De Beers created and marketed the modern concept of an engagement ring to sell diamonds. In recent years, man-made diamonds have improved so much in quality that it requires sophisticated equipment to tell the difference between natural and lab grown diamonds. Unscrupulous diamond cutters have been mixing lab grown diamonds with natural parcels.
The director of Nothing Last Forever, Jason Kohn, weaves these events into a story of deceit in the standard documentary format - a series of interviews with experts enhanced with B-roll and music.
Kohn called his film “a character-based essay film with a plot.” He added, when picking experts, “you’re actually looking for characters. You’re not looking for people.” Which characters made the cut?
THE GEMOLOGIST. From his research and experience, Dusan Simic is concerned about lab diamonds being passed as natural which is a legit concern. His patented solution is to have diamond growers infuse a compound that would make their diamonds display pink fluorescence when exposed to ultraviolet light.
THE AUTHOR. Aja Raden wrote two books: Stoned: Jewelry, Obsession, and How Desire Shapes the World and Truth About Lies: The Illusion of Honesty and the Evolution of Deceit. She gets in several snarky quips and urges us to believe nothing, because everything is a lie. Speaking of illusion, Kohn lists her as a jewelry designer instead of an author. She was a designer at Tacori for almost eight years, but it’s her book and opinions that landed her a role in the movie.
THE WEATHERMAN. Martin Rapaport is founder of the Rapaport Diamond Report and the RapNet online diamond trading network. He standardized diamond pricing and publishes current values in the marketplace. In the movie, he says he doesn’t set the prices, he merely publishes them. He compares himself to the weatherman who doesn’t make the weather, but only reports it. As lab grown diamonds continue to emerge, the extra supply will likely have an impact on diamond prices. De Beers is offering their Lightbox lab grown diamonds at a fixed price of $800 per carat. With an estimated worth of $14M, Rapaport has a personal interest in making sure diamonds don’t shift to a flat-pricing model. Rapaport’s status quo position to dismiss advancement doesn’t only apply to solely selling natural diamonds, it also applies to his outdated perspectives on gender roles.
THE EXECUTIVE. Stephen Lussier, the now-retired executive vice president of De Beers Brands, works to tell the other side of the story. Lussier shares the pluses for the local economy on a diamond mine, which he refers to as a two-kilometer hole. Mining those two-kilometers provides a greater return on investment than farming or any other use. In describing the economic benefits to Botswana, he details the increase in roads, teachers, and doctors. The filmmaker undercuts Lussier’s points with outdated information about De Beers and unrelated B-roll.
The two outdated facts that Kohn shares are that De Beers market share is 80-90% and that executives cannot travel to the US due to antitrust issues. Times change and the truth is today De Beers represents less than 25% of the market and execs have been coming to America for the last decade.
But it’s the bad B-roll that made my eyes roll. When Lussier is talking about real benefits, Kohn shows a shot a lion eating an elephant. When asked about the elephant at the Hamptons Film Festival, Kohn said they went on safari and wanted to use the cool footage.
Additionally, he showed dilapidated buildings in China as his lead in for showing the diamond factories. In providing background on De Beers he shows clips of Dan Rather and Mike Wallace from much younger days.
The funniest B-roll was Simic getting his hair cut in preparation for his presentation revealing his plan to mark lab grown diamonds. We see his eyebrows clipped, his nose hairs trimmed, his scalp massaged - must be a big day! Simic comes across as a tragic hero in the film. He resorts to driving for Uber after his proposal isn’t accepted by the industry, and we see plenty of footage of him as a driver selling his concept to passengers. When Rapaport won’t return his messages, Simic changes his tactics and begins to create a lab grown diamond to fool the testing equipment. The final scene shows him walking down the road on his new quest. As of writing this, he has not yet grown a diamond that tests as natural.
The technology for detection continues to improve, and reputable jewelers test every diamond to ensure they are selling what they say they are.
The film raises three questions that consumers should feel comfortable asking:
How do I know the value of the diamond I’m buying?
How can I be certain that the diamond is natural or lab grown?
Is a lab grown diamond a real diamond?
All three have easy answers, but unfortunately, the film doesn’t answer any of them.
The best way to know the value of anything you buy is to shop around. Value is more than price. It includes service levels, trust, and quality.
To ensure the truthful origin of your diamond, buy from a reputable jeweler who has a rigorous quality assurance program in place. They should be using state-of-the-art equipment to test every diamond they sell. Additionally, have your diamond tested by an independent grading laboratory like Gemological Institute of America (GIA), American Gem Society (AGS), or Gem Certification Assurance Lab (GCAL).
Grown diamonds are real. They are the same chemically, physically, and optically as natural diamonds. A diamond is a diamond no matter whether it is grown in a lab or comes out of the ground.
Back to the movie, I grew tired of hearing Simic saying “synthetic,” of Raden claiming something was a lie, and of Rapaport mansplaining what a woman wants. I would have preferred not to hear Kohn ask behind-the-camera questions to his characters, and to hear directly from diamond consumers.