why is diamond most expensive among all gems ?

Answer 1

diamonds exhibit rare beauty because of its characteristics (very high index of refraction) and every woman wants one. (diamonds ara a girl's best friend, but not mine hehe)
demand of the market.
diamonds are not found easily.
diamonds are hard (to cut and polish)
and because the first one who saw a diamond thought he could make a lot of money.

actually, you can grow or make your own diamond out of coal (yup...carbon)
but you'll have to be millions of years old to already own one...

Answer 2

Good marketing. Prior to 1938, the gems in the all the British crowns & such were far more rare rubies, sapphires & the like. Then, some gents from De Beers visited the royals with some magnificent diamonds & a lot of charm and slowly replaced most of the tiaras & necklaces that were publically worn. They also gave jewelry to actresses & other celebs & have done the "A diamond is forever" campaign for some time. They artificially state the rarity of the gems & drive the price up & up (they paid a $10M fine to the US for this exact crime).
And then, to top it off, they pay their employees as little as possible and don't give anything back to the communities or the country. Oh yeah, & if they had shut down their mines, WWII would have lasted 3 months, but the industrial diamonds smuggled out to the nazis were considered an acceptable loss compared to losing 3 months of profits. Nice guys, eh? Greedy AND disgusting. Here's the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Beers

Answer 3

Diamond rarity is technically overblown. Prior to the 20th century, rubies and emeralds were more valuable and more scarce.

What made diamonds an expensive commodity was the De Beers diamond cartel. They strictly control the amount of diamonds entering the market each year to ensure a balance in scarcity and demand. Their charter guarantees that the pricing of diamonds is monotonically increasing.

Additionally, De Beers created the entire engagement ring market in a brilliant marketing campaign that created demand where there had been none.

Answer 4

The diamond is actually not the most expensive. Rubies, emeralds and star sapphires can actually cost more.
In addition to their rarity, the high cost of diamonds is attributed to the difficulty in cutting and polishing the gems, since diamonds (being the hardest mineral known) can only be cut and polished by other diamonds.

Answer 5

In fact if you look at auction prices you will find that super fine top colour rubies cost more than diamonds on a per carat basis. Total prices for diamonds can be higher as large diamonds are far more common than large rubies.

Answer 6

It is the rarest...or at least has very high quality compared to the others. Also, because people like shiny things...that may sound stupid, but it's true. Yellow diamonds serve a purpose as drills, but the clear ones are used as jewlry because people like how they look...the same with gold. Odd how these things become so expensive when in all reality they're just rocks.

Answer 7

The prices are artifically inflated due to the DeBeers monopoly. The control diamond production in South Africa and even other African and Asian countries. Artificially created diamonds can be too perfect and are pretty cheap to produce.

Answer 8

brilliant and really truly evil marketing. while diamonds do have some actual practical uses because of their hardness the thing that really drives up the price is the monopolistic control of the market by the debeers company. the executives can't even enter the u.s. for fear of being arrested.

Answer 9

Value of stones go by availability. Diamonds are hard to find. It goes by how much the earth produces that stone.

Answer 10

it was innitally priced by rarity but is also priced by demand. people like the clear sparkly stuff. believe it or not aluminum was once considered extremely valuable. then they figured out ways to extract it cheaply and now they use it for cans and trailers.