Is the lab-grown diamond fad finally over? Emma Watson and Meghan Markle may have loved these synthetic stones, which even appeared on engagement rings, but natural diamonds are back

Jun 5 , 2024

Lab-grown diamonds now make up a fifth of the market, but their popularity has begun to fall. Photo: Reuters

Man-made diamonds became popular thanks to celebrities, but now they’ve gone mainstream with aggressive pushes by retailers like Walmart and Pandora, and prices are projected to fall

Industry experts forecast that jewellers will be shifting their focus back to natural diamonds, and lab-grown stones will no longer be seen as alternatives to the real thing

The man-made diamond boom is over, and prices for ultra-trendy lab-grown diamonds are set to tumble this year, industry veterans say.

Paul Zimnisky, a leading diamond analyst, foresees jewellers scaling back their business in lab-grown diamonds while ramping up their focus on natural diamonds over the next year. In fact, most jewellers aren’t even bothering to stock lab-grown diamonds in inventory, and are only purchasing them on consignment, he told us.

It’s the opposite of what jewellers have been doing since 2018, when the hype for lab-grown diamonds took off.

Lab-made De Beers diamonds; they used to be all the hype in the industry. Photo: De Beers

“Some of the fad is starting to fade a bit,” Zimnisky said, pointing to lower-priced retailers like Walmart and Pandora, who have started to “aggressively” push lab-grown stones. “I think it’s become a lot more mainstream.”

Prices for lab-grown diamonds will continue to fall over the next year, he said. Zimnisky didn’t have a price target, but said he believed loose lab-grown diamonds could see nearly the same price decline as they did in 2023, which the jewellery analytics firm Tenoris estimated to be about 20 per cent in the 12 months leading up to November.

Cormac Kinney, the CEO of the commodities trading firm Diamond Standard, believes the plunge could be even steeper as the hype over lab-grown gems fades. Man-made diamond prices could ultimately drop another 50 to 80 per cent, he estimated.

“Fashion jewellery is always worth a small fraction of real jewellery,” Kinney said. “Only real is rare.”

Lab-grown diamonds in rings from Smiling Rocks. Photo: Smiling Rocks

It’s not hard to imagine why man-made diamonds were so popular last year. Even A-list celebrities like Emma Watson and Meghan Markle have been known to buy lab-grown jewellery – they’re cheaper and basically identical to the naked eye.

“It’s a manufactured version of one of humans’ most valuable natural resources,” Zimnisky said of lab-grown stones. “It allows consumers to buy a diamond at really affordable prices, especially very large diamonds that would cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars if they were natural diamonds.”