The Little Gem That Could: Lab-Grown Diamonds are Transforming the Luxury Rulebook

“Diamonds are a girl's best friend" sang Marilyn Monroe in 1953, fast-forward 70 years and they still occupy the top spot when it comes to conveying luxury and celebrating love.

Natural diamonds have exceptional hardness and can cut, grind, or drill virtually any material making them invaluable not just for decoration but in a myriad of industrial applications too. Being the paragon of materials comes at a cost. They are expensive and can be challenging to source ethically and until not so long ago, could only be dug out of the ground.

A year after Marilyn’s timeless classic, in 1954 Dr. Tracy Hall successfully created the first-ever synthetic diamond. Working for General Electric at the time, Hall’s goal was to create a more accessible, ethical, and controlled source of diamonds for industrial applications.

These were widely used in manufacturing, drilling, and other industrial activities long before they made their way into the jewelry market. Their material properties are prized to this day for being able to do everything from shape the toughest of materials, to power the lasers that underpin so much of the modern communication equipment. But how does this relate to jewelry?

The Shake-Up

When lab-grown diamonds first showed up in jewelry stores, they were the underdog. But they had a secret weapon—ethics. No longer were diamonds just a girl's best friend; they were now friendlier to the planet. There are many parallels to when the first quartz watches came on the market, but that's a tangent for another time.

Skeptics doubted their appeal but time waits for no one. Young buyers grew up enter the workforce, earned their first pay checks. Next they wanted to settle down and get married, nothing screams forever like a diamond. Eager for responsible choices and armed with more information than ever, thanks to the internet, they started to research their options.

• Quality? Check.
• Ethical? Double check.

Sure, the energy demands of a reactor generating plasma to grow Diamonds is high. We could just find what occurred naturally in the Earth's core and just harness that...

“Do you want to tell me this is a good thing?” Alexander Weindling asks, rhetorically. “I don’t need science to tell that [lab-grown diamonds] is less bad than that. My eyes tell me that’s a lot worst for our planet. We don’t need to dig these huge holes in the earth any more that are visible from space. We used to hunt whales. We don’t do that any more do we?” Weindling is the cofounder of Clean Origin, a start-up diamond retailer that prioritises online sales catering to Millenials and Gen-Z.

The underdog (lab-grown diamonds) started to win hearts and wallets. How much did the DiCaprio factor have to do with it, the 2006 blockbuster "Blood Diamond" certainly opened the eyes of many to ethical concerns around sourcing natural diamonds.

The Wake-Up Call for Luxury

Lab-grown diamonds are becoming much more favored by ethically focused younger demographics. Clean Origin and start-ups like it are forcing legacy brands to rethink their sourcing and marketing. Old tactics aren’t cutting it anymore.

So what's next? Lab-grown diamonds are rapidly catching up in "performance" and cost to their natural counterparts (more on this topic to come) but time will tell whether the allure of the human factor, "our" hands finding a huge rock in the ground will be truly disrupted by technology.

New materials and technologies are appearing all the time. What will be next: lab-grown leather, sustainable silks, recycled metals. The bold change in the world tends to creep up on you and then smacks you in the face.

Have you thought about where your gems come from?

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