Marilyn Monroe movies, James Bond films and many other films discuss diamonds. The stones are also at the heart of fashion. Many people who cannot afford diamonds regard these as being part of the more powerful and desirable symbols.
The 2022 Berlin International Film Festival premiered Nothing Lasts Forever, a documentary about the so-called diamond mystique following the emergence of lab grown diamonds. It is possible to make diamonds in laboratories at a small part of the money required to mine diamonds. Therefore, artificial diamond rings come at more affordable rates than their natural diamond counterparts.
Thanks to laboratory technology, diamonds are in abundance and are not rare. It is not a good thing for all diamond dealers. Jason Kohn’s entertaining and skeptical film shows the natural diamond industry in a scared state.
Kohn includes all parties concerned in the documentary. His documentary film shows diamond mining in a Botswana pit from a company that it considers a cartel.
The film also takes the audience to Surat, a key diamond processing center in India. Surat is the largest lab-made diamond producer in the world. Kohn prefers to describe artificial diamonds as new diamonds. Kohn’s film also takes the viewer to NYC, in which the stone is sold along 47th Street. In New York City, many conventional jewelers look at the growth of artificial diamonds skeptically.
Therein lies the central dilemma of the film. Following years of value and charisma, diamonds are likely to be deprived of their appeal due to artificial diamonds. It is not possible to distinguish between the so-called new diamonds and their mined counterparts. As per some experts, 5% to 20% of mined diamonds are artificial.
There is an elemental fact at the heart of the documentary. As per a jeweler, the lone value that a diamond has is what somebody is ready to spend on a stone that mankind has dug up from a large amount of dirt. Any marketing unit is unlikely to talk about something like that.
As for physicist John Janik’s opinion, there is a traditional thing that possibly serves as an example of the natural diamond decline. The Washington Monument has a 9-inch aluminum pyramid. Aluminum is an expensive material when it is placed at such a height. When it became possible to mass-produce aluminum, the value of the material plummeted. The physicist regards natural diamonds as the new-age aluminum.