Planet Money buys a mystery diamond
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This message comes from Capella University. With Capella's FlexPath learning format, you can set your own deadlines and learn on your schedule. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at capella.edu. This is Planet Money from NPR. A little while back, I bought something online that, frankly, seemed too good to be true.

And after seeing this thing with my own eyes, I knew I had to share it with somebody. My Planet Money colleague, Sarah Gonzalez. It's like a white envelope. I had mailed this thing to her as a kind of proposal to, you know, co-host this episode about this very strange economic mystery.

And then more bubble wrap. This package had come from the Chinese e-commerce website Alibaba. Alibaba is the kind of place where you can buy like two dozen lawnmowers straight from the factory. You gotta pop the bubbles. But what I had bought was a lot smaller. Oh, so satisfying. And a lot shinier. Jeff, what is this? Is it a fake diamond?

Or a real diamond? Sarah. This is not a real diamond. According to the website that I bought it off of, that is a real diamond. What?

It is a one carat, colorless, ideal cut diamond. It's basically an engagement ring quality diamond. That's what they told me. Wait, this is like creme de la creme, top of the top, like perfect cut, perfect clarity. Dude, it's sparkly.

Now, the retail price for a diamond like this, it depends. If it's a natural diamond, we're talking $5,000. If it's a lab-grown diamond, we're still talking around $1,000. But that was not what Alibaba was charging. So how much did you pay? I paid $137. I mean, it's not a real diamond, right? There's no way. Or is there a way?

Hello and welcome to the Planet Money Diamond. I'm Jeff Guo. I'm Sarah Gonzalez. And Jeff, this is the start of a real mystery here. Or a scam. Is it a diamond? Is it real? How is it $137? Well, today on the show, we're going to answer all of those questions and dive into the economics of sparkly, sparkly things. My favorite things. Because the market for diamonds, let me tell you, it started to get very, very weird.

Yeah. No, I think it's just going to be fake diamond. This message comes from Charles Schwab.

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So, Jeff, when you sent me this diamond that you apparently bought sight unseen off of this website in China for $137, my first thought was, obviously, it's not real, right? Which is why we tried some experiments. So there are like tests you can do at home to see if something's a diamond or not. Do you want to try those? Oh, yes. Yes.

They're not like definitive or anything. Oh, like bite it? You can like get clues. No, not bite it. Don't bite the diamond. Like smash it? The first actual test that you had me try was to try to scratch something really hard with this diamond of ours. Right, because diamonds, which are made of carbon, they are the hardest naturally occurring substance on Earth. Jeff? What? It literally created like a gash in my glass kombucha jar. Oh my God.

Test number one, kind of promising. It's feeling real. Test number two, put a diamond in a glass of water. Diamonds are super dense, so they sink, but fake stones, a lot of them will float. All right, I'm dropping in the diamond. Let's see if it makes a clink. Okay. It sank straight down to the bottom. All the way to the bottom. Wow, it looks even sparklier in water.

Test number three, you had me hold the diamond up against my cheek. Right. So diamonds are incredible conductors of heat. So they're supposed to feel weirdly cool against your skin. Does it feel hot or cold? No. You feel nothing? It doesn't feel hot. Maybe warm. Okay, so the last test, I'm going to say not looking good for you, Jeff. But yes, the other two experiments...

were leaning diamond obviously these tests are not like super scientific no no no no uh so do you want to know the real answer sarah oh already so soon well no no first i i gotta tell you a story about how i figured it out of course all right let me get settled in here okay so before i ever mailed you the planet money mystery diamond actually took it on a couple adventures we

We started out at the GIA, the Gemological Institute of America. They're like the diamond experts. So a couple weeks ago... Okay, we're walking into the GIA. I went to one of their labs in midtown Manhattan. Wow, this lobby is really pretty.

For the diamond industry, the GIA is like the temple of truth. It's where people take their diamonds to get poked and prodded and given a grade by expert gemologists. I met their executive vice president, Tom Moses. Hi. Hi, Tom Moses. Hi. Who was going to take me behind the scenes, which they don't usually do because the GIA inspects millions and millions of diamonds a year. So let's just say we were in the presence of a lot of dollar signs.

And I've noticed we have a security guard following us. Yes, we do. Is that just for me? Yeah, just for you. No, no, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Tom kind of was not kidding. The whole time I was there, I had to have a security escort. Anyway, Tom introduced me to the scientist who was going to be taking a look at the Planet Money mystery diamond. Ulrike Darnan-Seal Hansson, senior manager of diamond research here.

Dr. Ulrika Dannens-Janssen has a PhD in physics, specifically in diamonds and how to identify them. So if anybody in the world could tell us what we had, whether it was a real diamond or a cubic zirconia or some newfangled futuristic kind of fake diamond, it was going to be Dr. Ulrika. Should we talk about this mystery diamond that I bought? Yeah, please, let's. Um...

I've been showing it off, so it might be a little smudged. That's okay. On the table in front of us was a large microscope hooked up to a television. So now taking your mystery diamond and looking at it under the microscope.

I'm sorry, I think that's some cat hair. Yeah, there's a little bit of cat hair there. A little bit of fluff, but that's not a problem. It wouldn't be a Jeff Guo story if cat hair wasn't involved. My life is covered in cat hair. So after getting the cat hair off and the fingerprints of basically all my friends and family, Ulrika got her first good look at the Planet Money Mystery Diamond.

What I'm seeing here, at least, is that it's very high clarity. Oh, that's good, right? That's good. Olga said, yeah, if this is a diamond, it is a very nice diamond. And to figure out if it is a diamond, she was going to pull out all the stops for us, run all of these fancy scientific tests. So she takes me to where the GIA keeps all of its most advanced equipment.

It kind of looks like a room where NASA might assemble satellites. Like, the walls are white, the ceilings are white. There's this HVAC system that's filtering out every stray pinpoint of dust. And in one corner, there's this big beige cabinet. It was called a spectrophotometer. This machine was going to tell us what kinds of atoms the Planet Money mystery diamond was made of. A real diamond, of course, is made of pure carbon. Now, to get our diamond ready for the big test, apparently

Apparently we had to make it really, really cold? We need to give it a little bath. It's going to go in liquid nitrogen. So liquid nitrogen... I'm sorry, what? No one told me about this. Your diamond is going to take a bath now. Ulrika has this bubbling thermos of liquid nitrogen. She pours it over our mystery diamond, which is sitting in a little dish, and she loads it into the machine.

Inside, a bunch of lasers turn on and they're just like blasting our sample. Pew pew pew pew pew! Meanwhile, Ulrika is watching a monitor nearby. Thinking about it, and then the squiggles come up. So the screen was showing this squiggly graph. It looked like a bunch of mountain peaks. And somewhere in those peaks was the answer. Ulrika points to one of them.

This one here? She says that specific peak in that specific place, it tells us we have carbon atoms. Carbon atoms arranged in a very special way. It tells us this is diamond. 100%. This is a diamond. So we're not looking at a stimulant. Okay. So, okay. Confirmed. We have a diamond. We have a diamond here. No.

Yes. This is a real diamond? Yes. Sarah, it is official. The Planet Money diamond is a real diamond. This is a twist. I wasn't expecting this. But hold on. There are diamonds, right? And then there are...

Diamonds, you know, there's natural diamonds and then there's like the lab grown diamonds. So is this is this where we're headed? OK, OK. So it is true that for the last 10, 15 years, people have been growing these beautiful diamonds in the lab. But I just want to be clear, natural diamonds and lab grown diamonds, they are both real diamonds. They are chemically the exact same thing.

I mean, tell that to the real diamond crowd. But okay, I will say the big difference between natural and lab-grown is still price. Right. So a natural diamond like this could sell for maybe $5,000. But if it's lab-grown, the price is more like $1,000. And Orca's machines, they could actually tell us exactly what we had.

Because every diamond, it turns out, is unique. It doesn't matter if they look flawless to the naked eye. Albuquerque says they all have these little defects, these little impurities, little imperfections. It's that imprint of how it grew, how it survived in the earth, or how it was produced in a laboratory. Like a fingerprint or like freckles. Yes, exactly.

The placement of freckles on anyone who has freckles is slightly different. So these imperfections can tell you how a diamond came to be. And when Ulrika examined our diamond, she saw three really telling imperfections. Number one, she saw when she looked at it under the microscope. They're teeny tiny little black specks.

Oh, I see them. Oh, but they're so small. So these specks, most diamonds have them, are bits of stuff from the environment that get trapped inside the diamond when it's born, whether that's deep underground or in a lab. Now, the second imperfection she saw was when our diamond was in that fancy liquid nitrogen laser machine. Because no diamond is like 100, 100% carbon. Most natural diamonds, they have a little bit of nitrogen in them. But

But our diamond? It had something else. It had tiny traces of silicon in it. You can see it on the chart. That feature creates this spectral signature.

And both of these clues, they were pointing in the same direction. It's lab-grown, not natural. That's right. So the planet money diamond is a real diamond just grown in a lab. And Ulrika is like 100% sure about this. She is 100, 1000% sure. She said the shape of those little black specks and the fact that they were silicon, those are really only things you see in lab-grown diamonds. Okay, but...

But now, here is the coolest part. There is one more imperfection that Orca noticed, and the moment she saw it, she was like, oh, not only can I tell you this is a lab-grown diamond, I can tell you exactly how they grew it.

How do you even grow a diamond? Isn't it amazing? There are actually two different ways that people create large diamonds in the lab. So one, you try to mimic how a diamond is made in nature. So you get this giant press. Some of them are 20 feet tall. And you just like squish some carbon at really high temperatures.

But there's also a newer method that's becoming really popular. It involves growing diamonds layer by layer in what Ulrika says is basically a fancy microwave oven. So when Ulrika put our diamond under this special blacklight and zoomed way in, she could actually see traces of that process. One of the things that you'll notice is that there's a line going through it, a layer that

Under the blacklight, you could see a very faint line going through the middle of our diamond. So as they were growing, probably they were struggling a little bit with their conditions. They weren't able to maintain it. They had to stop. They take it out, get it a little clean, polish it up, and then they grew a second layer. So you're telling me that the top half and the bottom half of the diamond grew at different stages. Yes, different stages. We have a Kit Kat diamond. It's got layers to it. Yes.

Yes. So it's not the perfect, perfectly imperfect lab-grown diamond. I just want to be clear. I just want to be clear here, okay? The layers are invisible. You cannot see it with the naked eye. This is a high-quality diamond that happens to be lab-grown. Okay, but here's the thing that still doesn't make sense.

If you were to walk into a diamond store today and try to buy a lab-grown diamond like this one, like our Planet Money lab-grown diamond, that would cost you like a thousand whole dollars. And yet you bought this lab-grown diamond for $137. Wow.

Yeah. So that, that is the final mystery we're going to try to figure out. After the break, we're talking about the bizarre economics of the diamond market. This message comes from Capella University. Learning doesn't have to get in the way of life. With Capella's game-changing FlexPath learning format, you can set your own deadlines and learn on your own schedule. That means you don't have to put your life on hold to earn your degree. Instead, you can learn on your own.

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Find a shoe for every you at your DSW store or DSW.com. So before we talk about how we were able to get a diamond for $137, let's just take a step back to talk about where diamond prices in general even come from. Yeah, like why do we even pay whatever amount of money for a

Yeah, exactly. Like the diamond industry is built around this kind of circular idea that people want diamonds because they're valuable, which makes diamonds valuable because people want them because they're valuable.

They're valuable. And the deeper you get into the economics of diamonds, the weirder it gets. So to understand how our planet money diamond fits into all of this, we should start with natural diamonds. Like, why are natural diamonds so expensive?

The modern version of that story begins with... De Beers. De Beers, the diamond company. They got us all to think diamonds are special. Yeah. So for many, many decades, the De Beers company, they controlled almost all the world's diamond mines. So they were able to keep the supply of diamonds really low. But more importantly, like you said, in the 1930s and 40s, De Beers launched maybe the most genius marketing campaign in history.

They convinced all of us that... If you love someone, you get them a diamond. You better have that diamond ring if you want to get engaged. The diamond is forever. That's them. It's forever. Yeah. So that marketing campaign really, really juiced diamond demand. Yeah. And of course, when you have high demand and you have a company that's like keeping the supply of diamonds low, that is obviously going to make the price of diamonds go up. Exactly. Exactly.

But now the story gets weirder because by the 1990s, De Beers had started to lose its diamond monopoly. A bunch of competing diamond mines had opened up. De Beers later had to settle an antitrust lawsuit. So they didn't control the supply of diamonds anymore. But diamond prices still stayed high for decades. Yeah. Why is that? I'm so glad you asked because I called up the expert.

Can you just say your name for us and what you do? Yeah, so my name is Paul Zemnitsky and I'm an independent diamond industry analyst. Paul Zemnitsky is like the diamond markets guy. He travels the world visiting mines and factories, collecting data on supply and demand. Paul says right around the time that De Beers was losing control over the supply of diamonds, they found a big new way to juice demand.

They took the same classic playbook, you know, a diamond is something you give to someone because you love them, all that stuff. And they deployed that playbook in a huge untapped market, a country with more consumers than anywhere else in the world. China.

China. You know, culturally, Chinese consumers really didn't buy diamonds prior to, say, the 2000s. So they were kind of marketing that as a new area to drive diamond demand. And, you know, it started to really catch on.

So in large part, thanks to these new Chinese customers buying into the story of diamonds and also buying a lot of diamonds, Paul says diamond prices actually hit a new peak in the 2010s. OK, so now lab grown diamonds, though, they enter the mix. Yeah. Does that not bring the price of diamonds?

natural diamonds down? Yes, but here's where the diamond story gets even, even weirder. So these high-quality lab-grown diamonds, they started hitting the market in a big way about a decade ago. And people did worry at the time, are these going to crash the price of diamonds? But because scientists like Ulrika can actually tell a lab-grown diamond from a natural diamond, instead what happened is the diamond market split dramatically.

into two different markets. So if you look at the market for natural diamonds over the past 10 years, the price has come down maybe 20%. Because people who would have bought natural diamonds started buying the lab-grown ones. Yeah, that is a big part of it.

But then you look at the market for lab-grown diamonds, and that has been just on a wild ride. So at first, lab-grown diamonds were pretty expensive. Paul says if you went to the jewelry store, the lab-growns, they were only 10% cheaper than natural diamonds. Essentially, they were selling, you know, a lab diamond...

having the same maybe meaning, if you will, of a natural diamond. So they were piggybacking off the sort of a diamond is forever and super expensive marketing stuff from De Beers. Absolutely. That's the way I see it. They're essentially riding on their coattails. Like you remember the marketing for this, Sarah, right? It was like, be ethical. Yeah, this is not a blood diamond. This came from a lab. Yeah.

But the more and more people that started to buy lab-grown diamonds, the more companies invested in perfecting the technology to make them, to grow them bigger and cheaper. A lot of those breakthroughs were happening in China, since China was already the world leader in making diamonds for industrial purposes. So, Sarah, let me show you something that blew my mind. Remember Alibaba, the Chinese website where I bought the Planet Money diamond? Yeah.

Well, they don't just sell diamonds there. Take a look at this page. Okay, I see a machine.

I see like a big machine with like knobs all over it. Kind of looks like a big giant like ice machine. Oh, it's a different kind of ice, Sarah. This is a chemical vapor deposition machine. This is basically one of those fancy microwaves Ulrich was talking about. Oh, so you can buy the thing to make your own diamond for just $158,000. Yeah, yeah.

Steel. Do you want to buy one? No, I'd rather just buy $158,000 worth of diamonds. I mean, a lot of people did think this was a steal. Paul says over the past couple years, companies in India and China have been buying tons of these kinds of machines, building big new factories. Paul's actually visited some of them. There's really not anybody there. It's basically machines that are growing diamonds. They'll just be, you know, rows and rows of them.

All these automated factories with their rows and rows of diamond making machines led to a huge upswing in the supply of lab-grown diamonds. I would describe it as like a bubble in production, a bubble in new supply that really became clear in, I would say, 2022 and 2023.

Since then, the wholesale price for lab-grown diamonds has absolutely crashed. In just three years, it's fallen like 90%. It's been this cataclysm for the diamond industry. Paul says some lab-grown companies are going bankrupt. Also, you know how diamonds are also used a lot for industrial purposes?

Some companies are actually pivoting back to that, just making diamonds for like saw blades and drill bits. Diamonds are a construction worker's best friend. They are. Okay, so this is how you got our diamond for so cheap. You got it wholesale, direct from the supplier. Yeah, exactly. And the normal wholesale price for a diamond is something like $137, I guess. Well, you know, I did ask Paul about that.

So how much do you think I paid for it? I would say the wholesale on that diamond is under $100. $100? Oh, gosh. You said under $100. What? Yeah, apparently. So you overpaid for extra sparkly lab-grown, badly made-in-a-microwave diamond. I know. Apparently, this is like an open secret in the industry. Literally, nobody that I talked to was surprised at all.

at all that I'd somehow managed to buy this diamond for $137. Apparently, it was not even that good of a deal. Okay, but there is this, like, disconnect for me because Paul is saying that the wholesale price for a lab-grown diamond like this one is $100-ish.

But if you walk into like any diamond store right now, this exact kind of diamond is not going to cost you $100. At a store, it'll cost you like $1,000. Yeah, exactly. That is the biggest mystery in the diamond market right now. The markup. Yes.

I think we should buy one of these diamond-making machines. Yeah, I know. That's what I'm saying. So this is the big puzzle right now. Because for natural diamonds, the typical markup, like in a retail shop, it's maybe 30%. But for lab-grown diamonds, the markup right now is like 600%. Okay, logically...

This should not happen, right? Someone else should just open a store next door, sell the lab-grown diamond for a lot less than $1,000, like $500, $300. They would still make a huge profit. And then everyone else would cut their prices and all the prices would go down. Right. But that isn't happening.

And there are a couple of theories why. So theory number one is maybe there's collusion, right? Maybe there's some conspiracy among diamond stores to not lower their prices. But there are

so many diamond stores, you know, in person. You can also buy them online. So it's kind of hard to imagine that they would all agree to this. Yeah, that doesn't seem like the likely scenario here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So theory number two. This is about something maybe going on with customers. Think about when you buy a diamond, right? For most people, it's maybe...

Right. People don't really know what the price of diamonds are until they're at the store buying it. And when you see, oh, this one is $3,000 less than a natural diamond, you think like, wow, what a steal. You don't know that it should actually be even cheaper than that.

You don't know that it's actually $100. Yeah. So part of this is that the price of these lab-grown diamonds has been changing so quickly, the wholesale price. But eventually you would expect consumers to catch on and for the prices to come down. PSA. News you can use.

You're paying too much for your lab-grown diamonds. Well, unless you believe in the final theory, theory number three. And this goes back to why diamonds are so expensive in the first place. You know, the whole story that De Beers sold us decades ago, how diamonds are supposed to be this expensive symbol of love and affection. So there's a big difference between buying someone an engagement ring that costs $5,000 versus $99.

Yeah. You don't want to seem cheap. Yeah. You know, I think it's just psychologically hard to let go of the idea that a diamond should be expensive. Like on some level, it just doesn't seem right that you can just order a diamond like this for $137. I mean, just look at it.

It's a diamond. I'm just going to say this would not matter to me personally. If it's as sparkly as the diamond I'm looking at right now, like I don't care if it's natural, lab made. Don't you just want something sparkly at the end of the day? Isn't that the only thing that really matters?

Okay, so Sarah, you know, I did try to embody that mindset. I did try to imagine this diamond as, you know, just a commodity in the cold, hard marketplace. Wait, what are we doing with our diamond? Did you try to sell our diamond? Well, okay, okay. Let me tell you one last story. So when I was in New York, I took our little diamond out for a walk in the Diamond District.

to see its family. Great. The street lamps are shaped like diamonds. It's pretty cool.

The Diamond District is this one block in midtown Manhattan where like 90% of the diamonds that come to the U.S. pass through. It's like the Ellis Island of diamonds. I was walking down the street and I saw so many shops selling diamonds but also buying diamonds. You guys buy diamonds? Yeah. Diamonds? Yeah. Where can I... I followed this guy wearing a sandwich board. It said,

We buy diamonds, we buy gold. And he led me to this dark, kind of dirty stairwell. I just go up the stairs? Yeah. Okay. Oh, here? Yeah. Oh. Push, push. Push, push? Okay.

I walk in and the door actually locks behind me and they have me go into this small back room. The shades were down and there were these three kind of big looking guys just sitting around. What's this old thing you got, bro? This? That's my microphone. You recording? Yes. Is that okay? Yeah.

No. I don't know, I mean, I'd prefer not, but if you're recording, whatever, I don't care. The guy behind the desk said his name was George Mooks. Mooks? How do you spell that? Now you're gonna ask me for spelling of my last name, bro? What are you? I report, I gotta ask. Come on, talk to me, show me what you got. Alright, alright, alright, hold on. I handed over the Planet Money diamond. Told him what kind of diamond it was, how many carats. So this is a lab-grown diamond? Yes. It's not a natural diamond? No.

I got you.

So you need to go to somebody that buys lab-grown diamonds. You don't even buy lab-grown diamonds. I mean, I do, but honestly speaking, I really don't because I don't have a customer for labs. Oh, he didn't want our diamond. Okay. No, he didn't even want it. Okay, so you wouldn't even buy this. Not for me, my friend. Not for you. I cannot offer you anything that's not for me. But just then, one of the other guys who was watching our conversation gets up from the couch and comes over.

Let me ask you a question, what do you want for that? Well, I paid $137. I don't care what you pay. You paid $137? Yeah. And how much you asking? This is one carat. Yeah. You're not gonna get $50 today. You don't think so? Anywhere on the street? Nowhere. What, you looking for the stupid guy here? They're all smart, don't worry about it. Okay. He's telling you from experience.

Now, this second guy, he said his name was Solomon. No last name. Are you the owner of this? No. CEO?

You like a KGB digging. FBI over here. I'm a reporter. I'm a reporter. So go report somewhere else. All right. All right. Come to do business here. I have no time for a report. Okay. And you know what, Sarah? As I was standing there in that little room, seeing our diamond in the hands of some stranger, I realized something. I realized maybe I didn't want to sell this diamond.

I don't know. I don't know if you didn't want to so much as they were not going to let you. Fair enough. Fair enough. Anyway, I got our diamond back from Solomon. All right. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. And I got out of there. Thank you.

I'm glad they didn't let you sell it because I have actually grown kind of fond of our little Planet Money diamond. Jeff, how dare you try to sell it? I mean, I kind of feel the same way, you know? That's what I was thinking in that room. Like, me and this little diamond, we've been through things. From the lasers and the liquid nitrogen to our romantic tour of the diamond district. No matter what anyone else says, this diamond is valuable.

to me.

If you're already a Planet Money Plus supporter, check them out. Also, thank you. If you're not, sign up at plus.npr.org. You also get bonus episodes, sponsor-free listening, and you know you're supporting the work of Planet Money.

This episode was produced beautifully by one of the sparkliest producers in the business, James Sneed, Planet Money's true diamond. It was edited by Keith Romer with help from Jess Jing, fact-checked by Emma Peasley, and engineered by Kwesi Lee. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. Special thanks also to Martin Rappaport. I'm Jeff Guo. I'm Sarah Gonzalez.

Yeah, go for it. You say it, right? Well, I don't know. You should say it. No, you take it. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.

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