Lab Growns: The Pendulum has Swung
March 13, 25
The pendulum has swung. More than half (52 per cent) of brides who said "I do" in the US last year were wearing an engagement ring with a lab grown rather than a natural diamond.
That's according to The Knot wedding website, based on responses from 16,956 couples. In 2023 the figure was 46 per cent and in 2019 it was just 12 per cent.
So we have crossed a threshold. Natural diamonds are, at least in the US bridal market, now a minority product.
If the numbers are correct, then couples simply aren't listening to the carefully crafted campaigns about symbols of eternal love formed over billions of years.
They just want more bang for their buck. Which translates into bigger stones (average 1.7 carats in 2024) for fewer dollars (average spend $5,200 in 2024).
Is this an inevitable and unstoppable decline for the natural diamond? It's easy to see a catastrophe when you're up close, but zoom out a little and things might not be so bad.
Read what Bruce Cleaver, former CEO at De Beers and now CEO at gemstone miner Gemstones, said recently in an interview with The Times.
"There have been synthetic rubies, emeralds and sapphires around for a hundred years and in the first 20 or so years they decimated natural prices, and the reason is people thought of them as the same thing.
"But over time those prices completely bifurcated … I still think that's where lab-grown [diamonds] will get to."
After the initial disruption caused by lab grown diamonds, history suggests that consumers will gradually differentiate between them and their natural counterparts. And they will, as Cleaver and many others have suggested, eventually become two distinct and different products.
Sapphires were the first gemstones to be synthesized, way back in 1873. The current method of production is basically a variation of the newer Czochralski process, which dates back to 1916 - dipping a tiny sapphire seed crystal into molten alumina and slowly withdrawing it.
The first synthetic rubies were produced in 1885 by melting together gemstone fragments. But it was a chemical process - combining aluminum oxide and chromium oxide - that really took off, with over 10m synthetic rubies produced in 1913.
Manufacturers today use an updated method, replicating the natural growth pattern of mined rubies. They allow minerals to form crystals in a flux, or molten mixture of chemicals, under intense heat and pressure.
Synthetic emeralds are almost a century old. Today they're made using the hydrothermal method - subjecting a colorless beryl seed crystal to high temperatures and pressure.
These lab grown gemstones may take far longer than diamonds to produce - many months instead of a few weeks - but they represent a distinct, different and much less lucrative market.
A vivid-green synthetic emerald could set you back as little as $20 a carat, other gemstones even less.
The point is that they've been around far longer than lab grown diamonds. They were first created by General Electric in 1954, but didn't become commercially viable for another half century.
And gemstones have bifurcated. Natural gemstones currently account for 70 per cent of the market.
Lab grown diamonds are far newer, and represent an altogether bigger market.
But maybe Cleaver is right. Maybe it'll take a decade or two and lab grown diamonds will go the way of lab grown rubies, emeralds and sapphires.
And more brides will walk down the aisle with a natural diamond on their finger.
Have a fabulous weekend.