Posts Tagged → lab
Lab grown vs Beautiful Naturals
Quite a debate has been raging for some years, decades really, about the impact of lab grown gems on the natural gem market. This debate is at peak right now, and appears to be headed in a surprising direction.
We are talking here primarily about colored gemstones, not diamonds. Lab grown diamonds for wearing as gems completely defeat the entire purpose of having a diamond in the first place. Gem-grade diamond grown by Mother Nature is quite rare, and therefore quite valuable. Lab grown diamonds are not rare, but are rather just cheap knock-offs of the real deal. What is the point of wearing a fake that looks just like the real? Are you trying to mislead people? That says a lot about you!
Forget those lab grown diamonds.
What started in the 1950s with junky, soft, easily identified, easily fractured high impact glass morphed into better quality lab-grown cubic zirconiums. Those “CZs” ruled the roost of cheap gem knock-offs for decades, both colored and clear, and were easily detectable by the eye and with simple two-prong “diamond testers” of many makes. Either a stone was diamond, or it wasn’t, and if it was not a diamond, it was most likely CZ.
The colored versions of CZ were almost ridiculous looking. They lacked the soft, deep, subtle nuance of the colored stones they were supposed to emulate, primarily red ruby and blue sapphire, and were often blindingly garish. Easy to spot these as fakes from a mile away, only the most unabashed or cheap wore them as deliberate gem representations.
Early attempts at lab growing blue sapphire corundum (and ruby, which is just the red version of corundum) gem-grade crystals bore rudimentary fruit, with clear growth rings that separated lab Frankenstein creations from Mother Nature’s real, beautiful, naturals. Same for lab emeralds, most of which still today have an unnatural nuclear-green Kryptonite color that is 99.999999% impossible to create naturally.
GIA really exploded in importance in this time period, because lots of decent lab-made fakes were being offered as natural colored stones, and GIA labs could analyze stones and certify them as natural, or not.
However, starting in the 1980s, the age of President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” anti-Soviet space lasers and incredibly accurate laser sighting systems for terrestrial military tank cannons, and then for laser cameras on military satellites that can count the hairs on a fly’s ass from 100 miles up in space, etc, American and Russian laboratories began to grow various crystals from corundum and other chemical concoctions (like YAG) to suit the military’s optical needs, which also happened to result in true gem-quality product. Clear, clean, visually appealing, natural looking, hard.
In all of this re-purposing of mostly sapphire/ corundum and garnet crystals for high tech optical uses, a broader public niche slowly opened up: Gem-grade lab grown…gems. These lab-created crystals-cum-gems are mostly actual ruby and actual sapphire that look in all ways like something created over hundreds of millions of years in the Earth’s crust…. or, in the alternative, these gems are something else entirely, with non-garish, unnatural, but nonetheless truly beautiful gem properties, like the various colors of YAG.
Lab-grown Alexandrite is one of the cooler gems, because it occurs naturally (in extremely limited quantities, mainly in the Ural Mountains) and yet the lab creation looks exactly like the beautiful natural material. Making it in the lab is not that easy, so it is not ridiculously cheap.
Now, we are seeing people experiment with custom-grown lab crystals made to specific color (using various rare earth metals), refractive, and chatoyant characteristics, with hardnesses of 8-9 Mohs, which make them eminently wearable as personal gems. These purpose-crafted lab creations are not garish, but rather are beautiful gems to look at, and easy to appreciate. When encased in gold or platinum, they look every bit as beautiful as a genuine natural pigeon blood ruby or Ceylon cornflower sapphire, or more beautiful.
The advantages of these lab gems is that they cost far, far less than the naturals, and can be made to look as good as, or better, than the naturals. How is that for a ROI? Pretty damned good!
Why do humans wear gems and jewelry in the first place? First and foremost to make ourselves more attractive. Other reasons include showing off wealth, hoarding wealth, making wealth highly portable in times of war or dislocation. Royalty the world over wear crowns made of precious metals and absolutely loaded down with precious rare gems. These crowns are a form of banking, concentrating wealth – and thus power – in one very small place.
What the lab created colored gem stones have done is democratize beauty, making gems and personal beauty more affordable and thus more widely available. They have also grown appreciation for just how rare are the actual natural stones in those royal crowns and sceptres and sold by Harry Winston. By making beautiful gemstones both believable and also widely available, lab gems are here to stay. People can pick and choose personally tailored gems that work best for their own unique skin tones and eye colors.
And of course, there are already fakes of lab created gem stones, made of glass, so already the lab stones must have some greater value than just glass.
To put this crassly, everyone loves a beautiful natural, but boy, those lab enhanced “fakes” sure look good, don’t they? And the fact that they function just as well as the naturals, or even better, means they are here to stay.
If your emerald looks impossibly green, it is fake.
American guinea pigs
A long time ago, guinea pigs were used for scientific experimentation. Feminine makeup, tool impacts, eye and ear capabilities, G-force and rotational effects on their brains and orientation, chemicals and drugs, and much more were all tested on what many Americans viewed as family pets. Like with most other small, cute, furry critters, the optics of the most egregious of these tests conducted upon them did not sit well with the American or European publics. And so most guinea pigs became liberated from the horrors of quasi-scientific testing.
Enter the human as the new guinea pig. There are so many of us humans on Planet Earth, and especially so many Han Chinese, that the value placed on a single human being is being dramatically reduced to measures of momentary comforts of the people standing around (post-birth infanticide), the organs in a human body (China), and hacked-up teenaged trans-sexual Frankensteins. At one time, Americans, at least, highly valued human life. Not anymore.
Today, we allow our American selves to be subjected to all kinds of unknown, un-volunteered scientific tests, conducted by distant Han Chinese politicians and scientists. Covid-19 was the first time we became fully aware of Chinese biowarfare testing being conducted upon our entire American population, but there were plenty of past strong hints that our health was being meddled with, and watched.
Unusually stronger and stronger influenza strains over the past two decades come to mind. Once correctly called the “Asian flu”, as these influenzas in fact come from Asia, wokeism/ political correctness demanded that Americans stop calling it what it was. Probably inspired by the prompting of a host of Chinese academics burrowed into American universities, where ridiculous ideas seem to come from non-stop.
Well, here we are in late March, 2025, and a lot of Americans are struggling with the strangest cold virus family doctors have seen (several family doctors told me this). I myself have had this weird cold virus for over three months now, and although the hacking cough stopped last week, the nasty mucous continues. I feel like crap, am low energy, and every time it seems I am past it, it comes back. Normal cold viruses last a week, maybe ten days. Like many others who have caught this “cold”, I am past ninety days. This is not just not normal, it is orders of magnitude waaaayyy not normal.
Several friends and acquaintances have experienced this cold virus much worse than I, getting pneumonia and being hospitalized. Many of my friends simply had its endless hacking cough for months. My own family physician told me “We are seeing a lot of it and we don’t know what it is.”
Well, I am going to venture a guess at what this is: Yet another Chinese bioweapon being tested on the American public.
What made me curious about this virus was the day I was exposed to it. I was flying back from a southern fishing trip in December, and a guy in the seat behind me was coughing, hacking, and sneezing his head off. Strangely, he made no attempt to cover his mouth, and everyone around him was objecting loudly to his unpolished behavior.
And what was his most unexpected behavior, as he was a white guy in his mid sixties, short hair, wearing a button down Oxford shirt, chinos, and Dockers. This very epitome of Middle Income propriety was behaving like someone raised in a cave. Very odd clash of how someone presented in public and how they then acted in public. Everyone raised as this guy was raised knows that you cover your mouth when you cough and sneeze, and yet he deliberately did not. Almost like he was trying to share his misery with those around him.
I remarked to the Princess of Patience next to me, “It’s like the airport scene in the Twelve Monkeys movie, where the deadly pandemic virus is exposed to the public.”
And then a week later, sure enough, I showed symptoms that now over three months later are by far the worst, longest, and strangest cold I have ever had. Too many people I know have had a similar experience. Normal viruses last a week. This far outlier thing has to have been made in a lab. Add to that the remarkably bad Asian bird flu this year, resulting in egg shortages, and we have two or three data points to plot on an X-Y graph. The R² is looking like almost a perfect 100.
And so now I share with you, the public, a curiosity in my mind that will not cease: Are people being paid to go forth into the American interior and deliberately spread experimental viruses created in Chinese labs, for the purpose of both damaging America and using us as a giant colony of guinea pigs?
Why wouldn’t China do this? China is already at war with America at every contact point between our two nations. China’s concept of “total war” includes making war against our public health, as much as it includes economic war and aircraft carriers. America’s freedoms can be an Achilles heel in this fight, and we had better get a handle on what is being done to us before China’s domestic allies here on our soil (America’s domestic enemies) begin demanding that we again curtail our freedom of movement, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, etc.
America must really get control of its borders and know exactly who is here and why they are here, before something much worse happens. God only knows what the imperialistic Han Chinese CCP is concocting in their genetic engineering bioweapons labs right now, with the goal of eliminating us.
[Edit: I apologize for the many small mistakes and the slow editing process to fix them all day. I feel like wombat sh*t, which is to say, kind of weird and uncomfortable, and not totally focused] UPDATE 4/8/25: TOLDJASO!
Dickinson College – always good to visit
Thank you to Professor Anat Beck and her very interesting students, for hosting me today. I know it is not easy to hear ideas you do not agree with, and you all did a marvelous job of listening and asking questions, and seeing photos of hunting and trapping. It was an honor to be with you. Just remember: Your entrepreneurialism cannot succeed with more onerous government regulations and requirements, like ObamaCare. When there are more takers than makers, the system collapses. Capitalism has generated more liberty, freedom, and opportunity than any other approach.
Last year I spoke to Dr. Andrea Lieber’s class, also at Dickinson, and we had an excellent dialogue on “climate change.” What surprised me was how little the students knew about the politicization of “climate change” “science.” It is to Dr. Lieber’s credit that someone like me was invited to address her students.
Dickinson has a fascinating, really neat environment and hands-on sustainability program, replete with a new green house/ lab. I hope I am invited back again, because, I like it a lot. The students are inspiring.