Never Forget is a fabulous project to pay tribute to our fallen soldiers of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom.

Project Never Forget is offering every family who has lost a soldier in the war one personalized 3-D photo charm. You can submit your request to Project Never Forget by going to their website and filling out the forms. Priority is given to wives and mothers of the fallen soldiers, but additional charms are available.

If you bought a diamond between January 1, 1994, and March 31, 2006, you may be eligible for a piece of the $295 million settlement with DeBeers. The settlement is part of an agreement entered in to by DeBeers for anticompetitive practices while not admitting any wrong doing.

While some people are saying that you could get several hundred dollars for as small of a purchase as $2,000, I just don’t see it. The math doesn’t work. I know a lot of stores aren’t even bothering to waste their time with the paperwork, and they buy a lot of diamonds.

In any case, if you would like to be a part of the class action lawsuit, you need to fill out a claim form before March 19, 2008. If you want a shot at getting a few dollars from DeBeers head over to the Settlement Website and fill out the form there.

Direct from Hammacher Schlemmer, The Astrolabium Clock. With its roots in the astrolabes developed by the ancient Greek astronomers to determine the position of the sun and stars, this astrolabium clock does more than simply count off hours, minutes, months, and dates. Crowning this extraordinary precision instrument is a miniature globe of the earth that rotates and revolves around a solid brass sun. Attached to the earths gear assembly is the moon, which maintains its synchronous rotation around the earth (always presenting the same face to land-based observers, depicted by the grey hemisphere). All orbiting bodies move in real time, perfectly synchronized with clocks skeleton quartz movement, 24 solid-brass gears, and differential, all which provide precise timekeeping.

Designed by Richard Hermle of the famous German clock-making family, it is an exacting reproduction of the beautiful 18th-century heaven machine built by the famous clockmaker Philipp Matthaus Hahn (17391790). Known to antiquity as a telurium, the astrolabium is mounted on a lacquered solid cherry base with a mouth-blown crystal dome. The miniature earth is made of a combination of four semi-precious stones, including abalone, green agate, jade, and mother of pearl, cut in detail to depict continents and oceans.

All this for just *cough* $1500.00..

Hammacher Schlemmer

I love these pendants! Dana*David has a cool line of scribble jewelry. Available in 18k yellow, white, and rose gold, these whimsical pieces put a little fun in your jewelry. My favorites are these hearts, but you can also get stars, crosses and much more in this line of jewelry.

My guess is that they were the color outside the lines type of kids growing up. And that’s a good thing.

As much as I like my Hello Kitty bandages when I get a cut, I’m thinking that something with a little more “bling” would be more appropriate for a jeweler.

Designer Fabian Seibert took care of that by creating these cool three pack bandages set with Swarovski Crystals. Available in 5 crystal colors and white or skin color bandages, you can really show off that new paper cut in style now. But at about $15 for a three pack, you might want to keep the injuries to a minimum.

Fabian Seibert

Jeweler Thomas Heyerdahl has released the iDiamond Ear headphones for the iPod. In the fine, continuing, tradition of “what else can we stick diamonds on the Norway designer has placed 102 diamonds on each headphone.

Originally designed for a charity auction, the iDiamond era was so popular that Heyerdahl decided to produce them for sale. Expect to see the most expensive headphones for the iPod in finer jewelry stores February.

Heyerdahl Jeweler

BetterThanDiamond plans to double production of its Takara lab-grown yellow diamonds in 2008 due to higher demand for the stones.

“We were quite surprised at the upswing in demand for our larger canary yellow diamonds in December,” said BetterThanDiamond.com president Less Wright. “We’ve been cutting and distributing lab grown yellow diamonds since 2002, and this was the first time we completely sold out of larger yellow diamonds, and still had more customers on a waiting list for additional diamonds to become available. As a result, production for our yellow diamonds will be doubled for 2008.”

Wright said the increase in demand resulted from increased customer awareness of the value for money offered by lab-grown diamonds, being up to one-seventh the price of a natural diamond. He added that traffic to the company’s website also rose due to a stronger presence on Google searches for key terms such as ‘yellow diamonds’ and ‘cultured diamonds’.

Happy New Year everyone, and what a great way to welcome 2008. Lucy, more affectionately known as BPM 37093 to her close friends, is roughly ten billion trillion trillion carats and measures about 4,000 kilometers in diameter. I bet she looses at least 30% of her weight when she’s finally cut and polished.

Discovered by Travis Metcalf and his team at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Lucy is a crystallized white dwarf. A white dwarf is the hot core of a star, left over after the star uses up its nuclear fuel and dies. It is made mostly of carbon and is coated by a thin layer of hydrogen and helium gases.

I wonder how it would grade out at GIA? I bet it’s pretty near flawless.