Posts Tagged ‘man made diamond’

10 Reasons Why Jewelers are Afraid of Simulated Diamonds

1. Diamonds are not scarce. All the gems’ value in the world are determined by their scarcity. But few people know that diamonds really are not that rare. In fact there are vaults and vaults of them in storage. They are released gradually, so that the price can remain high. Most of the diamonds are found in Africa, where they can be purchased for as little as $15 per carat. They are imported into civilized (rich) countries, where merchants mark them up another 1000%. Have you ever tried to resell a diamond? You will hardly get 10% of what you paid for it. Does that show the true markup?

2. Laser-cut, scientifically created diamonds, are flooding the market. Man-made gemstones, or diamond simulants have been in the market for several years, with more being created every year. The diamond industry is so scared of this fact, that they are giving special machines to some merchants to help them identify their existence. This serves two purposes: to scare the public from using them and to prevent a simulant diamond purchaser from returning it as a diamond. Simulant diamonds have the same optical qualities that have all of the four C’s. There are no flaws here.

3. The stunning diamonds in your jeweler’s case aren’t what they appear to be. Sometimes if there are cracks in the diamond, they can be fracture-filled with glass like substance, making them appear even better than before. This is equivalent to a bottled water company using tap water to fill their jugs. Where has the quality of the product gone? Where are the ethics? What happened to scarcity? And why is there still a HUGE markup?

4. The gold, platinum, and palladium settings we sell come from the same wholesale manufacturer that 90% of all jewelers in the United States use. We don’t have our own jeweler in the back that creates them by hand, but we purchase the settings as whole, or in parts, and put them together ourselves. If you purchase online, you can get the same settings at a fraction of the price, without all the hype.

5. There’s blood on this diamond. Since the public has been made aware of conflict diamonds (from the movie “blood Diamonds), the diamond industry has done their best to clean up their image. Conflict stones come from countries where they use child slave labor to extract the gemstones. The diamonds are sold and the profits from which are used to finance bloody civil wars and unethical dictatorships. The Kimberly Process was drafted as a public relations response. The process was written to explain that all diamonds were to be certified as coming from companies that extracted the stones using ethical standards – no child labor, no forced slavery, or brutal work camps. Unfortunately the process doesn’t work, as there are still tons of diamonds that enter the market every year.

6. We don’t want you to buy your wedding ring online. Nowadays, everything including luxury goods, can be bought online for a fraction of the cost. You buy computers online, luxury electronics on Amazon, and your airline tickets on Orbitz, so why not purchase an engagement ring or other jewelry on the web? But jewelry stores don’t want you to understand you can purchase the exact same ring online for a significantly lesser cost. clearly, when you go into their stores sales people will go to great lengths to put uncertainty in your mind about purchasing online. Why? It’s obvious: they want to keep your purchase in their store. In addition, the economic slowdown is affecting a broad swath of jewelry stores in your city. But the U.S. jewelry industry suffers from a more fundamental challenge than a sharp, if ultimately temporary, economic downturn – stiff competition from the Internet. Given the importance and enduring nature of the purchase, it is perhaps surprising that customers are more than happy to buy wedding rings online. But this has all changed. Young shoppers – precisely the ones most likely to be getting engaged – understand online shopping perfectly well and place great confidence in their security. Technologically savvy and accustomed to making major purchases online, young people also tend to place a higher value on price than the kind of expertise and personal service touted by white-haired family jewelers. And they are turning to online stores in droves. Indeed, with the industry facing a rash of bankruptcies and store closings in recent months, the Internet’s effect on the sector is slightly analogous to what sites like Amazon.com did to Tower Records and neighborhood record stores. Many of us have had wonderful experiences with buying an engagement ring online and they have saved us a chunk of change. This was verified by our ability to feel satisfied in their customer service, warranty and no reason to cover up any conspiracy.

7. You are my sales goal – walking in right now. The salesman behind the counter has been thoroughly trained and prepared to say the right things to direct you to the ring he wants you to buy. He’s going to steer you away from ‘unpopular’ rings – they’re the rings your grandma used to wear, so they can upsell you on a 3 carat monster ring. Salesman don’t have your interests at heart, they’ll do or say whatever it takes to get the sale – which includes stretching the truth about conflict diamonds – they have absolutely no war to authenticate it’s not coming form a conflict free zone. But they’ll give you a piece of paper that explains it to pacify you.

8. I switched your diamond with a simulant. Stone switching doesn’t happen every day, but some experts say you’re not paranoid to wonder what goes on in the jeweler’s back room. Alexandre Jonas says that antique pieces featuring stones in high demand – such as late-18th-century Old Mine or 19th-century European cuts – have been peculiarly targeted. “People often didn’t know what they had, and they brought it in to be fixed,” Jonas says. “The man-made stones look so good, you didn’t know the difference. They are awfully pretty .” Does the fact that they are synthetic bother him? “If you go into a florist and buy a beautiful orchid, it’s not grown in some steamy hot jungle in Central America,” he says. “It’s grown in a hothouse somewhere in California. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a beautiful orchid. Nobody cares if it’s from De Beers. My clients just want a nice looking ring.” If you are struggling to afford a ring and are ready to get engaged, we would altogether encourage you to purchase a setting with a high end man-made stone. As long as your lady is ok with it, we think it is a fair plan. You can replace the man-made stone with a real stone with your budget permits. We certainly wouldn’t hold up a marriage due to a diamond. What do you ladies think about this?

9. Your warranty is pretty wobbly. Many jewelry stores sell warranties for their merchandise – typically, from a few dollars to a few hundred – to cover imperfections and restitution for a year or two, or even the great sounding “lifetime warranty” on the diamond. Sounds great, right? Think again. They will offer lifetime guarantees on their diamond rings because they know the women either aren’t going to be around or remember to get their ring checked precisely to the day every 6 months. This way, they can provide a lifetime diamond warranty that only a small percentage of their customers will use and make a heck of a lot of money doing so. The catch? College students move in and out of an area within a few years and by that time, the warranty is null and void. Or women get busy and don’t get the exact 6 month check up and bam, it’s automatically void. The know this! Other issues also arise. “Consumers often leave the store thinking they have full coverage and are protected if anything happens to their jewelry,” says Mike Maley, a vice president at Neenah, Wis.-based Jewelers Mutual Insurance Company. “In reality these warranties commonly cover only a “partial loss” – like when a stone gets wobbly in its setting – but not a total loss.”Forget the jewelers warranty policy. Have your jewelry added to your renters or homeowners insurance. They provide very good protection, even if you lose it.

10. The clearance sales are not discounts, but just marking it up and down the same week. The advertisement for 60% off is not a legitimate sale. It just means they just previously marked them up last week in preparation for the ‘Liquidation’ sale. Don’t be fooled by their balloons and confetti. It’s just a ploy to get you to buy their 500% marked up rings.

Author Julia McKinnen has been speaking on the diamond deceptions in the United States for the past decade. Her expertise and views into the diamond industry and synthetic diamonds are available on her blog and new web site.

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Secrets Of Lab Grown Diamonds Are Revealed

Diamonds have always been considered as women have preferred jewelry. Over the years, diamonds have created conflicts, problems and environmental concerns. Some individuals believe that problems that diamonds cause are becoming obsolete because of the emergence of synthetic or lab-created diamonds. People are initially fooled by the term lab by which it’s called because they think it is a mock up. In previous years, lab-grown or synthetic diamonds had a bad connotation. Now, they are highly accepted by the public not just for its consistent quality and composition that is almost perfectly identical with a natural diamond, but because they were able to solve problems that natural diamonds have stirred up.

You see, behind the gleaming beauty and elegance of a naturally acquired diamond is the dark story of how it was taken and the negative effects that it imposes on the environment. You have to put in mind that when you are buying a natural diamond, you are condoning child labor and other inhumane practices. Most of the time, people from Africa would kill just so they could find a diamond and sell it in the market.

On top of that, naturally acquired diamonds are also smuggled in the different countries around the world because the demand is just immense. This mode of acquisition not only makes it dangerous for the people who are involved, but it is also humanely unacceptable. This, together with other factors has brought the prices of natural diamonds up.

Along with that, when purchasing naturally-occurring diamonds, you are also allowing the environment to be destroyed. Just think about it for a second; one carat of a gem diamond will extract almost 275 tons of ore. This is a staggering number that puts the environment on a massively stressful situation. The open cast strip-mining method is done in order to extract the diamond. This extraction method destroys the ecosystem of the place and further destroys the outlying environment. This seriously destructive and dangerous method not only adds to the problems of the country in which it was taken from but it also serves as a deterrent to progress. In the end, they are just shooting themselves on the foot.

Lab-diamonds completely solve these major problems. And, more importantly, synthetic diamonds are also almost in perfect tandem with real diamonds. The movie “Blood Diamond” imposes a strong message on the need for change regarding diamond mining. Lab diamonds, for one, spare the ecosystem from being destroyed mainly because these are created by machines and not taken from the earth. Because of this, the price is greatly reduced.

In addition to that, illegal syndicates and warlords would also lose their means of doing business. This would result in the dismissal of child labor, armaments supplies, and mining-related violence.

Sona Diamond custom jewelry is the world’s top-quality, Lab Grown Diamonds and they have a real diamond layer and the similar brilliance, clarity and created diamond hardness, to a natural diamond on the market today. http://www.SonaDiamondJewelry.com is a trusted online source of over 5000 affordable styles and consumer Ranked#1 in the World.

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Man Made Diamonds – The Synthetically Created Diamonds

After so many years of ruling the diamond industry, the De Beers have finally found their match brought about an unprecedented scientific advancement in creating diamonds. These lab grown or synthetic diamonds are absolutely stunning that it is seen to take over the monopoly of the De Beers.

What precisely man made diamonds? Man-made diamonds are artificially made diamonds. These diamonds are created through a process called CVD or chemical vapor deposition. In essence, the way this works is by enabling diamonds to grow one at a time for crystals. With the help of extremely high pressures and temperatures, the diamonds are able to attain the kind of quality that natural diamonds possess. In a 12 hour period; the diamonds will be able to grow into one full carat. This is a remarkable breakthrough considering that engagement rings only bear a diamond that’s less than one carat.

The primary reason as to why this kind of process was attained was because of the interest that the jewelry industry has shown over the Ersatz’ variety of the 45 carat Hope diamond. In addition to that, scientists all over the world were also able to come up with new uses for artificial diamonds. With the use of chemical vapor deposition, scientists will be able to mass-produce diamond semiconductors, which have turned out to be more than a hundred percent more efficient than their silicon counterparts.

Because of these promising results, a lot of scientists have shown their interest in the diamond industry. Researchers from Apollo Diamond Incorporated in Boston and Russell Hemley from the Geophysical Lab of Carnegie Institution of Washington have by far created the most unblemished and largest lab made diamonds in the world.

In addition to that, the Carbon Power Electronics consortium of Europe, which is led by Element Six, has created an artificial diamond diode. An artificial diamond diode is the first step that must be done in order to come up with semiconductors.

It is expected that within a few short years, diamonds will already be significantly cheaper. On top of that, by 2011, scientists also expect diamonds semiconductors to be used in the market. Indeed, in the last 10 years, artificially made diamonds’ consistency and clarity have become absolutely flawless that they have surpassed the standards of real diamonds.

Along with that, the jewelry industry will also benefit significantly. The De Beers have become seriously affected by these artificial diamonds that they have imprinted their logo on their minded diamonds just to distinguish it from the artificial diamonds.

Sona Diamond custom jewelry is the world’s top-quality, man made diamonds and they have a real diamond layer and the similar brilliance, clarity and created diamond hardness, to a natural diamond on the market today. http://www.SonaDiamondJewelry.com is a trusted online source of over 5000 affordable styles and consumer Ranked#1 in the World.

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The Importance That Lab Created Diamonds Have Got

Avid jewelry lovers are frequently confused as to why they should prefer lab diamonds instead of naturally occurring diamonds. In previous years, lab diamonds were quite questionable. Now, though, their quality and their credibility are assured of being topnotch. Lab-created diamonds replace naturally occurring diamonds for all the right reasons. These lab diamonds, for one, are environmental friendly because there’s no need to destroy ecosystems just to extract them. In addition to that, lab-created diamonds are not involved with any illegal activity whatsoever.

After all, diamonds, which frequently possess a high value, are subject to a lot of illegal activities and crimes. On top of that, lab diamonds are also significantly priced lower than their natural counterparts. This in itself is more than enough to encourage a lot of people. Here are some unique qualities and features of lab diamonds.

Material Composition

Lab diamonds are made up of polycrystalline on a molecular level. This means that nearly all lab diamonds that are sold worldwide only differ on features that are associated with the way they are cut, their process of manufacturing, and their method of polishing. With that in mind, lab diamonds are in association with naturally occurring diamonds since they are formulated at a molecular level. This makes them all the more identical. Likewise, with the different manufacturing procedures, lab diamonds are also easily changed.

Having said that, lab diamonds are in perfect unity with natural diamonds because they are formulated at a minuscule level. This makes them all the more identical. Likewise, with the different manufacturing procedures, lab diamonds are also easily changed.

The qualities of lab-diamonds have always been disputed over the years. This is mainly the result of the many factors that contribute to the quality and look of the diamond. In all essence, though, lab diamonds are only based on three levels of quality: low, medium, and high. You must keep in mind that these levels of qualities specifically correspond with that of naturally occurring diamonds. Simply keep this in mind; diamonds that have a seemingly murky and cloudy look are low. Diamonds that have sterling silver or a very thin layer of gold over silver are considered medium, while diamonds that are exquisite in color, cut, and polish are high.

Prices

Lab diamonds that are low are frequently sold in bulk since their value isn’t that big of a deal. These low grade diamonds normally retail for around $15 each. Meanwhile, lab diamonds which are medium, normally retail for around $100 per carat. This is because medium diamonds can be spotted by highly trained eyes and are thus perceived to have a lower value.

Sona Diamond custom jewelry is the world’s top-quality, Lab Created Diamonds and they have a real diamond layer and the similar brilliance, clarity and created diamond hardness, to a natural diamond on the market today. http://www.SonaDiamondJewelry.com is a trusted online source of over 5000 affordable styles and consumer Ranked#1 in the World.

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Get To Know The History Of Simulated Diamonds

You may have heard of the saying that a diamond is a woman’s best friend. Nowadays, it seems as if women will have more reason to enjoy diamonds. You see, real diamonds have been taken over by artificial diamonds. Simulated or artificial diamonds are not made up of the same materials as natural diamonds but their consistency and look are almost identical with a natural diamond. Outlined are the four properties that characterize diamonds.

Cut

The cut of the diamond is probably the most essential property of the diamond. All other properties are attached to its cut, hence it is highly emphasized. Essentially, the cut of the diamond determines the kind of brilliance that it possesses. The cut will also determine how light will reflect its many features. Having said that, simulated diamonds have been regarded to have the most ideal cut. This is due to the fact that the cut of an artificial diamond reflects it overall brilliance.

Color

The color of the diamond is likewise very important in determining its overall magnificence.Because simulated diamonds are created in man-made machines, the colors can also be altered. Different kinds of impurities are inserted in order to come up with different colors. Simulated diamonds possess the grade D in the color scale. Grade D is regarded to be the highest of all grades in the scale simply because it is the most rare of all.

Clarity

Diamonds of all sorts tend to have different shades of clarity. Some diamonds can have a murky and cloudy appearance while others can have an amazing definition. Simulated diamonds are among the clearest and often have no inclusions. Real diamonds that pose no inclusions are exceptionally hard to find, not to mention very expensive.

Carat

The last property on our list is carat. Carat describes the weight of the diamond. Normally, diamonds that have a high carat also have a high value. Along with that, diamonds that have a high carat also tend to be very expensive. With simulated diamonds, no matter what the weight of the diamond is, the price will always remain significantly lower than a real diamond. On top of that, with simulated diamonds, you also have the option of choosing what weight you want.

As a good rule, diamonds that are large and have a nice clean sparkle have a good perception of value. These simulated diamonds will work to your advantage because they’re so much cheaper than the natural diamond. Also, keep in mind that these diamonds are practically indistinguishable, which means that no one will be able to tell the difference.

Sona Diamond custom jewelry is the world’s top-quality, Simulated Diamonds and they have a real diamond layer and the similar brilliance, clarity and created diamond hardness, to a natural diamond on the market today. http://www.SonaDiamondJewelry.com is a trusted online source of over 5000 affordable styles and consumer Ranked#1 in the World.

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