Talk:Diamond (gemstone)

RE: Stone of the century. I just heard on the radio it will be sold in Sothebys. Anyone have any sources? Has anyone any idea on who might be bidding?? Maybe the Queen would like to carry on being the record holder an bid!? --Camaeron 19:36, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Camaeron, that's a hoax, there will be no auction. The very last valide news ([1]) is saying, that the stone is still unverified. And as long as it is not certfied, there will be no sale. I'm following this story from it's very beginning and made copies of nearly every news on it. For two months, there were a lot of unsubstantiated rumuors but at the bottom line only two things are for sure: (1) Nobody really knows, whether this stone is a diamond at all and (2) it's finders are delaying the verfication. As no end is in sight, I recommend to remove this "stone of the century" stuff from the article and to paste it in the disc until a serious verfication has been made 141.2.22.211 12:58, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

PS: Sorry, camaeron, the news you've mentioned, was no hoax. But nevertheless, is has nothing to do with the "stone of the century" aka "jade giant". I think, what you heard on the radio was about the sale of another diamond [2]. A real one, this time :-) nice greetings, 141.2.22.211 13:27, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

OK, I've removed the section "Stone of the Century" and I have pasted it here. Reason: As long as the announcement of this "diamond" is still an unvalidated claim, it is not relevant for an encyclopedia. If there will be a proper verification, the text can be added easily to the main article. Crypto-ffm 14:33, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Game over: The stone has been tested and it is not a diamond! [3] Crypto-ffm 11:54, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

I think you two may be talking about completely different diamonds. Crypto: Your diamond has a green tinge and has been confirmed as a fake. 141.2.22.211 : The diamond article you found was the one mentioned on the radio. As yet I havent found anything to suggest it is a fake. Does anyone know if it has been cut yet? It may yet crack which could drastically reduce its size. --Camaeron 12:34, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Hi, Camaeron! No, the stone you heard about on the radio is not a fake. The postings here were a little bit of a mess, that's all. To avoid any more confusion, I will speak of "your" diamond as of the "84.37-carat", ok?

All I know about the 84.37-carat is what the news-article cited above [4] tells me about it. It says: "It [the 84.37-carat] is D-colour, or finest white, has flawless clarity and its cut, polish and symmetry have all been graded excellent." And that means, that it is no longer a raw diamond but that it has been cutted and polished already. Crypto-ffm 13:36, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Wow, the Queen will be envious! Any news on who is going to bid on it? Some mad billionaire I suppose. Btw if youre German you English is brilliant. Bestimmt zehn mal so gut wie mein Deustch. Ich beherrsche die Artikel nicht sehr gut aber ansonsten geht es eigentlich. --Camaeron 14:33, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Danke fuer das Kompliment - Dein Deutsch scheint mir aber auch nicht schlecht zu sein :-)

Wenn Du Deutsch kannst, dann kann ich Dir auch einen deutschsprachigen Link nennen, auf dem der Diamant abgebildet ist [5]. Er wird erst naechsten Monat versteigert und über moegliche Kaeufer ist - so viel ich weiss - nichts bekannt. Das ist aber bei Sotheby's so ueblich. Jetzt muss ich aber wirklich Schluss machen (und außerdem ist es sehr unhoeflich, wenn man hier nicht auf Englisch postet). Gruss, Crypto-ffm 14:50, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Stone of the Century

On August 28, 2007, a giant gem, 7,000 carat (2x the size of the Cullinan Diamond and about the size of a coconut, with a greenish tinge) was reported discovered by a small South African mining company. Still to be confirmed, Brett Jolly (shareholder at the mine), deposited the gem to a bank vault in Johannesburg.BBC NEWS, 'Massive' gem dug up in S Africa The company announced that it asked the president of the World Federation of Diamond Bourses to make the examination next week. De Beers however stated that "the north-west province was not known for producing gems and greenish stones were even rarer".BBC NEWS, Fresh tests for 'giant diamond' World Federation of Diamond Bourses (which represents exchanges from Bangkok to Antwerp), president Ernest Blom confirmed having met with Brett Jolly, Cape Town property developer, by chance in a hotel in Sandton, and agreed to assess the gem claim. Martin Rapaport, chairman of the Rapaport Group stated that the giant gem could be worth 10 times more than the 603-carat Lesotho Promise sold last year for US$12.4 million.Mining Journal, World diamond group head to assess gem claim

It was a fraud, turned out to be a lump of plastic. [6] —Preceding unsigned comment added by Michael314159 (talk • contribs) 17:57, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

Poorly Written Addition to Wikipedia

This page is in dire need of a rewrite. There are two typographical errors in the first sentence alone and the assertion of "thousands of years" is just wrong. 195.29.113.138 (talk) 12:58, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

Almost 4 years later, and a rewrite still wouldn't hurt. "All the rage" is not encyclopedic language. Saberus (talk) 06:30, 24 June 2012 (UTC)

I just changed "all the rage" to "popular." "Sought-after" should probably go too, as it sounds like marketing-speak. Zyxwv99 (talk) 13:41, 24 June 2012 (UTC)

By the way, the "thousands of years" part is totally accurate, although it's been reworded to "since ancient times." Diamonds are mentioned by Pliny the Elder and in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. Zyxwv99 (talk) 17:12, 24 June 2012 (UTC)

Rewrote intro section

I made an attempt at improving the intro section of this article, and removed the "too short" tag. Improvements in addition to what I have done are welcome, thanks.Theseeker4 (talk) 01:29, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

Resale value

I'm utterly mystified by this diamond market and the vaunted ability of one company to dominate it. Why aren't used diamonds readily sought after as a better buy? After all, most of the really big diamonds have changed hands over and over again and been cut and recut over time. What am I missing - why isn't the resale value as high as the first sale value? Wnt (talk) 19:33, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

- Would you rather propose to your girlfriend with a diamond from a pawnshop, or with from Tiffany's? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Michael314159 (talk • contribs) 17:58, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

But once the diamond is placed in a new setting, who can tell? Even if the buyer has some bias against it, why would the jeweler? Wnt (talk) 12:07, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

Artificial scarcity. This happens when you have a cartel like De Beers. Diamonds simply are not worth the price you pay. 87.165.122.188 (talk) 21:19, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

The big problem is the huge amount you pay for the diamond compared to the actual cost to produce the diamond. Diamonds are incredibly marked up, partly because the jewelry industry makes a lot of money from that process and partly because of the De Beers cartel control. Basically, a jeweler doesn't care if he gets the diamond from a used ring or from a wholesaler, but due to the actual wholesale price being so much below the retail price, if you sold a diamond to a jeweler you wouldn't get anywhere near the price you paid for it. The Seeker 4 Talk 23:24, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

I don't understand. If the wholesalers are selling the diamonds very cheaply, then how can DeBeers be responsible for the high prices? And why isn't any jeweler on earth capable of doing discount sales, slapping a diamond in a setting without charging a large markup? This still doesn't seem to make any sense. Wnt (talk) 02:29, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, re-reading my post it doesn't seem clear to me either, lol. What I mean is that there are two different issues at work. First, prices are somewhat inflated at the wholesale level due to DeBeers' cartel which keeps the available supply lower than it would be without their controls, which of course drives up the prices. Jewelers do sell diamonds for discounts at times, but their entire source of profit comes from "slapping a diamond in a setting" while charging a large mark-up. The point I was trying to make above is that retail prices are well above wholesale prices (obviously there are some exceptions) so that while you can buy a diamond ring for example, and sell it at a later date to a jeweler, you will almost never receive anywhere near as much as you paid for it. I don't pretend that I know all of the factors that influence this, but I was simply trying to explain in response to your first question that the nature of the business is to have very high mark-ups on retail items, so for someone to sell a "used" diamond to a jeweler as a better buy, they would only get a fraction of the price they paid for it originally. Since for obvious reasons most people don't want to sell a ring they bought at a 75% loss for example, it is easier for dealers to simply buy new stones on the wholesale market. The Seeker 4 Talk 12:34, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

I've seen multiple source in the diamond business that say De Beers only controls about 35% - 45% of the market. The widely-cited 85% figure is apparently a vestige of a bygone era, a kind of urban legend that keeps getting quoted and re-quoted by unreliable 99th-generation sources. As for used diamonds, they do in fact constitute a substantial percentage of diamonds in wholesale inventories today. Many round brilliants were recut from pre-1919 stones, then recut again 50 years later, only to be recut a third time to Hearts and Arrows specs. Zyxwv99 (talk) 23:24, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

The global size of the repurchased second-hand polished diamonds segment ('recycled polished') was estimated at 0.96 billion US dollars in 2013 and the market has been growing fairly rapidly in recent years. — Preceding unsigned comment added by MichaelLDN3141 (talk • contribs) 03:16, 17 January 2015 (UTC)

References

Carat Weight vs. Mass

Someone recently changed carat weight to mass. I just reverted it. My reasons are as follows. 1) Every field of human endeavor has its own vocabulary and vocabulary of concepts, including technical terms and terms of art. In the diamond trade, "carat weight" is a term of art. 2) As the weight article clearly states, in law and commerce weight is a synonym for mass. 3) It is not the task of Wikipedians to reform the English language. (I don't know if that's in WP:MOS but it should be.) Zyxwv99 (talk) 13:39, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

The reason is that weight technically varies from time to time and place to place, but mass is constant. An item will weigh more at the top of Mount Everest than it does at the bottom of Death Valley (the item would weigh even less on the Moon). In most other industries on the Earth's surface this is only of technical interest, but in the diamond industry the difference between, say, a 9.998ct stone and a 9.999ct stone could be well over a million dollars (the former cannot be rounded up to 10ct according to normal diamond-industry practices, whereas the latter can), so it is important to try to establish what a stone's actual mass is. This is why diamond scales have to be regularly recalibrated with 'calibration weights' of known mass. Gem labs do specifically have to ensure that the property being measured is actually 'mass'. Naturally people do use 'weight' as a common synonym but this is one of the very few fields of general commerce where the difference between the two could conceivably have a practical impact. — Preceding unsigned comment added by MichaelLDN3141 (talk • contribs) 03:03, 17 January 2015 (UTC)

References

History

So, we learn that diamonds reached ancient Rome...but then we learn that they really didn't. Might be helpful to clear up that bit.--172.190.66.132 (talk) 06:57, 23 August 2012 (UTC)

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Short description

Shouldn't it be "type of gemstone"? It shouldn't change much other than stating that it is a type of gemstone. Qwertyxp2000 (talk | contribs) 05:40, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

`` Thurain ´´

`` Thurain ´´ 210.14.108.142 (talk) 04:27, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Missing information

The sentence:

"Because of their extraordinary physical properties, diamonds have been used symbolically since near the time of their first discovery"

would be a good place to actually mention what the "time of their first discovery" actually was.

It makes no sense to leave this information out.