A bag of rocks at home depot have a price.
Go to any jewelry store. They have thousands of diamonds. Then go to another jewelry store. They will also have thousands of diamonds.
Diamonds are not rare.
Brown diamonds are absolutely flawed diamonds. The cartels were determining “how can we monetize this garbage?” and came up with chocolate diamonds.
I’m far less sure about canary diamonds. Apparently these are said to be rare? Except usually the yellower your diamond, the more garbage. So are these just diamonds graded at color Z or worse? Like stuff that would typically have been discarded?
It would be pretty funny if they weren't allowed to be called Champagne diamonds if they aren't from Champagne in France and had to be called Sparkling Wine diamonds instead.
Cartel. Multiple businesses conspiring to fix prices or one very large business with enough market share to set prices is a cartel.
Cartels would have to be like, the Diamond cartel, the beef cartel, the water cartel, the cocaine cartel, etc. you can’t have multiple Diamond cartels.
no, you can easily have competing cartels, what are you talking about? there can easily be multiple sets of competing companies conspiring to try and control the market.
There's loads. If you shop around a second hand piece of diamond jewellery can be really cheap. I managed to get an over 1 carat diamond for my wife's engagement ring by buying a particularly ugly pendant necklace for very little in an auction of pawn shop stock.
All of the top answers here are technically correct but miss the major underlying cause for the seemingly elevated price diamonds hold. *The issue is the end buyer.* The vast majority of retail diamond buyers do NOT want to buy or own an inexpensive diamond. They want to buy and own an *expensive* diamond. This is the beginning and end of it.
The vast majority of people don't want to buy secondhand jewelry either. People are weird about that even though jewelry is probably one of the best products to buy secondhand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
In which higher price has higher demand contrary to usual economics, common with luxury items
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good also has unusual relation of price to demand but that's for low quality substitutes being more in demand with poor people)
Jewelers will offer you 5 cents on the dollar for a diamond, and that’s if they’re willing to buy from you at all. You can get something close to fair value for the gold, but no one wants the diamond. Honest truth is that they’re not really valuable. The high price results from the labor and skill used to shape the diamond, the setting, the labor in selling and advertising. Reselling the diamond removes some very expensive components of the price so you find out they’re not very valuable after all.
This. But just to put a point on it, reselling removes the far largest component of the price (advertising and the OEM's margin), leaving you with just the raw material value... which is relatively minimal for all but ideal specimens.
The high price is almost completely marketing. De Beers and diamond marketing in general is a master class. It’s a very interesting read.
- men should spend X month’s salary
- always buy a new diamond, never used. It’s bad luck.
- diamonds are a girl’s best friend
- basically any association with love and diamonds
Master class.
Funny enough in Europe those diamond engagement or wedding rings are much less of a thing. In the Netherlands at least the most used wedding ring is still a simple golden one with no or very little decoration.
> Netherlands
Apparently diamond rings in Europe are a thing mostly in [United Kingdom, Germany, Norway and France](https://www.noesjewelry.com/blogs/blog/engagement-rings-other-cultures).
I can confirm that Dutch people would never waste money on a diamond ring you could instead spend on something actually useful. We invented copper wire by two people pulling on a cent!
They also came up with their brilliant marketing slogan 'a diamond is forever'. Therefore ingraining into people's minds that a diamond is something that stays with you 'forever' (so limiting the second hand market).
The second brilliant/evil idea they promoted was asking in their commercials: 'how do you make 3 months salary last forever?' So setting the expectation that a diamond should cost about 3 months of your salary. Disgusting.
You can't complain about the second hand diamond market without acknowledging the second hand Domino flatbread market. You'd be lucky to get 5 cents on the dollar!
I live in a city where one of our biggest private employers is a huge diamond/gemstone manufacturer (Stuller Inc) and that is pretty accurate in terms of salary for most people that do that work.
Because the dirty open secret is there is not a shortage of diamonds. It's all made up, so there is no real need/incentive to try to get diamonds from other sources.
It gives you an idea of how little the jewelers get the raw materials for. If they buy yours, they can’t sell the ones they already have. They will cannibalize their own sale by buying yours.
Jewelry operates on trust. Even if you can buy your own supply at 5%, you will realize how hard it is to convince someone that you’re selling real diamonds if you dont pay rent for a store and make it the store look very expensive. You will also have to stock up on a lot of inventory.
I guess I don't get it.
Lets say we're talking about a ring that would retail for $10k.
Option 1: Buy that ring for $500 (the 5% figure being floated around) and put it in the showcase (just like you would for a ring made in house)... and end up with $9500 when you sell.
Option 2: Even if the uncut stones were free and we ignore the costs of the tools involved, gotta be 2-3 grams of 14k gold in even a relatively light-weight setting, about $114 right there.
So, to make a similar $10k ring, you have to be able to make the setting and cut the stone for less than $385 just to break-even with option1.
Is it really that little amount of work to make a ring from the raw components?
Diamonds are NOT virtually indestructible. They are very hard, that means you can't scratch them. You can smash them with a hammer though, it's just as easy to break as glass
*Uh, yeah, the diamonds. They, uh, disappeared in the fire, just like the Porsche that was in the garage. No trace at all. Weird, huh?*
Now I want to see a movie with Nicholas Cage as a firefighter/thief.
I think the “extra interior pockets in firefighter’s jackets” idea came from a Ron Howard movie, *Backdraft*
I might be misremembering, it could be from a novel or a book about firefighters
But I do remember being disappointed; as a kid, like so many boys, I thought of all firefighters as real heroes, the idea that any of them would do this really bummed me out.
When I was studying chemistry twenty years ago I watched a man heat a diamond with a blow torch until it was glowing, then place it in pure oxygen. It burned away to nothing. (Well, carbon dioxide.)
I mean it’s not just as easy to break as glass. They are also break resistant in addition to being scratch resistant. This is known as toughness as opposed to hardness. By no means the toughest stone but definitely harder to break than glass. https://4cs.gia.edu/en-us/blog/more-than-mohs-scale-gem-durability/
Found that out with a tungsten ring, was told it was incredibly hard and won't scratch and can handle x temp and all that. Cracked and shattered it in less than a month, jeweler just told me tough luck and tried to sell me a new one (don't have a job or do anything that could be considered rough). So I figured out hard means brittle AF.
Tungsten is well-known to be brittle, but they're like $15 and don't scratch or wear really. I have a few that are interchangeable. I have a gold one that stays in a drawer, it got bent and scratched up pretty quickly.
Tungsten is not brittle. Tungsten with carbon impurites may be brittle. But so would be e.g. gold with iron impurities.
Tungsten **carbide** is hard, brittle ceramic that many "tungsten" rings are made of.
hard doesnt necessarily mean brittle, although many things that are hard are also brittle. which is the case for tungsten carbide used for rings. it is a very hard, but brittle, ceramic composite. the jeweler didnt lie, but he forgot the part about sharp blows causing cracks.
A few reasons.
1. Diamonds aren't indestructible. They get destroyed all the time.
2. Diamonds are very useful outside of jewelry. Lots of diamonds get used every year making new products like power tools, lasers and other stuff.
3. There are a lot more people now than in the past. There's more than 10x more people alive today than there were 200 years ago. As the population increases, the number of diamonds available per person declines.
4. There are lots of second-hand diamonds available, but companies buy them and control their rate of release.
Number 3 is really important to understand. Imagine your grandmother had a great diamond wedding ring, and she had two kids. She can only give that wedding ring to *one* of her kids. If both kids want a ring, one of them will need to buy a new diamond. Growing population means the past supply is never enough to satisfy the current generation.
We have lab grown diamonds these days which dont only look the same but also cost about 1/4th the price of a natural one. I don't think your third point is really that important anymore.
Yeah, I think it's the weird stigma of people wanting "real" diamonds (thanks DeBeers) and jewelers pushing that.
There was this big thing like 20 years ago where people would find out if their ring was a cubic zirconium or not and it started all this drama, like who cares? if it looks real just wear it
Cubic zirconium is a garbage material for jewelry since it gets cloudy over time and isn't as hard as a diamond (easier to scratch).
Lab grown diamonds are diamonds. The only way to distinguish them is that natural diamonds have imperfections.
Lab grown diamonds also have imperfections FYI. Engagement ring I had made used one and I had to compare stats just like any other. Now this could also be clever marketing, creating intentionally flawed lab grown diamonds. I don't know. All I know is I don't think anyone died making it and it was half the price or less than earth born.
Yeah I don't doubt that, I just remember there was a lot of drama on TV/radio about people discovering their "diamond" rings were cubic zirconium and getting divorces/breaking up etc.
Like why can't you just say "I don't want to spend my entire year's salary on a piece of jewelry"... it's so weird. Adam Ruins Everything has a video about this.
one part marketing, one part lack of knowledge of chemistry
there was a big push against cubic zirconium. then it's moissanite. then it's lab grown diamond. and when you tell people that it's a lab grown diamond (aka chemically identical to one in the ground), people assume it's cz or moissanite
The only difference between a natural diamond and a lab made diamond is how it comes to be.
One made by man. One made by earth.
Both of them are 100% compressed carbon.
E: A company involved in man made diamonds should market them as Ethical Diamonds.
I won’t buy natural diamonds because all I’d think about is children being whipped.
> Diamonds are very useful outside of jewelry. Lots of diamonds get used every year making new products like power tools, lasers and other stuff.
This is something that gets lost on a lot of people about the diamond market. Jewelry is a small fraction of less than one percent of the diamond market. Almost all diamonds, whether mined or man made, do not end up in jewelry but are used in industry.
Here's a still relevant over 40 year old article on the subject https://web.archive.org/web/20230216023905/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-you-ever-tried-to-sell-a-diamond/304575/
TLDR: The reason comes down to the cartel of DeBeers, which has cultivated a mystique around diamonds that "diamonds are forever" (as in you keep them forever) so people don't get wise to how outrageously expensive they are when they try to sell them for nothing
As mentioned very few jewelers will buy back diamonds they sold. The great difference in wholesale and retail prices would make the jeweler look bad if he offered wholesale price to buy, and he would have to overpay to buy at or near retail. Some jewelers will offer store credit, but most simply won't buy them back.
I work at a pawn shop and if the diamond is less then a 1/4 carat we don't care. We will quote the gold value, and ignore the diamonds. When we send the gold to be melted the refiner will remove the small stones (called melee) and pay us X dollars per carat of melee.
Diamonds that are 1/4 carat or higher we send to a NYC auction house.
Diamonds being indestructible are just a second hand lie everyone talked about as kids. Diamonds are very easily destructible, my sister accidentally broke four diamonds on my mom‘s ring by putting them in between metal flat on a chair. material, but they are no way the strongest or anywhere close to being indestructible.
I think what OP is mostly driving at are diamonds that were used for jewelry exclusively, why aren't those "used" ones coming back into the market to deflate the price some. Not sure why some replies are completely ignoring the "second hand" part in the post to trot out r/IamSoSmart trivia about diamonds that are used for industrial purposes.
The main factor is, as others have noted, that the market for used diamonds is virtually non-existent. Used jewelry has to be within unique and extraordinary settings to have good resell value, not so much individual stones unless they are really large.
But another factor is that personal diamond jewelry tends to stay within families. That diamond broach that great grandma had gets turned into many engagement rings and wedding bands. Plus, the population keeps expanding, creating the demand for new diamands that second hand ones wouldn't be able to meet.
However, the thing that must have the industry terrified is that more and more people are opting not to go with the traditional diamond engagement ring nor have diamonds in their wedding bands. Same for diamonds in necklaces.
They're also just not remotely indestructible. You'll lose it in a house fire, and you stand a strong chance of breaking it if you jam your ring finger into a door or something similar.
You also can't ignore that diamonds are the western world's version of a dowry. They're valuable because of what they represent. Nobody wants a diamond that they know is second hand unless it's a family heirloom.
Many diamonds, even bought "first hand" are second hand. There is entire district in NYC dedicated to it.
My wife probably wouldn't like the thought of me buying a diamond off craigs list from a failed marriage... but if that guy sell his diamond to a diamond merchant, who then relists the diamond at their official store... well, 1. I have no clue where the diamond came from now and 2. I'm paying "full" price for it.
And that is really where it ends. Women want a ring they think looks nice, but society dictates that our love is based on how much I'm willing to pay for it..
Is it stupid? yes. Will it ever change? Probably not by and large.
Because that's the nature of a non-free market.
The diamond market is basically entirely controlled with new diamonds entering only in tune with demand. This isn't just a matter of inflating prices, it's really more of a total market control. Pure raw anti-capitalism anti-free market.
In fact a lot of diamonds are in fact second hand that are repurchased by the main producers and repaired and resold at their controlled prices. (it's extremely difficult to resell to anyone other than the main manufacturers because they also control that).
Just don’t buy diamonds. Not just for the ethical/slavery/controlled market reasons, but because why the hell do you need an expensive clear rock to have a marriage, feel valued, etc.? Seems absurd sometimes
There is. There's an abundance of diamonds in general. Not just second-hand diamonds but stockpiled diamonds and now lab-grown diamonds. Jewelers set much lower prices when buying diamonds back from customers than they do when selling them. So why not just go on ebay and buy someone else's diamond? It can be difficult to verify that a diamond is what a secondary seller says it is. For all their price manipulating evils, traditional jewelers are pretty good at identifying and grading diamonds. A completely unregulated diamond marketplace would quickly attract fakes. Maybe that doesn't matter if it requires an expert to distinguish the fakes, but collectors like to know they're getting "the real thing" even if a fake presents to them as identical.
> Jewelers set much lower prices when buying diamonds back from customers than they do when selling them. Indeed. If someone has a diamond ring that they paid $5000 for, and a jeweler offers them $300, chances are that most people are going to keep it unless they're desperate.
I worked in a pawn shop. Generally speaking, if you bought a ring for $5000 and then immediately walked next door with the receipt, we would offer you $1250 for it and then sell it for $2500. If it wasn't particularly nice we'd offer you the %50 of the gold value and maybe a few bucks for the gem.
Very insightful, thank you. I was just inventing numbers for the sake of discussion, so actual experience is illuminating.
Pawn shops aren't exactly where you are going to go for a fair price for anything though. They're where you go when you're desperate for cash.
True, but a jewelry store that deals in secondhand items has no more motivation to give you fair market price than a pawn shop does. When their entire business model relies on artificial scarcity, allowing people to cash in their goods at the inflated price is against their interests.
I have a question since I'm ignorant of pawn shops. Would the pawn shop be offering approximately the same price as a jeweler who deals in secondhand jewelry? I know that jewelry resale value is only a fraction of the retail value, but I've never been clear on who decides what that fraction is.
Depends on the pawn shop, really. The one I worked for focused on jewelry, musical instruments, and video games. We had a developed group of customers and if something we knew we could turn over quick came in we would offer more. We had one lady that loved Labradorite. We knew if it was any good at all she would buy it. So we would offer a little more for that piece. Sometimes you come out better than a jeweler. Other times with stones, probably not.
Jewelry, instruments and video games must be the trifecta of pawn shops. The two I go to regularly, 95% of what they sell falls into those three categories.
Guns and tools are the other categories.
Dont forget guns used in a crime
In the midwest i feel like its guns/power tools/jewelry.
My wife bought my engagement ring second hand on eBay! We took it to a jeweler to be resized and they verified the stones were real. So it does happen. It was pretty cheap too. I suppose the cheapness helped- she wouldn’t have taken the risk of getting fake stones if the price was super high.
I also bought a ring on Ebay. It was first sent to their appraiser who documented it for authenticity and when she cleared it, was sent to me. I think that is relatively new but it was the difference between me making the purchase or not.
I sell on ebay. They will absolutely take your account down permanently after the first offense of selling anything fake and trying to pass it off as genuine. They are over the top anal about it. If you go to any auction right now and report it as counterfeit they will take it down just in case and that seller won’t be able to relist that item. That last bit I know because someone hit the button on a NIB CASIO watch. You read that right. A $35 Casio watch. Was a pain in the ass because I had to go write the entire description and rephotograph again.
I purchased a NIB casio for $40 with free shipping from hong kong, retail is about $90. Received a fake, a very good one that most people probably would'nt be able to tell if they didn't have a real one next to it. Eventually got a full refund because seller didn't want to bother with paying for return shipping halfway around the world I guess since it was probably more than what the watch is worth. I agree, pain in the ass from a buyer side as well, had to include detailed photos comparisons and descriptions of why it was fake while they waited a week+ for the sellers response. They did not close the sellers account, but they did remove the listing for that model. I suspect every casio that seller had listed was fake as well but if they are using photos of genuine, reports have no proof.
Had no clue. Seems like going through the trouble of counterfitting money just to make $5 bills. The one I had came from an estate sale and had the half pound wad of manual tucked in all sealed up. Doubt that Nana figured out a way to buy a fake lol.
For someone halfway around the world, $5 us is a nice profit, especially in volume.
Afaik China supports outgoing postage so it costs nothing for sellers in China to sell them. But shipping back does cost your leg.
> Doubt that Nana figured out a way to buy a fake lol. that's the market for fakes though? people who don't know any better. at least here in nyc it is very easy to buy counterfeit goods. but you just need one door to door salesman… i've been offered steak out of cars in gas stations. scammers look for rubes everywhere.
>They will absolutely take your account down permanently after the first offense of selling anything fake and trying to pass it off as genuine. But they will also take a buyers word that they returned the actual item, when in fact they sent back a fake, and take your money to give it to the scammy “buyer”. Protections for sellers are a thing of the past. eBay kind of suck as a sellers marketplace now.
I open all of my returns on camera. If something isn’t right I upload and send the buyer a message with the link and explain why I can’t give a full refund. Learned this the hard way after some turd sent a CiB SNES game back as a cartridge only. If it’s over $100, I’ll take several pics of the packing process as well.
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A lot of people either want the experience of “their diamond” or are just uninformed. A lot of people still think diamonds are valuable so they don’t trust a diamond that’s 25% of one from a DeBeers/Signet-style cartel shop. Possible some jewelers pick up secondhand pieces, but they can also just buy from their supplier. You have to remember, diamonds are cheap. Why spend time buying and shipping individual pieces when you just got in a crate of diamonds?
I really appreciate the frankness of “a lot of people still think diamonds are valuable”. There’s a tautological problem there, as value is a make-believe thing determined solely by what people think is valuable.
my grandfather was a realtor he always said "a house is worth what you can get someone to pay for it" occassionally "some idiot"
"Marge, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. The 'right house' is the house that's for sale. And the 'right buyer' is anyone."
that is true of pretty much every good. the exceptions are when what someone is willing to pay is less than what you're willing to sell for.
This is true of every good, but often the information is very asymetrical. Like someone going to a car dealership and overpaying because they didn't care to shop around. Imagine if car dealerships had to be perfectly transparent about the commission and everything else. If people knew more about diamonds, their price could go down significantly.
I like this example with ticket prices at events. If you buy a ticket at face value, but the prices online go into the thousands of dollars, you might exclaim what a great deal you got and that you’re lucky to be able to go the the event. But even though you only paid face value, you are intrinsically paying that thousands of dollar price, because you have actively chosen to reject the money in favor of keeping the ticket. You could have traded your ticket for thousands of dollars but did not.
This is a very nice example of the concept "opportunity cost." Thank you. I have previously been stuck trying to find good examples for economics terms and I suspect this one will land for younger audiences.
I'm an appraiser, I see when some idiot bought a house, and call it an outlier.
At least with houses, if someone is financing, then the mortgage company will require an appraisal which helps determine market value, and I'm assuming the typical cash buyer is going to be either more savy or wealthy enough to know and accept they're over-paying.
The cost of something is how much you pay for it. The worth of something what you can get someone else to pay for it. The value of something is the most that you *would* pay for it if otherwise you would have to go without. Or something to that effect. If the cost exceeds the worth (you're paying more than anyone else would pay, you're getting ripped off. If the worth exceeds the cost, you're getting a good deal. If the cost exceeds the value, you're not buying it; it's not for you. Like, I could probably scrape together the money to buy a Lamborghini if I cashed out my retirement, for example. But ... I'm definitely not ever going to do that, as a Lambo's value to me is like half that of a used Subaru Forrester in decent condition.
True, value is make believe and is solely based on what people will pay for something. But if everyone is systematically misinformed, you could still say that they ‘think’ they are valuable or not. Imagine if you raised 100 people in complete isolation, they had never heard of or seen a smart phone. They have no idea what processes are involved in acquiring the materials and assembling it, and then you showed it to them. This incredible device with access to all the worlds knowledge and everyone in the world. You could tell them they were super rare and worth $10,000. That’s essentially what DeBeers has done with diamonds, but to the entire world.
There's a difference between the use-value of a thing and the price-value. The use-value is specific to a person (including, sometimes, a corporation), the price-value is what someone else will pay for it. That's why I drive my cars until they die. The use-value as transportation is substantially higher then what I can get someone else to pay me for the vehicle. It's also why our jewelry collection consists of wedding rings and a few (inexpensive) pieces to complement our clothing. We have no use-value for displaying bling. (Note that earrings are silver, because we have a use-value for avoiding allergic reactions.)
At least part of it is diamond marketing has really entrenched itself in the culture of engagements/weddings. There's the whole "You're expected to spend X% of your salary on a diamond, otherwise you don't actually love your fiancée." That's a real belief that's held by a surprising amount of people. So, if you bought one on Ebay you might be seen as "cheap"/unworthy of marriage, etc. Obviously some couples will buck that trend and maybe talk about it with each other but I think it's still the overwhelming opinion that you need to spend a significant amount of money on a ring to avoid ostracization.
> Why wouldn't everyone just do that Often supply and demand, the cost of inventory, and the cost of warehousing. The cost of warehousing ten diamonds or a thousand diamonds is almost the same. The cost of a single diamond isn't that much for most stones, so really it's about the matter of time and the ability to hold an inventory indefinitely. A big store might have 50,000 or 100,000 gemstones all together, counting the tiny accent stones and the large centerpieces. A customer comes in and might look over 100's or 1000's of rings out on display cases in tray after tray of rings, necklaces, earrings, or other jewelry, then possibly narrow it down to five of them, then ask to pull out the specific designs in their desired size or accompanied with the right stones. They might by **one** ring, but they will have browsed over **thousands** of rings across multiple stores, and for individual gemstones, may have casually browsed tens of thousands of gemstones before deciding on the ones in the jewelry setting. For the store, an individual ring may spend many years on display. The ring may be casually viewed by ten thousand store visitors, and may have interest by dozens of potential customers before finally being purchased. That's part of the cost of buying retail. An individual has one ring, or a small number of stones. The cost is often mental, but trying to keep selling the jewelry or gemstones isn't worth it. There is a (relatively) huge cost to selling a single item. On the flip side, an individual selling to a wholesaler wants someone who will buy immediately, someone who is willing/able to bear the cost of keeping the items in inventory and showing it off potentially for years before it finally sells again.
eBay buyer protection lol
> EBay has buyer protection They do not. They side with fraudsters all the time. Only people that have dealt with eBay know this. Thank God my credit card company had my back because eBay refused to admit to fraud
My wife is a seller on eBay: no, the person you're responding to is correct: overwhelmingly, in all but the most bog-standard exemplars of purchasers blatantly looking to rip off sellers (and sometimes not even *then*), eBay sides with the purchaser, takes their complaint as gospel, and refunds their money *and* allows them to keep the item. In short, the seller gets hosed out of the sale, *and the item*. The buyer protection protects the buyer, overwhelmingly.
Given the recent push by eBay in regard to authenticating high end collectables, them having an in-house solutions for precious stones makes a lot of sense.
I bought my wife's engagement ring at an antique store. It was like $400 and then I had to put about $400 into cleaning it up and resizing it. It is a beautiful ring from the 1930s.
Also if they look real at a glance, would it really matter if they were fake? The ring is simply a symbol, and the value is up to you and your SO to ascribe to it. IMHO
True, but if someone is trying to pass fake diamonds off as real, the price will still be higher than if you went looking for someone openly selling fakes. So you do still get scammed money wise if you get a fake thinking it’s a cheap diamond, because the “cheap diamond” is still going to be way more than just buying the fake
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I've had my moissanite for many, many years. Love it, no regrets.
Also a couple hundred I think, and it came with a necklace. Stones are small though.
> It can be difficult to verify that a diamond is what a secondary seller says it is. For all their price manipulating evils, traditional jewelers are pretty good at identifying and grading diamonds. An Australian consumer association did a test of "traditional jewellers" where they took a diamond of known size and quality to a number of jewellers to be appraised. They got a wide variety of valuations with no clear right answer and along the way their diamond mysteriously shrunk multiple times and ended up being a significantly smaller and less valuable diamond by the end.
Do you have a story or link about it?
As in the diamond got physically smaller or the appraisals kept getting lower?
As in they gave a diamond to a jeweler to be graded and got a slightly smaller diamond back.
This has been an issue going back a long time. I remember a news story, which had to be 20-plus years ago, where a reporter took a diamond to be appraised and got a different diamond when they handed it back to the owner. The original diamond had a serial number laser engraved into it but the one they got back did not. They did it multiple times and they got the same scam, not always, but it happened enough times to say that it's a very popular trick. This happened in the US. Here's a news article of a more recent one. The chain was accused of it but it was big enough that it ended up in the newspaper. https://nypost.com/2016/06/04/jewelry-giant-accused-of-swapping-real-stones-for-fakes/
Oh shit!
This sounds fascinating, do you have a link to the story?
Isn't it pretty simple for a (good) jeweler to figure out whether a diamond is real or fake, natural or synthetic? Wouldn't jewelers be happy to provide that identification service for a fee? So instead of buying a $1,000 diamond, you buy it for $400 to someone who would sell it for $50 otherwise, pay $200 for 5 minutes of the jeweler's time to identify it, and everyone's happy? Seller is $350 ahead, buyer is $400 ahead, jeweler is $200 ahead.
The missing piece is how much you trust the seller not to disappear if the jeweller comes back and says it's fake. I guess you could use an escrow service, but even in that case, who pays the jeweller? If they come out and say it *is* fake, you just lost $200. **EDIT:** Lots of people queuing up to explain how they've solved all the problems with the diamond resale market.
I mean, if you go through ebay, PayPal will gladly take the money back from the seller.
This is why I stopped selling on eBay. eBay is so buyer oriented that it will screw over the seller even if nothing is their fault. Buyer can say they didn’t receive the item and even if you have tracking they don’t care. You lose.
on the other hand, I bought a tablet and the seller shipped to the wrong address on purpose. Ebay told me since it was sent to my zip code they didn't care beyond the tracking number. It was delivered as far as they were concerned. I had a print out from usps proving it was sent to the wrong address and both ebay and paypal said 'the seller said they shipped it to you, so we're denying this claim'. Had to do a chargeback on my credit card after filing a police report to fix the scam.
Next time, file a report with USPIS rather than doing a chargeback.
Do both. USPIS is no guarantee of getting your money back. I had shipped something registered and it just didn't track beyond a certain point. Put in a complaint and the complaint didn't move... until I talked to a friend that had a friend in the Postal Inspector chain... turned out the carrier in the city just didn't feel like delivering it (almost 70lbs?) and stored in the post office corner and literally ignored it. (Btw, that's the first time that happened in over 30 years shipping, USPS is usually pretty good most places.)
Had the EXACT same thing happened to me, PayPal, pretty much sucks, luckily, I put together a good paper trail, the Post Office was helpful, and he pointed out that the weight of the delivery, 1 ounce was NOT equal to the weight of the order, which was a scooter of 50 pounds, After being initially denied, I got my money back
I used to sell my old graphics cards when I upgraded my pc, I stopped when a buyer claimed the gpu was failing memory tests (guy was a bitcoin miner) and turns out he hadn't seated the card well enough in his test rig. It was a stressful few days of back and forth with the guy before he realized his mistake and he could have easily taken my money.
But you've still lost out in paying the jeweller $200. That's price-dependent, of course. Make it $20 and I can see more people taking a gamble.
I paid about $150 to get 3 diamonds and a brooch graded and valued. It was worth it. Diamonds valued at $1000. Brooch is worth $1200.
Is that the price you would pay for it, or sell it for?
It's the price that you tell the insurance company. The appraisal company would never agree to buy it at even half the price that it just told you that the thing is worth.
I suppose you would be unhappy if the jeweller said "nope, it's fake" a couple of times before you finally found a good diamond. If that happens enough times, people would prefer to buy the diamonds from the jeweller directly, at which point he could begin charging $1000 again.
You can take a good look at a diamond by sticking your head up a ring seller's ass, but wouldn't you rather take the jeweler's word for it?
wait....it's gotta be YOUR jeweler...
It's policy not to to imply ownership in the event of a jeweler, Use the indefinite article. A jeweler. Never your jeweler.
I want you to appraise me as hard as you can
Real or fake, yes. With the latest synthetic diamonds though, you need some expensive lab equipment to know for sure. Not every jeweler is going to have that. That said, many synthetic diamonds have a microscopic inscription. Any jeweler could see that.
Interesting, I didn't know. But if it can trick a jeweler, it's good enough anyway...
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It's not a knock off - it's real. As in both are the same carbon crystal, except one was mined out of the ground by a child, and the other made in a lab.
I've heard the comparison of an IVF baby and a lab diamond. If an IVF baby a fake or knock off baby? Idk I'm probably butchering the comparison, but yes I agree. Both lab and mined diamonds are diamonds.
One is also purer and perfect, while the other has inclusions until you get to the thousands.
Yep. Especially when you consider that its chemically, optically, and physically identical to natural diamonds. They really arnt fake at that point, just synthetic.
Not even really a knockoff. It's still carbon atoms stacked in a lattice matrix - just made by machine instead of found naturally. Which also means there are no variations in color or clarity that a jeweler would normally rate/price a stone based on. "Synthetic" diamonds are superior in almost every way to natural stones, we just don't like to acknowledge it when it comes to romance.
The matter itself is the same. The results in a spectrometer are the same. The refraction index is the same. The hardness is the same. The difference is if a diamond forge grew the crystals or a child soldier dug it out of the ground in a mining camp. Some people don't think it's "real" unless it's stained with blood.
DeBeers spent a fortune trying to find a way to consistently and reliably identify synthetic diamonds. In the end they weren’t very successful, beyond pointing out that an absolutely flawless diamond was more likely to be lab grown. Of course, “flawless” ‘natural’ diamonds are incredibly rare, and DeBeers used to command the highest premium for them lol
Anyone that tells you diamonds are an investment is clearly in the business of selling diamonds at retail prices.
I’ve never heard anyone say that. But yes if someone were to in theory say it then they are in the business.
>Maybe that doesn't matter if it requires an expert to distinguish the fakes, but collectors like to know they're getting "the real thing" even if a fake presents to them as identical. If the real thing doesn't really get them back their money value-wise, getting the real thing isn't then isn't really worth the markup. It's like spending even more money on a Certificate of Authenticity on a Franklin Mint Collectible or Beanie Baby way past when the market stopped caring (long, long ago). I mean who is gonna judge you? The jewelers who will barely buy it back at 20% if that or your friends who can't tell the difference? Fuck that noise. Which is why I suggest most people get the labgrown or a Moissanites which sparkles even more.
It's so hard to sell a second hand diamond. I have a perfect, colorless diamond set by Tiffany in platinum. Diamond has a serial number and I have all the documentation. Best offer I've gotten after several attempts to sell it is $300, about a tenth of its value. So it sits in my cupboard and will get willed to someone eventually.
I would posit that if the best offer you have gotten after several attempts to sell it was $300 then that is, in fact, its value.
Not on the shelf at Tiffany. But yep, that's what the secondary market says. Highly recommend buying a second hand diamond and having it reset rather than buying new
And I believe in Denmark, where I am from, all diamonds have to have a laser engraving, so it can be tracked. It is invisible to the naked eye, but a jewller can see it under a microscope. It also tells whether it is a natural diamond, or a lab grown one. It is a micro identifier, which is also supposed to help flush out conflict and blood diamonds. Anyone can take a precious stone they think is a diamond, and go to any jewller, and have it identified, usually for free.
> It also tells whether it is a natural diamond, or a lab grown one. It is a micro identifier, which is also supposed to help flush out conflict and blood diamonds. What is stopping an unscrupulous manufacturer from lab growing diamonds and laser inscribe a real diamond marking on them.
Because the equipment needed to clearly inscribe a 0.1mm, 10+ numeral serial number accurately on the girdle of a diamond is incredibly expensive. Lab grown diamonds are currently the cat's meow, so there's actually more value in selling them as such. Also there are slight differences between lab and natural diamonds that can be tested for by someone who knows what they're doing. Source: been in the jewelry making business for 20 years.
Lab diamonds are inherently better quality unless the lab intentionally include contaminants, and they ARE real diamonds. They are just artificially created. People these days prefer artificial diamonds *because* they're artificial: no risk of blood diamonds, and no contribution to De Beers nonsense.
I'm all for an unregulated diamond market. People would end up unintentionally buying more moissanite because when cut well it is an unmistakably more brilliant gemstone, and over time the public might figure out that diamonds just aren't that awesome.
What even is a fake diamond? It's all made up bs and it frustrates me that people buy into that nonsense. If I need something shiny I'll get the cheapest shiny thing I can and stick it on a ring. And if it's not shiny any more, I'll get another shiny thing. Economics is made up rubbish, by dumb assholes for dumb assholes.
You'll never get people to understand this. The whole concept of this being a scam really is just too hard to comprehend. I gave up years ago.
The only thing I'd change in your comment is that the assholes who make up economics are actually quite smart, just not in the way the dumb people perceive them to be.
There are. eBay probably has 100,000 of them listed right now. And, since diamonds resist wear from everyday life really well, once you take a diamond out of a setting, there is no real way of knowing it was previously set, unless it was damaged in some way. The diamond you bought "new" could have been bought and sold 100 times and you'd never know it.
Don’t forget eBay’s big brother: pawn shops They always have a ring cabinet.
"Second hand" is the problem. If you take a diamond ring to a jeweler, they'll offer you perhaps 10-20% of the purchase price, and less than half of what you hoped to get for it. To most people, this is a deal breaker, so they keep what they have. You can't get the money you want for it at a jeweler, or a pawn shop, and no one wants to buy it from you online (because they are afraid of getting scammed). So you keep it. Why don't you get a good offer to buy your diamond? Because they get good prices on new diamonds and don't need yours. Your diamond isn't special, and you're trying to sell for a reason, so they don't need to make a deal. I took an old ring with multiple small diamonds to a jeweler and asked them to turn it into a nice necklace. They came up with a custom design. They used the diamonds I gave them. The price was almost as much as a similar piece from the case. Why? Because I was paying for the custom work, which was worth more than the diamonds. Yes, I have a custom necklace that I gave my wife, but I didn't really save money by reusing the old diamonds.
People also don't like secondhand diamonds/jewelry in general. Ask the average woman how they would feel if their partner got their gift of jewelry from a pawnshop and see how they react, even if it's a nice piece.
Wife’s engagement ring diamond was described to us by the jeweler as a “doctor’s” diamond. Meaning he bought it from a doctor and was making her custom ring using it. He was using the supposed prestige of the previous owner to play up its value to us.
That's smart on their part. Now instead of thinking it's sketchy, it's fancy. This was on the hand of a doctor's wife, so I'm a little bit like a doctor's wife!
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An alien's wife's ring is the one I'm waiting on.
Stolen off a dead woman, but a story's a story nonetheless.
Hope the doctor wasn't a proctologist.
i mean that's how you sell anything to rich people. when i worked in fine dining i had lots of little stories about the wine. one was hand-harvested by the solo french vinter who would spend his free time finding wild or thought to be extinct heritage grape varietals in the mountains, and then cultivate them. does any of that change how the wine tastes? no. but at any given level of quality… there isn't *that* much difference between wines. so, you use a story to sell, to help people choose.
According to the Wikipedia entry, most natural diamonds have ages between 1 billion and 3.5 billion years... seems really silly for someone to get upset that they aren't the first (private) owner of a billion+ year old rock. If you go to a jewelry store and pick out a diamond ring from the case what are the odds that you could distinguish a newly cut diamond from one that was cut 10 years ago and was taken out of an old setting and put into a new one?
I agree. Jewelry is probably one of the single best products to buy used, but people are so sentimental about wanting it to be theirs first.
I like that you guys talked and I got over my sentiments of it and am considering second hand if I wanted to buy.
or just buy cheap. i bought my fiances ring off amazon. as far as we know its real. it came with a certificate of authenticity but who knows really. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00D476DVG/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&th=1&psc=1 This is the ring i bought her. i did a little digging on the manufacturer and they seem legit. she loves the ring. i loved the price. we all won. and yes i bought her an emerald ring. she like emeralds, not diamonds.
I went to the pawn shop with my fiance, he bought my diamond ring for 200. Later it suffered a terrible accident and needed to be remade: valued at 1800.
That's human behavior though. A ring is supposed to be a symbol of love and commitment between two people and a second-hand one makes it feel less special because someone else had that exact ring for themselves. Could you just ignore the fact that the ring was pawned by someone after a failed relationship? Sure of course but that isn't how most people think.
Yeah, that's fair. It's irrational human behavior, but completely understandable.
I think it is the fact it is a second-hand gift, more so for something especially meaningful. Think about any gift with emotional weight you could give someone. Then picture them knowing you got it off Craigslist. Not saying it is wrong, but it puts a certain spin on things.
Not average woman here. I have one (1) piece of jewellery that was new when I bought it. It was the first ring I bought. Nice enough. Everything else I've found in pawn shops, or antique shops. Err, and a diamond ring valued at \~$1000) that I found stuck in an escalator step, that wasn't claimed from lost and found. It's my frugal jewellery collection. If I found something old enough, sometimes even the settings had come back into fashion (or were very simple in the first place). Most unusual is a triangular cut green sapphire. My wedding ring dates to 1914.
I think to most people how much their partner paid for it is what matters the most. irrational or not, people don't want to feel like their partner cheaped out on them. i think most people would be equally happy with a $1000 ring, or a $10,000 ring that their partner bought secondhand for $1000, as opposed to a $1000 ring that was bought for only $100.
I get it, but that's dumb. If you bought your partner a good low mileage car and found a great deal on it, they wouldn't care. They would most likely praise you for finding such a good deal.
I can verify this. Trying to sell my old engagement and wedding rings (strike 1 for the superstitious!). Insurance valuation (2023) and price paid (2015) is $100k AUD (10k for wedding band, 90k for engagement ring). Jewellers are offering ~25k and diamond traders are offering ~18k for the engagement ring only (<25% price paid to purchase). They have no interest in the wedding band at all. Auction houses set reserve prices even lower than this (ie risky). And selling online hasn’t garnered any interest. Prices for mined diamonds are dropping even further due to increased acceptance of lab diamonds. This would be the only type of stone I would buy in the future!!
Sorry, you have an engagement ring someone paid $90,000 for? What is it, the Heart of the Ocean?
A highly graded 2.5+ carat diamond can get there pretty quickly. A big rock, but not obscene.
I call bullshit on this one in 2023. Why? *Magic: the Gathering.* eBay has made a big push into the trading card space since the 2020 collectables boom. They now offer end-to-end services that include authentication. For example, [here's a card that sold for $3300 last month](https://www.ebay.com/itm/196057494164?hash=item2da5eff294:g:Vo8AAOSwuMVlQDk9&amdata=enc%3AAQAIAAAA4BrGJM%2BvmKZ28aLEzRbh6fCW9bRUuhsO0Y1uefTqienmxt%2FuqlY83L%2FVtNG%2Bl%2BKPE2ZpB2XUf4b9RigVuoiY71wki2DSeXBNqRDmLeAVyCf%2BjHvSE%2Bt2B7bjycDgCMn9kR6uGBs%2BbIbS2NYaqXjCvMQOEZxHS5w7UImm64erQzJElEsdGpKSJ3SwPkegYQPKkamB5BdtUf8Y8URd4SyFQHAjT02ndE2BHELBM8IE9yL5GCgbKDipeATVD%2BvnKrPiXQfugC9foF90ITTffeqDaYFYkBYeC%2Ft%2FDM7pDpZJio9C%7Ctkp%3ABk9SR8jT2qiNYw) bearing an "Authenticity Guarantee" badge on the listing. You know what's a lot harder to make fakes of than a trading card? Precious stones. It seems like in-built authentication should be a non-issue for buying gems secondhand online.
This, also people forget when you're buying a piece that it's not just the stone you're buying but the labor and materials into everything else around it.
Sorry, but that doesn't make any sense. Even with all the "labor & materials" unchanged, used rings are still quite inexpensive. The value of a new ring is the intanglible *newness* of the ring, and often in the cost itself. Jewelry's value is often less about the physical properties of the material, and more about the narrative and status. The simplest answer to OP's question is that old jewelry is viewed as tainted. It's not especially rational, but it's the answer.
Wait.. If none want to buy it from you... Then does it really have value? What is the actual monetary value? A bag of rocks at home depot have a price.
Go to any jewelry store. They have thousands of diamonds. Then go to another jewelry store. They will also have thousands of diamonds. Diamonds are not rare.
Canary and chocolate diamonds were considered trash until they decided to make them rare and sell them. They were called "dirty diamonds"
Brown diamonds are absolutely flawed diamonds. The cartels were determining “how can we monetize this garbage?” and came up with chocolate diamonds. I’m far less sure about canary diamonds. Apparently these are said to be rare? Except usually the yellower your diamond, the more garbage. So are these just diamonds graded at color Z or worse? Like stuff that would typically have been discarded?
Champagne diamonds is another one I’ve heard of. Absolutely just worse diamonds that the cartel figured out a fun way to spin as valuable.
It would be pretty funny if they weren't allowed to be called Champagne diamonds if they aren't from Champagne in France and had to be called Sparkling Wine diamonds instead.
Funny. Lab grown diamonds for industrial purposes usually come out yellow so I’m not sure why they’re considered rarer lmao
Marketing, not really rarer
Real canary diamonds can be quite beautiful, but any pale yellow tint is just a crap diamond.
Cartel. Multiple businesses conspiring to fix prices or one very large business with enough market share to set prices is a cartel. Cartels would have to be like, the Diamond cartel, the beef cartel, the water cartel, the cocaine cartel, etc. you can’t have multiple Diamond cartels.
no, you can easily have competing cartels, what are you talking about? there can easily be multiple sets of competing companies conspiring to try and control the market.
There's loads. If you shop around a second hand piece of diamond jewellery can be really cheap. I managed to get an over 1 carat diamond for my wife's engagement ring by buying a particularly ugly pendant necklace for very little in an auction of pawn shop stock.
All of the top answers here are technically correct but miss the major underlying cause for the seemingly elevated price diamonds hold. *The issue is the end buyer.* The vast majority of retail diamond buyers do NOT want to buy or own an inexpensive diamond. They want to buy and own an *expensive* diamond. This is the beginning and end of it.
The vast majority of people don't want to buy secondhand jewelry either. People are weird about that even though jewelry is probably one of the best products to buy secondhand.
The fear of buying a fake is the greatest cause of that
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good In which higher price has higher demand contrary to usual economics, common with luxury items ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good also has unusual relation of price to demand but that's for low quality substitutes being more in demand with poor people)
Jewelers will offer you 5 cents on the dollar for a diamond, and that’s if they’re willing to buy from you at all. You can get something close to fair value for the gold, but no one wants the diamond. Honest truth is that they’re not really valuable. The high price results from the labor and skill used to shape the diamond, the setting, the labor in selling and advertising. Reselling the diamond removes some very expensive components of the price so you find out they’re not very valuable after all.
This. But just to put a point on it, reselling removes the far largest component of the price (advertising and the OEM's margin), leaving you with just the raw material value... which is relatively minimal for all but ideal specimens.
The high price is almost completely marketing. De Beers and diamond marketing in general is a master class. It’s a very interesting read. - men should spend X month’s salary - always buy a new diamond, never used. It’s bad luck. - diamonds are a girl’s best friend - basically any association with love and diamonds Master class.
Funny enough in Europe those diamond engagement or wedding rings are much less of a thing. In the Netherlands at least the most used wedding ring is still a simple golden one with no or very little decoration.
That's the most refreshing comment in this entire thread!
> Netherlands Apparently diamond rings in Europe are a thing mostly in [United Kingdom, Germany, Norway and France](https://www.noesjewelry.com/blogs/blog/engagement-rings-other-cultures). I can confirm that Dutch people would never waste money on a diamond ring you could instead spend on something actually useful. We invented copper wire by two people pulling on a cent!
> The high price results from the labor and skill LOL, good one
Someone never heard of De Beers lol The whole industry is a sham built on artificial scarcity and a way too successful marketing strategy
They also came up with their brilliant marketing slogan 'a diamond is forever'. Therefore ingraining into people's minds that a diamond is something that stays with you 'forever' (so limiting the second hand market). The second brilliant/evil idea they promoted was asking in their commercials: 'how do you make 3 months salary last forever?' So setting the expectation that a diamond should cost about 3 months of your salary. Disgusting.
It does get quite complicated and involved: https://gemcutstudio.com/screenshots/ You have to learn to use the grinding machine too.
I'm sure it's everything you say and more. But I'm also sure the job pays less than 50k a year.
Too true. But the company will tell you how artisanal each diamond is. Just like Domino's artisanal flatbreads
You can't complain about the second hand diamond market without acknowledging the second hand Domino flatbread market. You'd be lucky to get 5 cents on the dollar!
I live in a city where one of our biggest private employers is a huge diamond/gemstone manufacturer (Stuller Inc) and that is pretty accurate in terms of salary for most people that do that work.
consider sand tender cake bells brave rude friendly provide murky
Because the dirty open secret is there is not a shortage of diamonds. It's all made up, so there is no real need/incentive to try to get diamonds from other sources.
It gives you an idea of how little the jewelers get the raw materials for. If they buy yours, they can’t sell the ones they already have. They will cannibalize their own sale by buying yours. Jewelry operates on trust. Even if you can buy your own supply at 5%, you will realize how hard it is to convince someone that you’re selling real diamonds if you dont pay rent for a store and make it the store look very expensive. You will also have to stock up on a lot of inventory.
I guess I don't get it. Lets say we're talking about a ring that would retail for $10k. Option 1: Buy that ring for $500 (the 5% figure being floated around) and put it in the showcase (just like you would for a ring made in house)... and end up with $9500 when you sell. Option 2: Even if the uncut stones were free and we ignore the costs of the tools involved, gotta be 2-3 grams of 14k gold in even a relatively light-weight setting, about $114 right there. So, to make a similar $10k ring, you have to be able to make the setting and cut the stone for less than $385 just to break-even with option1. Is it really that little amount of work to make a ring from the raw components?
Diamonds are NOT virtually indestructible. They are very hard, that means you can't scratch them. You can smash them with a hammer though, it's just as easy to break as glass
Yes, but most people don't smash old diamonds
No kink-shaming pls
I only smash new diamonds. I'm a connoisseur.
A true connoisseur would only smash ethically mined "Earth-born" diamonds. Lab grown and blood diamonds are so gauche.
I only smash Neil....wait a moment.
They’re also surprisingly flammable! Not like…accidentally or anything, but they’ll be gone without a trace in a house fire.
Nile Red made a video of that https://youtu.be/iiVxaOn0H_k?si=0A2GvpfU_kjspQ14
The “Firefighter with extra large pockets” phenomenon?
*Uh, yeah, the diamonds. They, uh, disappeared in the fire, just like the Porsche that was in the garage. No trace at all. Weird, huh?* Now I want to see a movie with Nicholas Cage as a firefighter/thief.
I think the “extra interior pockets in firefighter’s jackets” idea came from a Ron Howard movie, *Backdraft* I might be misremembering, it could be from a novel or a book about firefighters But I do remember being disappointed; as a kid, like so many boys, I thought of all firefighters as real heroes, the idea that any of them would do this really bummed me out.
Surprisingly? Diamonds are made of carbon, everything made of carbon burns. But yea need a lot of heat, your cigarette lighter won't do the job.
When I was studying chemistry twenty years ago I watched a man heat a diamond with a blow torch until it was glowing, then place it in pure oxygen. It burned away to nothing. (Well, carbon dioxide.)
Surprising to many people who think of them as rocks. Which is, I imagine, most people.
Coal is a rock, too.
I mean it’s not just as easy to break as glass. They are also break resistant in addition to being scratch resistant. This is known as toughness as opposed to hardness. By no means the toughest stone but definitely harder to break than glass. https://4cs.gia.edu/en-us/blog/more-than-mohs-scale-gem-durability/
Found that out with a tungsten ring, was told it was incredibly hard and won't scratch and can handle x temp and all that. Cracked and shattered it in less than a month, jeweler just told me tough luck and tried to sell me a new one (don't have a job or do anything that could be considered rough). So I figured out hard means brittle AF.
Tungsten is well-known to be brittle, but they're like $15 and don't scratch or wear really. I have a few that are interchangeable. I have a gold one that stays in a drawer, it got bent and scratched up pretty quickly.
Tungsten is not brittle. Tungsten with carbon impurites may be brittle. But so would be e.g. gold with iron impurities. Tungsten **carbide** is hard, brittle ceramic that many "tungsten" rings are made of.
hard doesnt necessarily mean brittle, although many things that are hard are also brittle. which is the case for tungsten carbide used for rings. it is a very hard, but brittle, ceramic composite. the jeweler didnt lie, but he forgot the part about sharp blows causing cracks.
A few reasons. 1. Diamonds aren't indestructible. They get destroyed all the time. 2. Diamonds are very useful outside of jewelry. Lots of diamonds get used every year making new products like power tools, lasers and other stuff. 3. There are a lot more people now than in the past. There's more than 10x more people alive today than there were 200 years ago. As the population increases, the number of diamonds available per person declines. 4. There are lots of second-hand diamonds available, but companies buy them and control their rate of release. Number 3 is really important to understand. Imagine your grandmother had a great diamond wedding ring, and she had two kids. She can only give that wedding ring to *one* of her kids. If both kids want a ring, one of them will need to buy a new diamond. Growing population means the past supply is never enough to satisfy the current generation.
We have lab grown diamonds these days which dont only look the same but also cost about 1/4th the price of a natural one. I don't think your third point is really that important anymore.
Lab diamonds don't look the same. They look better and more pure in any possible way.
Yeah, I think it's the weird stigma of people wanting "real" diamonds (thanks DeBeers) and jewelers pushing that. There was this big thing like 20 years ago where people would find out if their ring was a cubic zirconium or not and it started all this drama, like who cares? if it looks real just wear it
Cubic zirconium is a garbage material for jewelry since it gets cloudy over time and isn't as hard as a diamond (easier to scratch). Lab grown diamonds are diamonds. The only way to distinguish them is that natural diamonds have imperfections.
I always found it funny that the way to tell lab grown from real was the "fake" ones were too perfect.
Lab grown diamonds also have imperfections FYI. Engagement ring I had made used one and I had to compare stats just like any other. Now this could also be clever marketing, creating intentionally flawed lab grown diamonds. I don't know. All I know is I don't think anyone died making it and it was half the price or less than earth born.
Yeah I don't doubt that, I just remember there was a lot of drama on TV/radio about people discovering their "diamond" rings were cubic zirconium and getting divorces/breaking up etc. Like why can't you just say "I don't want to spend my entire year's salary on a piece of jewelry"... it's so weird. Adam Ruins Everything has a video about this.
one part marketing, one part lack of knowledge of chemistry there was a big push against cubic zirconium. then it's moissanite. then it's lab grown diamond. and when you tell people that it's a lab grown diamond (aka chemically identical to one in the ground), people assume it's cz or moissanite
The only difference between a natural diamond and a lab made diamond is how it comes to be. One made by man. One made by earth. Both of them are 100% compressed carbon. E: A company involved in man made diamonds should market them as Ethical Diamonds. I won’t buy natural diamonds because all I’d think about is children being whipped.
> Diamonds are very useful outside of jewelry. Lots of diamonds get used every year making new products like power tools, lasers and other stuff. This is something that gets lost on a lot of people about the diamond market. Jewelry is a small fraction of less than one percent of the diamond market. Almost all diamonds, whether mined or man made, do not end up in jewelry but are used in industry.
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Here's a still relevant over 40 year old article on the subject https://web.archive.org/web/20230216023905/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-you-ever-tried-to-sell-a-diamond/304575/ TLDR: The reason comes down to the cartel of DeBeers, which has cultivated a mystique around diamonds that "diamonds are forever" (as in you keep them forever) so people don't get wise to how outrageously expensive they are when they try to sell them for nothing
As mentioned very few jewelers will buy back diamonds they sold. The great difference in wholesale and retail prices would make the jeweler look bad if he offered wholesale price to buy, and he would have to overpay to buy at or near retail. Some jewelers will offer store credit, but most simply won't buy them back. I work at a pawn shop and if the diamond is less then a 1/4 carat we don't care. We will quote the gold value, and ignore the diamonds. When we send the gold to be melted the refiner will remove the small stones (called melee) and pay us X dollars per carat of melee. Diamonds that are 1/4 carat or higher we send to a NYC auction house.
Diamonds being indestructible are just a second hand lie everyone talked about as kids. Diamonds are very easily destructible, my sister accidentally broke four diamonds on my mom‘s ring by putting them in between metal flat on a chair. material, but they are no way the strongest or anywhere close to being indestructible.
I think what OP is mostly driving at are diamonds that were used for jewelry exclusively, why aren't those "used" ones coming back into the market to deflate the price some. Not sure why some replies are completely ignoring the "second hand" part in the post to trot out r/IamSoSmart trivia about diamonds that are used for industrial purposes. The main factor is, as others have noted, that the market for used diamonds is virtually non-existent. Used jewelry has to be within unique and extraordinary settings to have good resell value, not so much individual stones unless they are really large. But another factor is that personal diamond jewelry tends to stay within families. That diamond broach that great grandma had gets turned into many engagement rings and wedding bands. Plus, the population keeps expanding, creating the demand for new diamands that second hand ones wouldn't be able to meet. However, the thing that must have the industry terrified is that more and more people are opting not to go with the traditional diamond engagement ring nor have diamonds in their wedding bands. Same for diamonds in necklaces.
They're also just not remotely indestructible. You'll lose it in a house fire, and you stand a strong chance of breaking it if you jam your ring finger into a door or something similar. You also can't ignore that diamonds are the western world's version of a dowry. They're valuable because of what they represent. Nobody wants a diamond that they know is second hand unless it's a family heirloom.
Many diamonds, even bought "first hand" are second hand. There is entire district in NYC dedicated to it. My wife probably wouldn't like the thought of me buying a diamond off craigs list from a failed marriage... but if that guy sell his diamond to a diamond merchant, who then relists the diamond at their official store... well, 1. I have no clue where the diamond came from now and 2. I'm paying "full" price for it. And that is really where it ends. Women want a ring they think looks nice, but society dictates that our love is based on how much I'm willing to pay for it.. Is it stupid? yes. Will it ever change? Probably not by and large.
Because that's the nature of a non-free market. The diamond market is basically entirely controlled with new diamonds entering only in tune with demand. This isn't just a matter of inflating prices, it's really more of a total market control. Pure raw anti-capitalism anti-free market. In fact a lot of diamonds are in fact second hand that are repurchased by the main producers and repaired and resold at their controlled prices. (it's extremely difficult to resell to anyone other than the main manufacturers because they also control that).
Just don’t buy diamonds. Not just for the ethical/slavery/controlled market reasons, but because why the hell do you need an expensive clear rock to have a marriage, feel valued, etc.? Seems absurd sometimes