This past winter, one of my esteemed industry colleagues included a saying in one of his blogs that I had never heard before: If you really want to be wary of the mass media, read an article on a topic about which you are particularly well informed.
Since reading that blog, this phrase has proven to be true a number of times, the latest of which happened just this past week.
On April 19, The New York Times published a story online that mentioned lab-grown, or synthetic, diamonds titled “When Diamonds Are Dirt Cheap, Will They Still Dazzle?” (It also appeared in the Times’ New York print edition the following day.)
While the overall message of the article, that technology could shift people’s perception of where value lies, is an interesting point certainly worth discussing, much of the information given in the article about lab-grown diamonds was wrong.
To begin with, the writer never seems to grasp that lab-grown diamonds are, in fact, real diamonds. They were just grown in a lab, not underground.
His column states that diamonds grown using the “new” chemical vapor deposition (CVD) process are “visually identical to mined ones” and the caption (which the author of the article might not have written) for the photo at the top of the story states: “Chemical vapor deposition can produce diamonds, created from gases, that are virtually indistinguishable from mined diamonds.”
It’s unclear whether this means indistinguishable visually or in a grading-lab sense. Either way, it’s wrong.
