4 reasons to choose lab grown diamonds
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Conflict free luxury
Never compromise between quality and conscience when celebrating love. Lab-grown diamonds are ethically made.
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Highest Quality
Wear diamonds you’ll never want to take off. The chemical & optical properties of a natural diamond and a lab grown diamond are identical.
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Ethical Production
Our lab-grown diamonds are sustainably crafted, identical to natural diamonds, offering a conflict-free and responsible choice.
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Value
Enjoy the same beauty and properties of a mined diamond at 1/10th of the price.
Are lab grown diamonds real?
Lab grown diamonds are real and should not be considered a diamond simulant. Diamond simulants are gemstones engineered to mimic diamonds, without actually being diamonds such as moissanite and cubic zirconia. These stones have an entirely different chemical makeup to diamonds, whereas lab grown diamonds and natural diamonds share the exact same structure and properties.
Diamond simulants actually look very different to diamonds. The biggest telltale sign will always be the way the light reacts with the stone’s facets, better known as “sparkle”. The facets in a moissanite or cubic zirconia often won’t be as bright, crisp or as lustrous as a diamond–lab grown or natural.
Is it accurate to call a lab grown diamond a ‘synthetic’ diamond?
No. In 2018, the Federal Trade Commission revised their jewellery marketing guidelines, which achieved a few important changes to help consumers understand the differences between natural and lab grown diamonds. They stated that the term “synthetic” cannot be applied to lab grown diamonds because they are made from pure carbon, just as mined, earth-grown diamonds are. At the same time they insisted that the words “laboratory grown” are always used before the word “diamond”, when promoting lab diamonds to ensure customers know the difference. For natural diamonds, retailers do not need to state “natural”. If a retailer sells a natural diamond it is sufficient to just describe it as a “diamond”.
How are lab-grown diamonds made?
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1. High Pressure High Temperature (HPHT):
This method mimics the conditions under which natural diamonds are formed inside the earth. To produce the lab diamond, a large machine is fed a certain amount of carbon material that it then crushes under pressures of more than 870,000 lbs. per square inch at extreme temperatures ranging from 1300 – 1600 degrees Celsius.
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2. Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD):
CVD is when a seed diamond is placed in a small, vacuum chamber filled with heated hydrogen and carbon-containing gasses. At a certain temperature, the gas molecules are broken down and layers of crystallized carbon begin to form around the seed, growing a more substantial diamond. Some lab diamonds created through CVD may also undergo pressure and heat treatment after they are grown.
How are lab grown diamonds graded?
There are three certification bodies that we use for lab grown diamonds.
Since 2007, The Gemological Institute of America (GIA) has graded the colour, clarity and cut standards of lab grown diamonds–with additional information as to whether the diamond was created via CVD or HPHT growing technique. However, instead of using the terms like VS2 to grade clarity or ‘D’ to define colour, GIA chooses to identify colour and clarity with descriptive terms. Because of this, some people prefer International Gemological Institute-graded lab diamonds. Known as the IGI, this certification body uses the global standard for grading colour and clarity. The third certification body is the Gem Certification & Assurance Lab, known as GCAL.
GIA, IGI and GCAL all laser inscribe a unique number on the girdle of the diamond that can be viewed under 50x magnification, which corroborates the unique number of its certification, where you’ll find the stone’s grading details. IGI adds the words ‘lab grown’ alongside this laser inscription.
So if lab grown diamonds are real, why do they cost less than natural diamonds?
The answer lies in the efficiency of their creation. The time and cost of producing a lab grown diamond are a lot less than that of finding and mining a natural diamond and that’s excluding the billions of years they take to form. The natural diamond mining industry requires extensive amounts of land, established infrastructure and workforce in order to mine.
In contrast, it takes just one laboratory with a small, but highly specialist, workforce just a couple of weeks to create a lab diamond. After an initial high investment into the hardware and technology required, this one laboratory can continue to produce lab diamonds at scale – whereas a natural diamond mine will eventually exhaust its resources and run out of diamonds, at which point, the miner or mining company will need to acquire more land to explore.
Because diamond mining is nowhere near as cost efficient as lab grown diamond production, lab grown diamonds see a lower, more affordable price point–often between 60-80% less than natural diamonds.
Lab diamonds vs natural diamonds – what are the differences?
Are lab grown diamonds more ethical?
Stating that lab grown diamonds are ‘sustainable’ is an ongoing source of contention. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) warned a number of jewellers who were in violation of the FTC Act as they were making unsubstantiated claims of their jewellery being sustainable or eco-friendly. It has been suggested that a lab grown diamond requires 250kWh to produce. For comparison, the average UK home will use 7-15 kWh of energy per day.
Will a lab grown diamond hold its value?
The price of lab-grown diamonds is falling at a significant rate, and shows no signs of stopping or reversing. It’s important to take this into account when considering your purchase–the same lab diamond bought for $1,000 today may be priced at a fraction of that amount in just one or two years.
Your intention probably won’t be to sell your lab grown diamond jewellery, but in the event you’d like to at some point in the future, it’s unlikely you’d get what you paid for it. It’s widely anticipated that lab grown diamond production will continue to boom in coming years and with an increased level of supply, prices will continue to fall.
Following historical and existing trends, it’s highly likely that the value of lab grown diamond jewellery will continue to decrease in value for years to come.