Are synthetic diamonds inferior to natural diamonds? Diamonds are forever, and so are synthetic ones

Some people say that there are three commodities in the world today that are capital-driven scams, and one of them is diamonds.

Are diamonds not as valuable as imagined? This question is a bit complicated, because the value of a thing is determined by many factors, such as production costs, supply, demand, etc., but from the perspective of difficulty in formation, diamonds are still worth talking about. The essence of diamond rough is a natural mineral. Its formation process is very long and the conditions required are extremely harsh. In terms of composition, the composition of diamond is no different from that of coal. The reason for the huge difference in appearance between it and coal is the environment in which it is located. Only in an environment with high temperature, extremely high pressure and lack of oxygen can carbon elements gradually crystallize to form diamonds.

Generally speaking, the formation time of a natural diamond can reach hundreds of millions of years.

So, it seems that there is nothing wrong with diamonds being more expensive, but we need to think about it and not be deceived by appearances, because the length of time a substance takes to form is not the determining factor of its value. The Earth is 4.6 billion years old, and there are many substances on Earth that took a long time to form, but have large reserves and are not very valuable, so they are extremely cheap. Of course, diamonds are different from these substances, and the difference is that they symbolize love, as the saying goes, "Diamonds are forever, and one diamond lasts forever."

Everyone needs love, so everyone needs diamonds. If this is the reason why diamonds are expensive, it seems easy to solve because there is now a substitute for natural diamonds, synthetic diamonds.

What are synthetic diamonds? Are they different from natural diamonds? As mentioned earlier, the most commendable thing about natural diamonds is their formation conditions and formation time, while synthetic diamonds are diamonds that are cultivated quickly by creating the conditions for diamond production and shortening the formation time.

There are currently two main methods for producing synthetic diamonds. The first is called "chemical vapor deposition".

In short, this method is to mix the gas produced by low molecular hydrocarbons as raw materials with hydrogen and oxygen, dissociate hydrocarbons under high temperature and high pressure, generate carbon ions in the plasma state, and finally, under the guidance of the electric field, these carbon ions grow a polycrystalline diamond film layer on the diamond substrate. The second method is called "high temperature and high pressure method". This method uses metal catalyst solvents to reduce the conditions for graphite phase transformation to diamond under extremely high temperature and high pressure environment, so that graphite dissolves in a higher temperature zone and diamond grows on seed crystals in a lower temperature zone.

The use of artificial synthesis methods has greatly shortened the time it takes to form diamonds. Taking the synthetic diamonds cultivated by the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering of the Chinese Academy of Sciences as an example, its growth rate has reached 0.007 mm per hour, and the largest synthetic diamond in the world currently weighs 14.6 carats.

From the manufacturing method of synthetic diamonds, it can be seen that there is no difference between them and natural diamonds in terms of appearance and connotation. They are like "ice in the lake and ice in the refrigerator". There is a difference, which can be detected through testing, but this difference between the two is meaningless. If we have to give the biggest difference between the two, it is probably the price.

Diamonds are forever, and so are synthetic ones.

Some people may not agree with this statement, and think that only natural diamonds can represent love. This is a very interesting thing. Love is the product of subjective emotions combined with psychological and physiological factors. No matter from which angle you look at it, you can't find any connection between it and a piece of stone. If we talk about eternity, then there are too many things in this world that are eternal. The only value of diamonds lies in their beauty. In this regard, synthetic diamonds are not inferior to natural diamonds at all, and even surpass them. In this era of rapid technological development, the value of everything is constantly changing, and in the long run, they are all on a depreciation trend, because the ceiling of the value of anything is its reproduction cost, and with the continuous advancement of technology, the reproduction cost will gradually decrease.

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