“The demand for elongated cushion shapes, which you will find in Taylor Swift's engagement ring, has gone absolutely berserk,” says Brett Afshar, CEO of Queensmith, the bespoke Hatton Garden jewellers. Social media and celebrity culture have combined to create a consumer population that believes bigger is better, and diamonds are no different.
Georgina Rodriguez’ Engagement Ring via Instagram
“If you look at Instagram and you do a quick sweep of engagement rings, no one is going to post a picture of a half-carat ring — it is not Insta-worthy,” Afshar says, adding that, “no woman wants to be the smallest diamond in the room”. It is human nature to want (or want to be able to afford) what everyone else has, and in an age of shrinkflation, lab-grown diamonds are an answer to this.
Consumers typically choose lab-grown diamonds for three reasons: environmental benefits, price, and size. UK-based brands like Queensmith, Skydiamonds (based in Gloucestershire), and Kimaï (from the diamond capital, Antwerp) focus on all three. Jessica Warch and Sidney Neuhaus started Kimai with a natural diamond background and decided to focus on building ‘a modern jewellery brand that delivers true traceability.’ All of these brands are options for more ethical and ‘greener’ diamonds, using a mixture of green energy and offsets to create their stones.
In today’s cost-of-living crisis, more than the environment, value has become the main driving force towards lab-grown stones; however, “What we are finding is that clients will tend to spend the budget and are just getting more for their money, rather than cutting back the budget and buying the same size of stone,” says Afshar. Their business, although originally only specialising in natural diamonds, has since changed with the times. Since buying his first lab-grown stone over a decade ago, the business now sells 80% of its own lab-grown stones and only 20% of natural ones. Some other brands, however, won’t get on board.
Many Hatton Garden jewellers have been slow to adopt selling or producing their own lab-grown stones, relying on the romantic connotations around natural diamonds.
Big brands such as Tiffany & Co. still refuse to sell a single lab-grown stone, and instead rely on the heritage and mystique to sell their natural diamonds. It is not just the smaller private jewellers or the bigger brands; even the gem giants are feeling the effects of what lab-grown is doing to the market.
By the end of 2024, the price of natural diamonds had fallen by 26% compared to their post-COVID- 19 spending surge in 2022. This caused De Beers (the diamond industry giant) to cut the production of mined diamonds by 20% in order to preserve their pricing. Even with this drop, there remains a 50%-80% disparity between the cost of buying lab-grown diamonds and natural diamonds, which forces many to reconsider their prejudice against the man-made alternative.
It wasn’t long ago that consumers tried to ditch diamonds for other reasons. In the late 90s-early 10s, the term ‘blood diamond’ began to connote because of the murky waters around the ethics and sustainability of mining diamonds; there is much human and environmental cost to produce such a rarity, or as Afshar puts it, “Mother Nature doesn’t give up her treasure lightly.” Lab-grown are an alternative to this, seemingly sustainable and less harmful option; however, even with lab-grown, all that glitters isn’t green.
It takes a lot of energy to create a lab-grown whether you use either of the two competing technology systems, CVD and HPHT. Without going into the molecular, sciency, techy explanation of each too much, CVD is a low-pressure, high-temperature process for making diamonds, which needs a lot more treating and usually creates more strain on the stone, meaning a lower-quality, milkier (cheaper) diamond. HPHT is a high-pressure and high-temperature process which mimics conditions deep within the Earth—but a billion years faster.
When opting for a lab-grown diamond, you really want to invest in an HPHT diamond from a reputable place using green energy, so look for places certified by the GIA. The main point is that you shouldn’t be able to tell two identical lab or natural diamonds: they are in every way molecularly the same. “Where a stone has been correctly grown and has had minimal treatments, I can’t tell the difference between one and the other, and I have been doing this for 15 years,” says Afshar. You may be thinking, why ever invest in a natural diamond if you can’t tell them apart? Longevity— not of the diamond, of course—of the investment; lab-grown diamonds don’t hold their value well.
Buying a lab-grown diamond is somewhat like buying a brand new car, as soon as you have driven it off the lot, it halves (if not worse) in value. Lab-grown rings are often only worth their price in gold (or whichever precious metal they are made from).
Even with the cost-of-living crisis and the option to have a diamond at even the most modest budgets, thanks to lab-grown, people are sizing up rather than spending less. “The average lab-grown size is getting bigger and bigger. About a year ago, the average carat rate was 1.50ct, and now it is 1.80ct,” Afshar confirms.
At Kimaï, you can get a 1.70ct round brilliant cut lab-grown stone for £4,455, whereas a natural one would be well over £10,000. And at Queensmith, two identical (in very similar colour and clarity) 1.80ct lab oval brilliant cut diamonds will be around the £3,500 mark and natural… closer to £17,000.
“The sky is the limit” to how big one can make a lab-grown stone nowadays, says India Charter, the marketing manager at Queensmith. It isn’t just the Gen-Z and Millennial Instagram fiancées that want a ring as all the celebs have, even people with smaller natural stones are ‘upgrading’ to bigger, because they now can.
It should be argued, however, that there is a happy medium between a “not insta-worthy” diamond and Georgina Rodríguez's boulder. Just because Rodriguez’s ring is more achievable with lab-grown, doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the right choice.
Lab-grown diamonds are not fake versions of mined diamonds; if made correctly and well, they are identical down to the last molecule, but when one starts to go too big, they can slip away from looking expensive and become costume jewellery-esque. “There is a lot of smoke and mirrors in jewellers; a lot of mass production, low-quality masquerading as high-quality,” Afshar says, so invest in the creation of the ring as much as the diamond, and the piece will be special.
There is a lot of romance in diamonds, but mystique and rarity in those formed naturally. Far underground and made over billions of years, of course, the price tag will be higher, but it is all about perspective and what narrative you give to your ring, according to Afshar; “You need to think of natural stones as a wonder of nature, lab-grown stones as a wonder of science.