It’s the stuff of a TV thriller. Yet it’s also a lesson in how quickly a new industry can grow, eat itself and now potentially collapse. But, first, a recipe. Take a seed, the tiniest slither of carbon material and put it into a chamber. Add varying amounts of gases, including a carbon source. Heat to a very high temperature to produce a plasma, in which the gases break down and carbon molecules attach themselves to the seed, causing it to grow. Let your CVD, or Chemical Vapour Deposition, simmer for anywhere between a few days and a few weeks. Remove gases. Remove the now larger seed from the chamber and crack it open. Congratulations, you have now done what it takes nature billions of years to do: you have made a diamond.
That process is not a new idea. The theory has been understood for over a century: one Henri Moissan attempted to make diamonds back in the 1890s. To revive the idea took a retired American army officer visiting Moscow to buy a new electronic security device, and, while there, being taken aside by a Dr Boris Feigelson to be shown the blueprints for something developed for the Soviet space programme: a tumble-dryer-sized device that, yes, made diamonds. General Carter Clarke could not believe his eyes, immediately bought three, shipped them back to America and founded Gemesis Cultured Diamonds, a market pioneer.
And a market disruptor. Maybe even, eventually, a destroyer. Such has long been the cachet derived from the rarity of diamonds—the product of long searches for sites of potential, followed by intensive mining to find maybe very little—not to mention its mystique—being the hardest substance known to man—that inevitably the ability to make diamonds would bring seismic change to an industry which has historically very tightly controlled their availability. It did not like lab-grown diamonds at all, deliberately if inaccurately referring to them as “synthetic” diamonds, despite the fact that they are not cubic zirconia or glass, but chemically identical to diamonds out of the ground, as court cases have had to underline. The only difference, in fact, is that they don’t come out of the ground.
Over the last decade the production of flawless, white stones of anywhere between one and several carats—the difference between a lovely engagement ring and the kind of gem Elizabeth Taylor favoured—has become routine. Four years ago they accounted for just 11 per cent of the entire diamond market. According to one analysis now they account for over half. And therein lies the problem.
“They have become mainstream now, and at a remarkable rate, with demand only increasing,” explains Lisa Rosen, head of the International Gem Society, an organisation that promotes education in gemology. “The natural diamond folks— maybe better called the mined diamond folks—have done a good job at placing doubt in the mind of the consumer as to whether lab-grown diamonds are real. But obviously, the problem for them has been that they’re significantly cheaper and becoming less and less expensive”.
And in a big way. If just a decade ago a lab-grown diamond might have been priced at a 10 per cent discount on the mined equivalent, now it’s more like 90 per cent. Small wonder that LGDs—as they’re referred to—have no resale value. That’s all been the result of “the cat being let out of the bag [as to how to make them],” as Tom Chatham, of US lab-grown gem company Chatham, puts it. “The tech has been worked on for more than 50 years and really a lot of kitchen secrets go into making quality lab-made diamonds. It’s not just about buying a diamond-making machine and switching it on. There’s a lot of physics, chemistry and special touches that make it work. [And yet] now, over just the last few years, [there are so many] producers all making and selling low-cost diamonds”.
Mass producers in China and India have come online to dominate the market, many backed by state subsidies, further driving down LGD prices—which fell by some 20 per cent over 2023 alone, with some predicting a further 50 per cent fall—and forcing many of the pioneering companies, mostly in the US, to close, consolidate or pivot dramatically. That’s a process that Chatham argues will be on-going until just a few mega-producers remain. In other words, much as the market for natural diamonds has long been dominated by a powerful oligopoly, so too the same fate might befall the market for LGDs.
“It has been like the Wild West. There have been no rules or standards and the market has effectively imploded,” says Brittany Lewis, commercial director for lab-grown diamonds company WD Advanced Materials, who notes that even the mined diamond players felt compelled to get in on the act: DeBeers, likely the most famous name in mined diamonds, A laser removes the last bit of poly before planning begins at a lab diamond facility. launched Lightbox, its own lab-grown diamond business, and more recently decided to get out of LGDs altogether. “If you’d have asked me just two years ago if the industry would be in the place it is in now, I couldn’t have predicted it,” adds Lewis.
Meanwhile, jewellery retailers have even been accused of keeping LGD prices artificially higher because they’re worried a downward spiral will have a devastating impact on their revenues. “A race to the bottom event is very scary if you’re a jewellery retailer,” Rosen notes.
Much less so, of course, if you’re a potential diamond consumer. Suddenly a good quality and size diamond has been affordable like never before, and the retailers offering them a whole lot more approachable. There’s been talk of the “democratisation of the diamond”. If proposing with a big fat rock was once what only the rich could do, now that is open to the many. That sounds great but, as Chatham says, leaves the whole mythos surrounding diamonds in flux. Aren’t they meant to be special, rare and so extremely expensive? And isn’t that critical to their allure? Can some of the fragile magic that society has imbued diamonds with—from Marilyn Monroe singing about a “girl’s best friend”, to Superman forging them with his bare hands, to rap culture and bling—be saved? Should it be?
Indeed, Chatham—who is trying to establish a council of lab-grown diamond producers to bring some order to the industry—notes how mined diamonds are, actually, not that rare. “For sheer rarity factor, we’ve put the wrong gem on the pedestal,” he says: coloured gems the likes of emeralds and rubies are far rarer. As he might know: it was his father, Carroll, who in 1934 developed one of the first processes for creating lab-made emeralds, some decades before making diamonds became feasible. Diamond’s association with romantic love—and the tradition of using them in engagement rings—is little more than the product of a decades-long and an admittedly hugely successful marketing campaign. “A diamond is forever”? That’s a DeBeers advertising slogan dating to 1948. Yet half of all engagement rings now have an LGD in them.
“Clearly that people are now able to buy a lab-grown diamond of a size you’d almost never find in a mine is going to change things,” says Chatham. “There will always be a natural demand for the billions of carats that have been mined to date. But I think we’re now talking about a clash of mindsets: those who think a diamond is so special it should cost an arm and a leg, and a public more interested in the process of buying a diamond, the setting, the meaning in giving one. For the more practical masses, the future is going to be in lab-grown diamonds”.
Nor will their motivation be just monetary. For some, it’s also about wanting diamonds that are cleaner and greener. While the energy used in the production of lab-grown diamonds isn’t exactly environmentally sound, they are at least free of the human cost of some diamond mines—low pay for dangerous work, child labour, and so on—and of their use to finance terrorism or war, notably across Africa (so-called conflict or blood diamonds).
Provenance and traceability were, for a while, a key selling point for early lab-grown diamonds. The problem now is that they are so cheap to produce, and competition so intense, that even willing manufacturers can’t afford to get recognised third-party accreditation for their ethical or sustainability standards. Still, as Lewis notes, the public perception of LGDs as socially better remains, especially among younger consumers out to buy their first diamonds.
It would seem that LGDs have managed to pull off what the Japanese company Mikimoto did at the turn of the 20th century when, faced with the extreme and genuine rarity of natural, deep-dive pearls, it devised a way of making what would come to be called “cultured” ones—it saw consumers express gratitude at the availability and accessibility of any pearls rather than throw doubt on their authenticity. That cat long ago escaped from the bag too.
Not that there isn’t still some heat between the natural and lab-grown diamond worlds—this remains an uncomfortable topic for them—for all that the last few years have seen them intersect and blur. On the one hand, there are the likes of the US’s Federal Trade Commission ruling in 2018 that a diamond is a diamond, regardless of whether it’s lab-grown or taken from the Earth’s crust; on the other hand, there are mined diamond dealers who argue it is possible to tell the two kinds of diamond apart—at least with the right laboratory equipment. That’s the kind of equipment Neil Duttson, of London-based mined diamond dealer Duttson Rocks, says he and other dealers are having to invest in now: cases of fraud, in which the unscrupulous try to pass off LGDs as mined ones, are on the up.
That suggests the exoticism and mystery around mined diamonds may still be intact. “I understand why people want synthetic diamonds”—as Duttson calls them—“because they get more bang for [their] buck. And there will probably always be some market for them now. But with China and India knocking them out and prices falling, I don’t see that being huge money spinners for the jewellery business within five years”.
The question for the arguably complacent mined diamond industry now is whether can return to its pre-LGD state. Can the mined diamond industry rebrand itself to highlight all of the qualities that might well make its product more desirable to some—co-opting the positivity many consumers feel about naturalness, even though most luxury products are man-made, or perhaps underscoring the cosmic romance inherent in being billions of years old. Maybe it’s just all too late.
Duttson says that the appeal of mined diamonds has, ultimately, always been down to salesmanship and the ability to “convey their mystique, the sense of marvel and adventure that surrounds them. They just have such a great story”. It’s why, anecdotally at least, customers of LGDs often see one as an entry-level product, with the intention of trading up to a mined diamond someday.
“Diamonds in general are definitely a luxury product and thus the idea of selling a dream is always going to be a big factor around them. People don’t need diamonds, but most people like the idea of owning something rare, valuable and special - which is the case for all luxury,” argues Paul Zimnisky, an independent New York-based diamond industry analyst. “Diamonds are not typically a practical purchase but an emotional one, so people still want natural diamonds even though manufactured versions are available. [We’re at a place now where] in order to capture higher price points, the lab-diamond industry is going to have to do something unique and different like offer proprietary colours and shapes”.
That doesn’t mean the mined diamond industry won’t have to up its game too. It has also gone into decline over recent years, both in terms of carats dug up—supply peaked in 2017—and in value too, especially post-pandemic, with the price of a mined one-carat diamond down 12 per cent on a year ago. That has encouraged the major suppliers to reduce supply to stabilise prices. Some in the industry claim that, unless some new technology is devised to allow access to the most remote underground pipes, the mining of natural diamonds will cease to be profitable within 40 years. That might suggest that natural diamonds will, at last, become genuinely rare and so more valuable. But it’s likely that by then the whole idea of the diamond will have changed thanks to lab-grown variety.
But maybe we’re looking in the wrong direction. According to Brittany Lewis at WD Advanced Materials, the important future of lab-grown diamonds isn’t about jewellery at all, but in what they can do for the technology of tomorrow. Diamond is already used in cutting tools, in medical applications, in water purification, lasers, optics and GPS systems. But now it’s being posited as a superior replacement for the silicon commonly now used as a semiconductor in computer chips—able to withstand higher voltages and higher temperatures, able to transfer heat more effectively, lower power consumption, and so on.
Such chips —if the lab-grown industry can scale up production because demand could potentially be enormous—will be required for the rise of AI and other 21st century tech, not least proving critical to the development of quantum computing. Indeed, WD Advanced Materials started out as Washington Diamonds, a manufacturer of lab-grown diamonds for the jewellery industry, but pivoted—acquiring specialists, building research labs and winning US Department of Defense grants—as competition and rock-bottom prices crashed the market.
“After so many years thinking about jewellery and the consumer psychology behind it, talking with the head of merchandising at Tiffany’s, now I have to think about substrates and talk with the head of physics at Harvard,” Lewis laughs. “I love a beautiful piece of jewellery but this [new way of considering lab-grown diamond] is extremely exciting in just how revolutionary it could be. Ten years ago it was just another holy grail. Now it’s seen as having real potential”.
That, at least, feels one way in which diamonds will be set to find their sparkle again.
