The cost is exactly what it represents.

The entire point of using diamonds in wedding rings is for the male to signal how committed he is to the marriage by expending a large amount of money on both the ring and the wedding itself. It then acts as a way for the wife to signal her status to other women by showing off how much her husband was willing and able to spend on the ring.

It is a hold-out from the tradition that the male is a provider and the female is a caregiver. If you reject traditional gender roles, you should also reject expensive diamond rings regardless whether they are mined or grown. Otherwise, embrace the shiny, but make no mistake: the cost is entirely the point.

For anyone appreciating expensive things, giving diamonds represent the willingness to fulfill that desire. It’s easy to conflate that with love, at least for a while, even when you aren’t a materialistic person.

Jewelry is the pinnacle of “just monetary value”. Unlike almost any other possession, a car, a house, clothes, etc. jewelry serves no practical purpose, only shows the willingness or ability to spend for it. The more you spend, the more valuable the gesture, the more you cared to please the recipient.

Materialistic people have the same feelings you have. Those just happened to be triggered by different values than yours.

No. But some of the eBay prices are so cheap that you can just risk it. And if it looks nice, that's all you can ask.

Agree, though I think he meant one is real and the other's fake.

Indeed. The oldest things on earth are the hydrogen atoms. Literally all of them were formed in the first 3 minutes after the big bang. So all of them have the same age, billions of years old, down to a few seconds difference at most.

But not rare.

The difference is instantly apparent under UV - most lab grown diamonds will not fluoresce unless they have a bad growth process that leaves flux and other impurities in the crystal.

Natural diamonds won't always fluoresce but the ones that do will do so in a variety of colors, and sometimes change depending on what wavelength is irradiating them.

I get your point, but on the other hand you don’t want to drink osmosis purified 100% h2o, or it’ll start leeching minerals from your bones.

Tired: rocks don't have souls

Wired: we will put a soul in this rock for $10,000

Which, coincidentally, is exactly the same soul that appears in art.

Walter Benjamin called it "aura" - something a physical original has, but a reproduction doesn't.

It explains why collectors pay $$$$$ for a guitar played by [famous musician], even though they can't play.

There's no objective way to look at any one guitar and divine its history. Without provenance or physical customisation, any Rickenbacker or Les Paul is indistinguishable from any other of the same production run.

But we believe in sympathetic magic. Objects are charged with mysterious non-physical manna through proximity to wealth and status. Owning these special objects confers that manna on us, and perhaps our fortune will increase.

It's the logic of witchcraft lurking at the heart of capitalism.

One of the fun things about AI is that it deconstructs this while reinforcing it. Huge collections of high status manna are now inside a machine, and available for free, or near as.

Do we still believe in magic, or not?

Actually soul is Christian concept that inherits it from greeks that applies to living humans spirits only.

We can talk about "anima", in latin, the same inside "animal" or "animation" to apply it to a wider concept of living beings.

We can go further in time to the greek concept "daimon", devils, allude to supernatural powers or spirits to start applying it to things.

Then we could apply De Boers sociopaths concept that goes back to using the Christian concept to rocks again.

The only "soul" those rocks have is the one of the millions of African people that died in wars, the women that were raped and the kids that were traumatised being forced to kill their family members so a woman can look at beautiful iridescence in her finger.

Disclaimer: I have worked as a volunteer helping refugees, mostly from Congo, so I am biased a lot.

You sure about that?

https://ai-art-turing-test.com/

Most rocks are millions of years old, some billions

Also, people who pay extra for the same quality just for status signalling should be called fools. This is exactly what Chinese tiktokers did when the trade war started.

You miss the point. The only reason to buy a diamond is that it is expensive. It doesn’t matter if you could buy the same thing cheaper. It doesn’t matter that there are better gems that are cheaper. You buy the diamond to show that you can afford it. You buy someone a diamond to prove how much they are worth to you.

Yes, you can buy a man-made diamond the same you can buy counterfeit branded clothes. That only shows that you’re tasteless and that you can’t afford the real thing.

I think this is true, manmade diamonds are valuable in a way that counterfeit currency is not. But "most people" may not be as important as people who know the story of, and the person wearing, the gem, and provenance is always a meaningful point of reference for expensive luxury items.

My screenshots of NFTs are pixel accurate, but not exactly as valuable as the real thing.