We always look for new and advanced solutions to keep our natural resources intact. It’s the same way when it comes to diamonds too and that’s how people started to think about artificially created diamonds. If it was a few decades ago it would have been unimaginable to create round diamonds bridal sets or any diamond cut in a lab that has the same properties as of natural mined diamonds. Now, technological advances have made lab created gems more beautiful and sought after than ever.
For couples who are looking for an eco-friendly alternative to the traditional mined diamond, lab created gems is a great option. Right now, majority of diamonds on sale around the world is a blood diamond that is mined in a war zone and sold to finance armed conflict and civil war. And for those wanting to opt out of such a commodity, it’s becoming impossible to figure out the difference between a clean and a blood diamond. And therefore the market for lab-made diamonds is slowly growing. It is also offering a cheaper, more environmentally friendly, and ethically sound option that looks just as pretty as real diamonds. But these artificial diamonds are nothing like those cheap, lab-grown imitation diamonds, such as cubic zirconium. They have the exact same physical structure and chemical composition as a diamond that’s extracted out of the ground.
So far, synthetic diamonds make up a tiny fraction of
the US $80 billion global diamond market, with Bloomberg reporting that in
2014, an estimated 360,000 carats of lab-grown diamonds were manufactured,
while about 146 million carats of natural diamonds were extracted.
But the results of a recent survey showed less than half
of North American consumers aged between 18 to 35 said, they’d prefer a natural
diamond. The
companies behind the natural diamonds are hoping their customers will continue
to buy real diamonds and relate true love and romance with real diamonds
instead of buying synthetic stones to show their love and romance.
But with price tags as little as half that of natural diamonds – Bloomberg is saying that in a New York jewelry store, a 1-carat synthetic diamond can cost about $6,000 there, compared with $10,000 for a similarly sized natural stone – and no ethical questions, the demand will be there in some capacity in the future.