As some of you may recall, some years ago I went to Antwerp to buy a diamond, delightfully wooked out on MXE, to place on my altar. I was all mystical about it but, it was meant as a symbol for Divinity so hey 
It wasnt important how big it was, but it needed to be authentic, so it became a gorgeous, tiny 0.1 carat diamond with wonderful specs (0.1 carat Top Wesselton F Color VS grade African diamond, 3 mm across). A carat as you know is 200mg, so the diamond worked out to be 20mg.
Flash forward almost 4 years. For Singularity reasons I wished to have a Moissanite stone upon my altar also, the diamond, being pure carbon, being symbol for carbon based life and the moissanite, being a 1:1 molecular lattice of silicon and carbon, being a symbol for the merger of carbon based life (us) with the emerging silicon based life (AI, technology), that is the upcoming Technological Singularity.
So, with some push and pull I decided to order a 0.25 carat moissanite from India, for under, I kid you not, 12 bucks.
Today it plopped in my mailbox, after some epic delay.
Guys, we're talking tiny stones here and I'm no jeweler but the moissanite was just as magnificent to the eye, really, as the actual good quality diamond. It actually was indeed a wee tad more colorful in its lustre, as the comparatively higher refractory index suggested.
I played around with some cubic zirconia as a trip toy, but it really, really doesn't hold a candle to a moissanite in terms of beauty.
Hardness too. A sapphire has a Mohs Hardness of 9, diamond 10 and moissanite, 9.5. To put this metric in perspective, its 20x as hard as sapphire and half as hard as diamond. Cubic Zirconia has 8.5 so its a whopping 40 times less hard than Moissanite. CZ tends to get dull over time in jewelry, Sapphires, not really so a stone 20x as hard like Moissanite will stay sparkly, which is wonderful if you intend to buy it for jewelry. A good moissanite will probably be as sparkly on your 50th wedding anniversary as a diamond will.
Where I'm going with this, is this: The world diamond trade is in the hands, mostly, of a cartel which artificially raises prices far above the worth of the diamond itself. They are not as rare as the cartel wants you to think they are. If you think of diamonds as a store of value, think again. You can buy a gold coin and spin around and sell it and lose maybe 2.5% spread. If you look at the buyback prices for diamonds, bam! typically if you spin around you just lost 75% of the value, gone, kaputt! Diamonds are nice to smuggle a large sum of wealth across a border in a last ditch scenario (a 5 carat D color diamond half an inch across is about a quarter million dollars) but the whole Diamonds are a girl's best friend ploy that they are good to hold onto wealth for a rainy day that lives on in bling circles is a fabrication by the cartel. Gold and currently especially Platinum are far more intelligent bling, in that they are an actual asset for investment likely to increase with inflation. Diamonds, by contrast, are carbon and carbon is abundant. Burn a sheet of paper, compress the ashes with heat and pow! a diamond worth more than a months pay at the job!
Lets focus on another thing: sourcing. The diamond industry sources diamonds generally from develoiping nations where people are ruthlessly exploited to dig it out of the ground for cheap, we've all seen the movie "blood diamond", it sucks. I happen to be active on the African Internet (not African American but actually from inside the cradle of mankind) and consensus there is that people are all-out repulsed by how the diamond industry screws local communities over and is actually keeping backward areas backward to exploit them better.
Yes, its that bad, thats not just a movie.
Moissanite!
Moissanite is the union of an atom of silicon and an atom of carbon. An American company which eternally wont be named charges your CC double overtime with prices for these stones that are actually close to that of diamonds. This American company tried to form its own cartel, but, no dealio muchachas, patent expired, China and India are getting in on the game.
Right now the American 0.25 carat moissanite runs for $129 and like I told you, I sourced my 0.25 carat moissanite from India (worldwide eBay even!) for under 12 bucks. And that India stone, I'm glad its a differenb size and weight because unlike cubic zirconia, the moissanite is not easy to tell apart from the actual diamond, and for all intents and purposes, just about as hard.
Moissanite is a natural mineral that occurs in meteorites that is much rarer than diamond in its natural form, so rare that it must be manufactured as there is too little of it around. Both of them are made naturally in both Space and Deep Earth.
Those of you thinking of buying lets say a ring for your fiance or better still, your wife-to-be, here's some food for thought.
Why sponsor a cartel that actually keeps developing nations in misery, why spend one to three paychecks on a stone that when you spin it around lost 75% of its value? If you want cash bling, go for platinum and gold and if you want sparkly bling, go for moissanite, it is even sparklier than diamond itself! Don't sponsor the fact that some poor kid is kept out of school to look for shiny rocks in the African mud that wars are fought over, sponsor the high tech labs that produce ever cheaper, ever better moissanite. You and your computer screen, glued together right now, carbon and silicon in unison that is the future of the Singuarity that you and your lover will walk into in THIS lifetime! This incredible merger of the carbon of brains and the silicon of computer chips that has us all hypnotized, the sign of OUR times.
Spend your money wisely. Dont spend 1000 bucks on a stone when you can have one flown in from across the world for a few tenners, and fitted by your jeweler into the jewelry of your love.
A diamond is a story. It is beautiful, but its a story. A moissanite has an even more beautiful story, is even sparklier and is, well, better for the world at large and a more intelligent choice for a loving couple to take in these interesting times.
Ultimately the choice whether to go for a diamond or a moissanite is up to you, but just the act of discussing this with your love will teach you both a lot about each other, about what you value and for which reason.
There are a million unique visitors passing through here every month, so this one's written with the Lovers and Lovers-to-be in mind
Above, an extreme closeup of part of my altar. The photoflash does not do it justice. On the folded red handkerchief that afforded my first Ether induced vision when I was 13 years old, lies in the middle, a natural cubic crystal of Fool's Gold, an Alchemical union of Iron and Sulfur, because we are all fools sometimes, to the left a black pearl, symbol of the Singularity that gave birth to the Universe, the Oneness of All Things, and to the right, below, the Diamond and above, the Moissanite that arrived yesterday, 13 hours passed like nothing!
Friends, thank you for reading this.
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