[crdb]

It won't because the main value of dug diamonds is rarity, which makes them perfect goods to display your wealth and status. Many of these goods are stored in vaults (some in freeports, areas of an airport carved out for fiscally optimized storage), and the only sign of a change of ownership is an extra name on a registry... but the whole point is to leave your mark on that registry.

So, the demand for these diamonds is not driven by their diamond-ness, just as the James Bond set Astons fetch higher value at auction than the same model sold at retail.

You can already see a version of this by heading to any jewelry shop and comparing lab diamond prices to the stuff sold by Tiffany's etc. Or just asking any young, not yet married lady in the street if she'd be OK with a synthetic.

[billpg]

If you say "synthetic diamond" to most people (I suspect) they would imagine you mean cubic zirconia or something similar.

A "synthetic" diamond is 100% a genuine diamond, made from the same stuff as mined diamonds.