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EditorsOct 25, 2013
Undisclosed and still unpunished, part II
I’ve been reading all the reports this week about the next trade “crisis,” the apparently large volumes of undisclosed synthetic melee being mixed in with batches of natural diamonds.
Chaim Even-Zohar kicked off this most recent string of reports in the Oct. 17 issue of Diamond Intelligence Briefs while Martin Rapaport issued a trade alert that same day. JCK’s Rob Bates warned of the possible crisis coming in his blog Wednesday, and undisclosed synthetics were the subject of Edahn Golan’s Memo this week.
Were you surprised to read these accounts? You shouldn’t be.
Do you remember being a little kid and getting away with something you knew you shouldn’t do? Did you try to do it again? The answer is probably, because that’s how humans are built; to constantly test boundaries. We spend the formative years of our life doing just this: essentially, seeing exactly how much we can get away with in our environment.
The same applies here. In May 2012, reports surfaced that a company linked to lab-grown diamond producer Gemesis had submitted a parcel of hundreds of undisclosed synthetics to the International Gemological Institute in Antwerp.
Everybody was up in arms about this scandal when it broke, but where is the case now? Was anybody involved ever punished? Last I heard, law enforcement authorities in Belgium were investigating Gemesis/Su-Raj Diamonds but I've never anything about the outcome of that investigation.
Why doesn’t anybody--the big diamond producers or one of these countless trade organizations that spend all year meeting in various locations around the world--step up, name the companies that are doing this and punish them?
The holidays are getting closer. Everybody in the jewelry industry knows how the consumer media has an acute sense of timing when it comes to airing stories that make the general public wary of jewelry at the worst possible time of the year.
In the past it’s been “blood” diamonds, or lead glass-filled rubies.
In a few weeks, you might see a story about “man-made diamonds” being sold as natural on the Today show or ABC News, with an emphasis on the price difference and how consumers, essentially, are being cheated by jewelers.
Don’t be surprised.
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