Lab Grown Company Ordered to Drop Misleading Terms
April 10, 24
(IDEX Online) - Skydiamond has been ordered to stop using misleading terms to describe its lab grown diamonds.
Britain's Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) issued its ruling today (10 April) following a complaint from the Natural Diamond Council.
It said the British company must not misleadingly use the terms "diamonds", "diamonds made entirely from the sky" and "Skydiamond" to describe their synthetic diamonds in isolation without a clear and prominent qualifier, such as "synthetic", "laboratory-grown" or "laboratory-created", or another way of clearly and prominently conveying the same meaning to consumers.
They must also avoid using the term "real diamonds".
Skydiamond took out double-page newspaper ads in February 2023 headlined: "Say hello to the world's first and only diamond made entirely from the sky".
Smaller text underneath stated: "We make diamonds using four natural ingredients, the sun, the wind, rain and something we have too much of, atmospheric carbon. In doing so, our technology turns a negative into a positive. Now that we can mine the sky, we never need to mine the earth again."
The ASA also complained about an Instagram ad ("Love is … a diamond gift made from the sky") and the www.skydiamond.com homepage ("Create your engagement ring with diamonds made from the sky").
Skydiamond was founded by Dale Vince, a hippy turned windfarm millionaire who owns Britain's first vegan football team. In November 2020 he said he expect to produce just 200 carats of carbon-negative diamonds a month to start with, increasing to 1,000, or 12,000 a year.
"We acknowledged the various pieces of consumer research provided by Skydiamond," said the ASA in its 5,000-word ruling, noting that a that a significant minority (around a quarter) of UK consumers were unaware of lab grown diamonds.
"We did not consider that they provided strong evidence of how the average consumer would interpret the individual ads under investigation."
Alan Cohen, co-president of the London Diamond Bourse said: "We have seen this misleading marketing and terminology for many years and hope the ASA ruling puts an end to this and for the future, we also hope the eco-friendliness claims are scrutinised too".
We have approached Skydiamond for comment.
Pic supplied by ASA.