<story><title>Pandora says laboratory-made diamonds are forever</title><url>https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56972562</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vagrantJin</author><text>&amp;quot;Okay class, child labour, a few thousand poor people dead, terrorist groups starving hundreds of thousands, destroying schools and libraries. That is where diamonds come from. How many would still want a natural diamond because diamonds are forever?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The elephant in that lecture hall was probably the hypocrisy.&lt;p&gt;I think if you still raise a hand after hearing all that, the issue isn&amp;#x27;t branding at all. It&amp;#x27;s narcissim, that people have to die so you can maintain the illusion of...of what?&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s the difference.</text></item><item><author>qw</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s mostly about the emotional attachment. If you find two identical pens, and one of them was used by a famous writer, you would expect a price difference.&lt;p&gt;There is no difference in the quality of those pens. They both work the same, and using the writer&amp;#x27;s pen will not make you a better writer by itself.&lt;p&gt;I personally would not buy a natural diamond because of the ethical issues, but I do understand the students who feel there is a difference.</text></item><item><author>joeblau</author><text>Random diamond story! As a freshman in college, I took a geology class and our teacher asked all of the women in our class to raise their hand if they would rather have natural or human-made diamonds. Most of the women (over 80%) raised their hands for natural. The reasons they gave all seemed to tie back to branding and natural diamonds being “real.”&lt;p&gt;Then our teacher gave another analogy. He asked if people would rather have natural ice or human-made ice in their water. He broke down that the human-made ice could be frozen in a freezer to a custom size&amp;#x2F;shape, be a lot cleaner, consistent in how you make it, and chemically no different than H20 than naturally occurring frozen water. As you looked around the lecture hall, you started to see people’s brains unlock. He went on to explain cost efficiencies, ethics, challenges with conflict diamonds, and how you could make a perfect diamond at a fraction of the coast.&lt;p&gt;After a 30 minute lecture, he asked the question again. Surprisingly, the majority of the women still wanted natural diamonds although the number was less than the original amount that raised their hand. That was the point where I realized the strength of diamonds product branding.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>GordonS</author><text>I personally fully agree, but unfortunately not everyone thinks as logically as you or I.&lt;p&gt;I talked about this with my wife recently, and even though she had a vague idea of the horrors that mined diamonds bring, she&amp;#x27;d still continue to buy&amp;#x2F;want mined diamonds. She sees mined diamonds as more &amp;quot;real&amp;quot;, and finds it difficult to believe that &lt;i&gt;her&lt;/i&gt; diamonds in particular would be part of the problem - as if it somehow would only affect diamonds purchased in dodgy, back-room deals. She seems to think it&amp;#x27;s OK because &amp;quot;everyone else does it&amp;quot;. No amount of discussion of verifiable facts seems to change that view; indeed, she got quite annoyed with me, and didn&amp;#x27;t want to discuss it any further.&lt;p&gt;A large part of the problem is &lt;i&gt;conditioning&lt;/i&gt;, through both advertising and tradition. In the west, we are conditioned from an early age to believe that &amp;quot;diamonds are a girl&amp;#x27;s best friend&amp;quot;, that women should accept nothing less that a &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; diamond, and that men should spend some silly multiple of their salary when buying such a diamond. Diamonds are synonymous with luxury.&lt;p&gt;What we really need is a big, &lt;i&gt;sustained&lt;/i&gt; campaign against mined diamonds, really putting the horrors in the faces of potential customers, so they have to accept the damage mined diamonds cause,and accept that they are part of the problem. Such a campaign probably needs to be fronted by celebrities - inspirational figures that people will listen to.&lt;p&gt;I whole-heartedly applaud Pandora for making the first move here - hopefully this will help to break the stalemate and be the start of a much bigger movement.</text></comment>
<story><title>Pandora says laboratory-made diamonds are forever</title><url>https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56972562</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vagrantJin</author><text>&amp;quot;Okay class, child labour, a few thousand poor people dead, terrorist groups starving hundreds of thousands, destroying schools and libraries. That is where diamonds come from. How many would still want a natural diamond because diamonds are forever?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The elephant in that lecture hall was probably the hypocrisy.&lt;p&gt;I think if you still raise a hand after hearing all that, the issue isn&amp;#x27;t branding at all. It&amp;#x27;s narcissim, that people have to die so you can maintain the illusion of...of what?&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s the difference.</text></item><item><author>qw</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s mostly about the emotional attachment. If you find two identical pens, and one of them was used by a famous writer, you would expect a price difference.&lt;p&gt;There is no difference in the quality of those pens. They both work the same, and using the writer&amp;#x27;s pen will not make you a better writer by itself.&lt;p&gt;I personally would not buy a natural diamond because of the ethical issues, but I do understand the students who feel there is a difference.</text></item><item><author>joeblau</author><text>Random diamond story! As a freshman in college, I took a geology class and our teacher asked all of the women in our class to raise their hand if they would rather have natural or human-made diamonds. Most of the women (over 80%) raised their hands for natural. The reasons they gave all seemed to tie back to branding and natural diamonds being “real.”&lt;p&gt;Then our teacher gave another analogy. He asked if people would rather have natural ice or human-made ice in their water. He broke down that the human-made ice could be frozen in a freezer to a custom size&amp;#x2F;shape, be a lot cleaner, consistent in how you make it, and chemically no different than H20 than naturally occurring frozen water. As you looked around the lecture hall, you started to see people’s brains unlock. He went on to explain cost efficiencies, ethics, challenges with conflict diamonds, and how you could make a perfect diamond at a fraction of the coast.&lt;p&gt;After a 30 minute lecture, he asked the question again. Surprisingly, the majority of the women still wanted natural diamonds although the number was less than the original amount that raised their hand. That was the point where I realized the strength of diamonds product branding.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sandworm101</author><text>Don&amp;#x27;t apply logic to fashion choices.  Why do some sneakers sell for thousands?  It is all about the attached backstory.  Two identical shoes, but one was owned by a celeb.  The backstory, the notoriety of owning the embodiment of that backstory, is the value.  Some people want to own something &amp;#x27;from the earth&amp;#x27;.  Some would even pay &lt;i&gt;more&lt;/i&gt; for an object that people suffered to produce.  Lots of people certainly pay more for objects that come from animals suffering. Blood diamonds are no different than ivory or tiger parts, the backstories of which are so valuable that we enact laws to destroy their market.</text></comment>