These Diamonds Were Grown In A Lab

Mined stones face some rock-hard competition

- Hyla Bauer

If they’re good enough for Leonardo DiCaprio and Penélope Cruz, shouldn’t they be good enough for you?

Lab-grown diamonds, made for decades as an inexpensive alternative to mined stones for industrial purposes, are cracking the consumer market. In recent years, the technology to produce gem-quality stones has improved dramatically; the new manufactured diamonds are optically, physically, and chemically the same as mined stones.

“They’re so identical that we never have them out on the same desk at the same time,” says Harold Dupuy, vice president of strategic analysis at Stuller Inc., a Louisiana-based jewellery maker and gem wholesaler that produces laboratory stones.

The allure of these cheaper stones is so strong that in September, industry heavyweight De Beers Group—whose advertising motto “A Diamond Is Forever” was named the slogan of the century by Ad Age—will begin selling its own line of lab-grown- diamond jewellery under the brand Lightbox.

“We’re not trying to pass these off as natural diamonds,” says Sally Morrison, Lightbox’s chief marketing officer. And they shouldn’t: The U.S. Federal Trade Commission in July revised its guidelines for the identification of the stones. Diamonds are now defined as “a mineral consisting essentially of carbon crystallised in the isometric system.” Previously the definition included the word “natural,” which has now been omitted, opening the door for lab-grown stones to legally identify as diamonds. But a manufactured diamond must be “qualified by a clear and conspicuous disclosure” with words such as laboratory-grown, “conveying that the product is not a mined one.”