Lab-grown diamonds are real diamonds.
I think that's the most important place to start, because there's still a surprising amount of confusion about what a lab-grown diamond actually is.
The way I like to explain it to customers is with a simple analogy.
Imagine you're walking through the woods and you discover a berry you've never seen before. You pick it, take a bite, and it's the sweetest, juiciest berry you've ever tasted.
So you save the seeds, take them home and plant them in your backyard.
Eventually, the same berry grows there.
Is the berry growing in your backyard fake?
Of course not.
You simply figured out how to reproduce the conditions necessary to grow it somewhere else.
That's essentially what we've done with diamonds.
We've learned how diamonds form and developed technologies that allow us to grow diamond material under controlled conditions. The result isn't an imitation of a diamond like cubic zirconia or moissanite.
It's an actual diamond.
So if natural and lab-grown diamonds are both diamonds, what's the difference?
Scarcity.
A natural diamond is the result of geological processes that occurred deep within the Earth over an extraordinary amount of time. We have to find it, extract it, sort it and ultimately discover what nature happened to produce.
With a lab-grown diamond, we've gained much more control over that process.
And when you gain control over the production of something, you change its scarcity.
That's important because scarcity has always been a major part of what gives natural diamonds their economic value.
Think about almost anything valuable. If it's extremely easy to produce in unlimited quantities, it's difficult to maintain a large scarcity premium. If it's genuinely difficult to obtain, scarcity can become part of what you're paying for.
Natural diamonds also have something else working in their favor:
Romantic love.
Diamonds don't come out of the ground with an engagement ring attached to them. Over generations, the diamond industry—most famously through De Beers' advertising—helped build an extraordinarily powerful cultural connection between diamonds, engagement, permanence and love.
That story became part of the product.
Lab-grown diamonds change the equation because they separate much of the beauty of a diamond from the natural scarcity that traditionally came with it.
With the natural diamond, scarcity is part of the product. With the lab-grown diamond, accessibility is part of the product.
And that's where I think the conversation gets much more interesting.
I've worked with diamonds for roughly 30 years, and one thing I've learned is that there's a difference between simply seeing a diamond and seeing what an exceptional diamond is capable of.
Most people have seen diamonds.
Far fewer have seen what a truly exceptional diamond is capable of.
Give a diamond enough size, excellent clarity, a beautiful white appearance and an exceptional cut, and the visual effect can be extraordinary.
The problem has traditionally been price.
With natural diamonds, improving size, color and clarity can increase the price dramatically. At a certain point, you're no longer talking about a small improvement in price. You're entering an entirely different economic category.
For most customers, that means compromise.
Maybe you sacrifice some size. Maybe you accept a warmer color. Maybe you choose a lower clarity grade. There's nothing inherently wrong with any of those decisions—they're simply part of buying something whose value is heavily influenced by scarcity.
Lab-grown diamonds change that.
They make combinations of size, color and clarity accessible to people who might never have considered those specifications in a natural diamond.
Lab-grown diamonds let you buy more diamond and less rarity.
That doesn't make the natural diamond inferior. It means the two products offer different value propositions.
If the geological rarity, natural origin, history and scarcity of the stone matter deeply to you, a natural diamond offers something a laboratory-grown diamond simply cannot reproduce: it was created by nature.
If your priority is the visual experience of the diamond—size, whiteness, clarity, cut and overall beauty—lab-grown diamonds can give you access to an extraordinary amount of diamond for the money.
And that's really the distinction I think consumers should understand.
Beauty and value aren't the same thing.
Something can be beautiful without being rare, and something can be rare without necessarily being more beautiful.
Lab-grown diamonds have reduced one of the characteristics that historically made diamonds expensive: scarcity.
But in doing so, they've given far more people access to the characteristics that can make diamonds visually spectacular.
We have reduced the scarcity of diamonds, but in doing so, we've given far more people access to the beauty of them.