Feel like this is common knowledge by now right? Diamonds are scarce because DeBeers controls the supply to keep prices high. Not because they're geologically rare
this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2026
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Well, yes, but also no. Even without DeBeers fuckery, they'd still be worth more than other gems. Diamonds are incredibly common, but large, high quality diamonds are both rare and difficult to process without damaging. Diamonds are brittle as fuck.
The analogy I use is imagine if the latest home decor trend was perfectly preserved tree stumps. Everything intact, from the tiniest root all the way to the trunk. Super common, yeah, but it would be enormously expensive to have done.
Something that often gets lost here is high quality gemstones are still rare by comparison. Not saying it excuses their stupid prices, but that we use diamonds to coat sawblades because it is so abundant, yet so much is shit quality.
Large enough to set in jewelry, with few enough imperfections to convince a buyer, and a skilled jeweler with years of practice cutting it, is still rare and worth something. Sure debeers did a "fuck you i control the supply" and we're still falling for part of that scam, but it doesn't mean gemstones are suddenly commonplace and worth $10.
Maybe we should embrace imperfection as a character of the gem.
Wait, no, then they use it as distinction to cheap artifical diamonds.
We should stop using them as stupid vanity items and working people to death to drag them out of the ground.
They started marketing things like "chocolate diamonds" that are imperfect
They are common enough for them to be cheap especially with man made ones.
Every time I see people in the west mock Japan for being bamboozled by KFC into accepting chicken as part of Christmas tradition, I think of this.
Turns out people in general are just easily manipulated creatures of habit and custom.
Why would americans mock japanese for eating chicken on a holiday? We do the same with turkey on thanksgiving which isn’t much different than kfc other than who made it. Everyone on this planet is brainwashed a bit by their ancestors.
It's not chicken, it's KFC specifically. That's usually the source of derision. Not to say I agree with it (let people have their little things, even if it's corpo hell paste that they got it from)
All you actually need to make a diamond is extremely high pressure and carbon, which are both in relative abundance below the Earth's surface.
So compared to other gemstones that require specific multi-elememt minerals to form, on top of any other conditions, diamonds being the most common makes complete sense.
Which makes Debare's whole campaign of artificial scarcity only that much worse.
Diamond is expensive because it absorbed the miner and slave's blood. Gotta let it marinated for 24 hours.
Yep. And basicly all coloured jems are saphires
Sapphires are awesome and easy to produce
Really? The jewler and goldsmith told me opposite
Not sure from jeweler perspective, they might be hard to put into jewelry.
But synthetic sapphire is relatively easy to produce, enough that it's used for watch faces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapphire#/media/File:Sapphire_boule,_Kyropoulos_method.jpg
They also use them in high-end watches as tiny bearings for the movements IIRC
I'm wearing a watch with a sapphire lens right now! From what I understand, the tradeoff between different watch faces are how easy/hard they are to scratch vs shatter, with sapphire being the most scratch proof and a plastic polymer (I don't remember which) being the most shatter resistant.
Surely all screens should be sapphire then?
They are very hard to scratch, but also probably easier to crack. I'd hate to drop a phone with a sapphire screen.
Sapphire is extremely hard, and thus extremely easy to crack.
Apple used to do that
Remember all the smashed iphones?
Rubies and sapphires are both the same mineral with different impurities but this is very wrong. Tourmaline, garnet, spinel, emerald, topaz, beryl, ...?
I was going to point out that some of the stones you mentioned are semiprecious stones but it turns out that "gemstone" actually includes precious and semiprecious stones. Also, the distinction between the two is arbitrary and mostly based on how expensive they were in the Copper Age. TIL.
Beryl and emerald are also (basically) the same thing. Just different impurities giving a different color.
I found out more about alexandrite, and now I want it
Same! I want my wedding ring to be that now. It looks so beautiful and it changes color is so fun thing.
Surely that's because we value them more and they are thus mined more.
On the contrary, the diamond supply is artificially limited by debeer and their cartel. The mines are producing way below capacity to keep prices high.
That doesn't refute my statement in any way. We're talking about diamonds vs other gemstones. Had you said "gemstone X is valued more than diamonds both in monetary and world-wide cultural sense, here is a source", I might agree, but all you're saying is "we are mining more diamonds than other gemstones, and we could be mining even more but aren't". That says nothing about whether the are more gemstones out there than diamonds or not.
Imagine we had 1 billion gemstone X , 10 billion gemstone Y, and 100 billion gemstone Z, but gemstone X was the most culturally and monetarily valuable gemstone and the others were worth a fraction thereof. Gemstone X would naturally be mined more and thus be more prevalent. If you mined 1k of gemstone X and held back others from mining to control the number on the market, sure, you could say "we could mine much more, therefore it is incredibly abundant", but that would be false because Y and Z actually are the more abundant gemstones.
The article doesn't reveal any numbers whatsoever, so simply saying "it's the most abundant gemstone out there" is a valueless statement.
YOUR assertion was that they're more common because they're mined more. By definition that means we're talking about gems that have been mined and are floating around aboveground. So why are you moving the goalposts now by bringing up the total number underground?
My statement was just addressing your assertion that diamonds are prevalent because they're mined more due to their value, by pointing out that on the contrary they're actually being artificially supply constrained to keep that value high. I make no claims about other gemstones.
I make no claims about other gemstones.
What do you think the article is about? Read the headline.
TIL out of all gemstones, diamonds are the most common
No, they are just more abundant.
The article makes the claim but doesn't back it up with anything. I could also write an article and say "although many people wear diamonds, the most abundant gemstone on the planet is rutile" without providing a single source.
This is what it says:
However, diamonds actually number among the most common gems. Ask yourself this: "How many people do you know who own at least one diamond?" Now, ask this question about other gems, like rubies, sapphires, or emeralds.
While we have much to learn about the Earth's interior, our current knowledge of gem formation indicates that diamonds are likely the most common gem in nature.
That's it.