How 2023 became year of lab-grown diamond
LifeStyle
Surging popularity of lab-grown stones has opened doors for low-cost brands to offer serious bling
(Web Desk) - In New York, a stretch of 47th Street is known as the Diamond District for the countless gem shops and appraisers that occupy just about every storefront and office. Some 40 blocks south, Pandora recently brought to life a competing vision for how stones are made, bought and sold.
During New York Fashion Week at the start of September, the jewelry retailer shut down the busy thoroughfare of Astor Place to host a splashy party it dubbed the “lab-grown diamond district,” attended by fashion insiders and stars like Pamela Anderson, the face of the brand’s latest campaign.
Pandora was never a big player in the diamond category. It built its jewelry brand — one of the world’s biggest with nearly $4 billion in revenue last year — on charm bracelets that sell for under $100.
But the surging popularity of lab-grown stones, which are structurally identical to mined diamonds but sell for a fraction of the price, has opened the doors for even relatively low-cost brands to offer serious bling.
The company isn’t the only one seeing big sales from this category: Lab-grown diamond brand Brilliant Earth saw a 15.7 percent net sales increase in 2022, to $440 million. Dorsey, another exclusively lab-grown jewelry brand, sold over a million stones last year.
Brands like these are changing how the jewelry business works: pieces typically fall into certain categories based on the types of materials used and the prices charged.
Diamonds were the ultimate luxury signifier, their trade dominated by small, bespoke businesses or big brands like Tiffany and Cartier.
Lab-grown stones have erased some of those distinctions. First developed in the 1980s, they are produced by exposing pure carbon to a large amount of heat and pressure in a metal cube, eventually creating a diamond.
They are virtually indistinguishable from the traditional kind; realizing this, the diamond industry has invested in marketing designed to create two categories of stones in the minds of consumers.
Those efforts haven’t worked, at least not for the most price-conscious consumers: a Tiffany tennis bracelet runs north of $20,000, while a bracelet containing similar, lab-grown carats from Brilliant Earth is $3,450.
