The natural diamond industry is getting rocked. Thank the lab-grown variety

But one big reason lab-grown diamonds are so much less expensive now is economy of scale. Something had to start increasing the demand to enable that. Especially considering the large marketing investment against lab-grown gems by established players, trying to make them seem “tacky.” The ethical issues have been a very capable counter-message to that.

> What I find most interesting is the weight put on the ethical side. I think it’s overstated. When the issue became big, the Blood Diamond movie, sales of lab grown did not markedly increase.

It was not a switch that was pushed the moment the movie went out. In the grand scheme of things, the movie was not even that popular. But there definitely was a realisation that diamond prices were completely artificially inflated by an oligopoly, and that there were many issues with how they were sourced.

Just because demand did not follow a step function when the file was released does not imply that ethics are not relevant.

Years and years of “diamonds suck” make a mark. It’s an evergreen topic online for a long time, and the people looking at engagement rings in 2025 have been aware of the shittiness of the diamond business for years.

The mining, corrupt trade practices, etc are all well known and sometimes subject to enforcement action.

What you're seeing in the drop of value of diamonds also reflects the general shift in tastes of different generations with income. I'm a person that likes to go to flea markets and antique stores on the rare occasion and the value of the same items on the market has drastically shifted in the last 10 years as boomers are no longer in the collectible age bracket. Younger people don't really care about Tiffany jewelry

More people have caught on to the many terrible things about natural diamonds over time and now we are finally at the tipping point for lab grown to dismantle the unethical natural diamond trade. The idea of lab grown needed time to gestate with the public, which has been manipulated for decades about the “value” of natural diamonds. Even when lab grown became a thing, the natural diamond trade did its damnedest to manipulate the public on the quality of lab grown vs natural. Coincidentally, natural diamonds are overvalued due to decades of market manipulation by a monopoly.

When I was a kid in the 80s my mother worked at a jewelry store and CZ diamonds were already considered cheap fakes at the time. The price was not comparable to the real deal because nobody was buying them at diamond prices.

They were simply dismissed as more trash belonging in the gold-plated case. It's hard to appreciate how much less informed people were back then - we're talking pre-internet. The adults around me couldn't explain scientifically what the actual difference was between a CZ and natural diamond. Just one was a fake, held little value, and was a sure way to lose your fiance.

I actually predict in a few years it will become more fashionable to wear other jewels over diamonds given the rate the prices are crashing at. When diamonds are competitive with all the other gemstones, people start looking at those the same way too

A chip of concrete has more "complexity" than any diamond. But somehow I bet Graham's wife isn't wearing a piece of Blue Circle's finest.

Yep. In the context of what should be a very simple crystal structure, "complexity" is another word for "defect".

Better question: Why should you aesthetically prefer a diamond to cheap glass?

I'd disagree with that. The prospect of a natural diamond is that it's unique (I mean, not visibly I suppose) and millions of years old.

I'd say it's like AI music or art - something made by a machine, for some reason, just doesn't have any "soul" to it.

I'm not actually entirely convinced in my argument, but there is something there...

I’m not sure diamonds are popular because of what they are but what they represent.

Every gem out there is “the crystalline form” of something. Diamonds are (were?) the expensive crystalline form. And plenty of people equate “expensive” with love, or care, or respect. Even if the same people would never be able to tell the difference between diamond and cubic zirconium, knowing it’s the cheap one makes it less valuable in other ways. This depends on the person, of course.

If it’s not diamonds it will have to be something else that shows “I put my money where my mouth is”. A simple metal wedding band is the same wherever it’s made but a famous jeweler will charge an arm and a leg more than your local shop for the same amount of precious metal, same effort, and same result. And yet Tiffany’s isn’t going out of business for the same reason. It’s what it represents.

I am curious to see if tastes or fashion shift towards other rarer or more expensive gems not yet manufactured cheaply en masse.

The entire point of a diamond is that it’s expensive. People buy them for status. Otherwise there are lots of gems that are much more prettier, but they are not as expensive. It’s like saying people will stop buying branded clothes because unbranded clothes have the same or even a higher quality for a fraction of the price. Kinda misses the point.

It was never about the rocks. Like nearly everything else in the economy it's really about attention.

You shouldn't have gotten a 2 carat diamond that cheap at that time. Either you got a really great deal for some idiosyncratic reason or your recollection is off.

Here's an example article from the era: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/2004/02/14/y...

Inflation is probably why the number is higher now.

A year ago I picked up a 1ct hearts and arrows (D/E. VVS1/2, IGI certificate) from AliExpress for $360. I can see the hearts and arrows and it tests as diamond. A few months later an article came out about how lab diamonds stack up against mined, and the author had also bought one with similar characteristics from AliExpress for even less.

I just checked the same store and they're (not H&A but same other stats) running around $125 plus a $14 tariff.

According to the inflation calculator at bls.gov, $2000 in June 2005 has the same buying power as $3,317 in June 2025. So in real terms the price is about the same.

The _new_ price has doubtless gone up, as inflationary valuation benefits to the manufacturer / vendors.

The resale value of your item has gone down.

A price appreciation of about 75% over roughly 20 years.

Isn't diamond too brittle for all these applications?

When I saw the headline I immediately thought: "couldn't have happened to nicer guys /s"

Why is it that everyone seems to have a soft spot for industries that have some kind of monopoly, suddenly losing that monopoly.

I'm all in for finding beauty in our daily lives, but I'm not sure diamonds are more special than other things we take for granted. Oil and helium have also taken millions of years to form, and yet no one spends a second before buying a plastic duck or inflating a balloon. And if the point is that diamonds are shiny and pretty (which is a fair reason for liking them) there are other types of stones around just as good.

> But there is something about diamonds that makes them divine: carbon atoms crystallizing and bonding over millions to billions of years to form structures

It does not take millions of years to form a diamond. It takes hours. The million years are atoms sitting around doing nothing before that, and then diamonds sitting around doing nothing while some of them are eventually pushed to the surface.

You can say the same thing about any mineral. There is nothing special about carbon or the diamond structure. If anything, zircons are much more significant, being the oldest minerals we can find.

> rated on a scale of color, clarity, cut, and weight.

This is nothing special. The colour of lab-grown stones can be varied almost at will, and the rest is still an issue with synthetic stones.

> Naaaaah let's just make it in a lab it looks the same.

That’s the thing, though: it does (yes, some synthetic stones have specific defects related to how they were made and they tent to be too perfect if anything, but they still have the exact same property). It’s like complaining that the meat you are eating comes from a farm instead of being hunted.

> People are being priced out of art and beauty and it's a shame economics and corruption make real diamonds dirty.

Quite the contrary. Gemstones become more accessible to more people. The diamond industry made its bed, being completely corrupted from extraction to distribution. When stones are cheap we can have discussion about their beauty instead of their prices.

Unfortunately, De Beers controls the natural diamond supply, and they leave much to be desired in corporate ethics.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Beers#Legal_issues

It’s not just that, the economics of diamonds is completely fabricated. Idk about these days, but debeers used to buy up the vast majority of mined diamond, not to sell but to hoard or destroy them to maintain scarcity.

I’m not even sure that all of these recent stories about lab created diamonds to come out aren’t actually a PR pitch to advertise “natural” diamonds, an effort to emphasise the difference in the public psyche.

Anything public facing that positions diamonds as expensive, desirable, or valuable can usually be traced back to the cartel. It’s super common in movies and other media.

If the value is in perfection. Why would I not pick one that is bigger, has less flaws and less impurities. It is like would I prefer natural rain water or artificially purified water without microplastics and pfas and so on... My pick should be clear.

I’m curious, how old are you? Age range works.

The article emphasizes that this is a generational thing and I’m wondering which generation you fall into.

there are many naturally occuring objects that have a similarly dramatic timeline

the point is that westerners are completely drunk on the marketing from de beers and its cost lives, not to mention the disgusting machiavellian exploitation of what was once an innocent courtship gesture into an aggressive commercial enterprise, chiefly profiteering the hopelessly young and naive.

If the chemical composition is the same, yes.