By Abe Sherman Around the first week of September, I wrote a rather long article about synthetic diamonds. It had very limited distribution; I only sent it to our Plexus members because I wanted to discuss the subject during our fall Plexus meetings to get a sense of how jewelers were feeling about the subject, and what, if anything, we should be doing about it.

I wrote an analogy between the natural and cultured pearl markets and while it was not a perfect correlation, I wanted to make the point that there must have been a point in time, 100 years ago, when cultured pearls were sold as simply “pearls”. None of us alive today can recall the impact that may have had on the confidence of buying ‘pearls’ and how disruptive that might have been at the time. I posited that we may be heading for similar confusion and disruption (and a ding to consumer confidence) with synthetic diamonds. Click here to read more….