Diamonds Are Forever
Penned Ed. 13
Ah November. Somehow it’s been both the longest and the shortest month this year, from *that thing on November 5* to lots of happy moments, like Phoenix’s school taking over Wollman’s Rink in Central Park for K-12-plus-family skate night.
But as if the month didn’t polarize us enough, apparently talking about diamonds is as heated a debate as anything on the ballot.
Specifically, lab grown diamonds versus natural stones.
I learned this by osmosis over the past few years. The Facebook moms groups are often full of attacks on one type or the other when a poster asks about upgrading their engagement ring or buying a milestone tennis bracelet.
I get it: lab grown diamonds are 60 to 80% cheaper so that’s alluring right?
The Diamond Dilemma
Alluring it was, to me. I always wanted a chunky diamond tennis necklace, which would probably cost the same as a five-figure down payment on a vacation house in Portugal. But lab grown? I could get that for a four figures, which somehow equated to the cost of the plane ticket to said vacation house.
I then reported on the topic for nearly 12 months by talking to jewelers, to-be-weds, married women, and my own friends. I poked around dozens of sites of lab grown jewelers. I read case studies about natural diamonds. I debated rewatching “Blood Diamond,” because the Leo DiCaprio movie came up so many times in conversations.
On Transparency: “The consumer for a lab diamond is not pushing as hard as a consumer for a natural diamond to really understand where that stone’s coming from.”
Misconceptions abound.
If you buy a natural stone, it was mined by a child with a gun to their head in some conflict-ridden African country. (Not true.)
If you buy a lab grown stone, it's not a real diamond. May as well be cubic zirconia. (Not true.)
There’s no resale value for lab grown stones. (True, but there’s hardly resale value for natural stones either.)
So I set out to cover it in a story that was published this week in The New York Times. The topic is SO MUCH BIGGER than fit in the final piece, which for reasons I suspect but do not know for sure ended up fluffier than my initial draft. My editor wanted a pros and cons article but it turns out this topic can’t be simplified as such.
Much got left on the cutting room floor, no pun intended. (Yes, that’s a film joke but works here too, no?) So here is, my objective reporting (and yes, that means one side appears worse than the other.)
Sparkle Bright
Yes, lab grown diamonds are real. They are chemically identical to a natural diamond.
No, lab grown diamonds aren't necessarily more ethical. There are enormous diamond growing farms overseas where manufacturing practices are nebulous. The growing machines use a massive amount of energy to produce one too. Since you can buy one on Alibaba for some $200K, almost anyone can spin up a growing facility….anywhere.
That has resulted in very little supply chain transparency for lab grown stones. I, for one, couldn't get Signet Jewelers, which owns Zales, Jared, Blue Nile, Kay and other mall retailers, to comment on theirs, nor many other Insta-famous jewelers who sell lab grown.
One jeweler compared the lab grown industry to the “wild wild west.”
That same jeweler sells both natural and lab grown stones, and even then, they said that the lab grown world is worrisome. They attend conferences, where at a B2B level, lab grown companies share no transparency into their supply chain and are rarely willing to be accredited by third-party companies that give consumers reassurance of ethical standards.
At the same time, the lab grown consumer tends to be one of two types:
1) price-conscious, where the idea of getting a ring or a bigger ring for cheaper outweighs other priorities.
2) ethically inclined, but not necessarily asking enough questions to understand if what they are being sold by a specific retailers is true.
“The consumer for a lab diamond is not pushing as hard as a consumer for a natural diamond to really understand where that stone’s coming from,” explained one jeweler, who sells both natural and lab grown-stones.
They explained that consumers ask significantly more questions about the provenance, supply chain, and paperwork of a natural stone whereas the consumer for a lab-grown stone assumes it’s “better” and tend not to ask anything about where the stone came from, where the factory was located, where it was cut, or other details about its journey from production facility to jeweler’s glass case.
“It’s easier to want to believe something or not ask certain questions because you have a different priority,” they added.
This is hardly a takedown of lab grown stones. There is just simply much more transparency for natural stones, including a cool program called Tracr. But that industry is far from perfect either.
Under Pressure
We know this after collectively watching “Blood Diamond,” a film about the 1990s civil war in Sierra Leone and the role that the diamond mining industry played in funding militants. While the film hit theaters in the early 2000s, the actual situation took place some 30 years ago. Since that time, the diamond industry has straightened up.
While you aren't getting a "blood diamond" if you purchase from a reputable jeweler in the U.S.—there are massive regulations on where diamonds are sourced today, and we get most from conflict-free Botswana and Canada—mining still causes environmental harm that countries are making attempts at softening. Diamond mining companies may be funding local educational opportunities, supplying micro-loans to employees, offering healthcare, and ensuring fair working conditions, but diamond mining is no doubt not great for the earth.
Now, let’s tackle the elephant: marketing & advertising.
Mad Men
Is the whole natural diamond industry the result of a DeBeers ad campaign?
Yes.
Is what lab grown is saying about being more ethical and more sustainable also the result of a marketing and ad campaign.
You betcha.
See, when lab grown technology, which has been around since the 1970s for industrial purposes, intersected with 2010s venture capitalists looking at consumer applications, a light bulb went off: make diamonds, flood the supply chain with “ethical stones” on the heels of that Leo movie, and sell at a 90% markup.
Lab grown stones at retail are cheaper than natural stones by a lot, but also banking higher profit margins. There must be hundreds of lab grown companies making engagement rings, because I’m pitched dozens by publicists. I see more served up via Instagram ads. And those are just the companies where the algorithm includes my demographics.
These companies exploded not only because diamonds are easy to produce, but they challenged the natural diamond industry by collectively positioning themselves as more ethical—the issue that long plagued diamond companies—and, because it was like 2015, more sustainable too. (You know, when everyone was greenwashing.)
It was frankly as brilliant as DeBeer’s original campaign.
It also came about during our era of misinformation, where consumers’ version of fact-checking is listening to an influencer talk in a 30-second video. They don’t necessarily read case studies or ask deeper questions to experts. Hollywood told them that all natural diamonds are blood diamonds. San Francisco VCs told them that lab grown stones are the solution. And consumers’ wallets said the price is right, so why the hell not?
After all, a big rock will look good on the ‘gram.
Call the Shein effect. Business of Fashion notes fast fashion won’t go out of style because at the end of the day, it’s not about quality or DEI or sustainability or design. Consumers primarily care about fit and price. It’s the look for less.
Which is a somewhat important point here: the affordability of lab-grown diamonds democratizes the idea that everyone can propose with diamond engagement ring. I was frankly disappointed that the commentary from the glamorous and thoughtful Pnina Tornai, a fashion designer and the creative director behind a line of engagement rings at Jared, was cut from the piece. She calls lab-grown stones “human-made magic” and notes they sparkle just the same, allowing many more couples to partake in the tradition. Her collection includes both types of diamonds.
Can The New York Times, which needs to speak to a mass audience, many of whom are not wealthy New Yorkers with the funds for expensive rocks, tell consumers that they shouldn’t believe everything about lab grown stones? Or that consumers justify their ethical concerns with the cost savings? Or that it’s incredibly sketchy that Signet, the largest jewelry retailer conglomerate in the world, with such popular mall brands like Zales, won’t share details about their supply chain with a major publication?
The natural diamond jewelers told me everything about theirs.
What conclusion have I deduced? I don’t think I can knowingly purchase a product that is sold at a 90% markup with questionable business practices that I cannot track. Do I know that natural jewelers aren’t sketchy too? I guarantee some are. I’ve walked the NYC diamond district and gotten the ick. But the jewelers in this article, like Greenwich Street Jewelers and Zameer Kassam, make me feel as good as I possibly can about the purchase of natural diamonds.
I cannot say the same about the lab grown diamond sellers of the world.
Have a thought? Feel free to share, and let’s continue the discussion.
Cheers 🥂