The ethical choice.
Are you sure?

Sometime at the end of last year, someone in the trade asked me a question over cheese and wine. Casually. The way you ask things when you are not expecting a real answer.

What can we do about the lab diamond problem?

I have been thinking about it since. This is not the complete answer. I am not sure there is one. But it is the most honest answer I can give right now, based on what I know, what I have read, and what I have watched happen to an industry and to the communities it sustains.

It turned out to be a bigger question than the cheese and wine suggested.

Somewhere in the last decade, lab-grown diamonds acquired a story. The story goes like this: a lab diamond is chemically identical to a natural diamond, costs significantly less, and comes without the ethical complications of mining. It is better for people. It is better for the planet. It is the modern choice. The responsible choice. The choice that lets you have the ring without the guilt.

It is a clean story. It is also an incomplete one.

Let us start with what is true about natural diamonds, because honesty requires it. The natural diamond industry has a history. Blood diamonds, stones mined in conflict zones and used to fund war, were real. The suffering they financed was real. The industry's complicity, for a period, was real.

What is also true is that the industry faced that history, took the reputational consequences, and built something in response. The Kimberley Process, established in 2003, created an international certification scheme for rough diamonds. It is not a perfect system; no system governing something this complex ever is. But natural diamonds are now among the most regulated and traceable commodities in the world. Origin is documented. Chain of custody is enforceable. The industry did the hard work of accountability that most industries never do.

Lab diamonds arrived into this landscape and positioned themselves as the clean alternative. As if the natural diamond industry had never changed. As if the Kimberley Process did not exist. As if "no mining" automatically meant "no harm." The marketing was effective because it told a simple story to people who wanted a simple answer.

Simple stories have a way of hiding complicated things.

Botswana gained independence from Britain in 1966 as the third poorest country in the world. It had almost no infrastructure, barely any paved roads, and fewer than two dozen university graduates in the entire nation. What it had, discovered that same year, was diamonds.

The government made a decision that would define the country for generations. Diamond revenues would be reinvested. Eighty percent of all diamond-related revenue goes back into the economy. The result is that Botswana became one of Africa's most stable, prosperous nations. Its GDP per capita rose from almost nothing to among the highest on the continent. Every child in Botswana is guaranteed a free primary and secondary school education, subsidised entirely by diamond revenue. Debswana, the joint venture between the Botswana government and De Beers, runs schools, hospitals, and community infrastructure that the government budget alone could not sustain.

This is not a De Beers marketing line. These are the figures from the IMF, the World Bank, and the Botswana government's own budget reviews.² A quarter of a country's economy. A third of its government income. An entire generation's education.

Now consider what has happened since lab diamonds began their rapid ascent. Their market share in US engagement ring sales grew from 5% in 2019 to nearly half of all sales by 2024.³ Prices for natural diamonds fell. Demand softened. Debswana, the company that runs the schools and the hospitals, began cutting production.

In a town called Jwaneng, whose name means "place of small stones" in Tswana, the entire local economy orbits the mine. Fruit sellers outside the gates. Minibus drivers ferrying workers. Small businesses built around mine salaries. As production cut back, Jwaneng felt it first and felt it hard.¹

A teacher named Dimpho Selebe worked for seventeen years in a Debswana-run school. His salary was double what public sector teachers earn; the mine could afford to pay that, and it understood that a well-paid teacher stays. He sent his children to good schools. He bought a farm. He built a life on the stability that diamond revenue made possible. As the mines reduced production, he saw the writing on the wall and left before he was pushed.¹

The lab diamond factory did not cause this alone. Global demand shifts, the Chinese luxury slowdown, and macroeconomic pressures all played a role. But lab diamonds were the structural disruption; the one that market analysts describe as potentially permanent, unlike a price cycle which eventually corrects. A quarter of Botswana's economy does not have a recovery plan that works at the speed this is moving.

Botswana is the clearest example because it is the largest and best-documented. But it is not the only one. Artisanal and small-scale diamond mining provides livelihoods for millions of people across sub-Saharan Africa; Sierra Leone, Namibia, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo. These are not faceless statistics. They are the miner in Sierra Leone's Kono district who used his increased income to send four children to university, to study law, finance, and medicine. They are the agricultural communities whose economies are intertwined with mining activity in ways that outsiders rarely think to trace.

The lab diamond does not fund any of this. The reactor pays its electricity bill. The factory pays its technicians. The margin returns to shareholders in countries that already have schools and hospitals and functioning public infrastructure. The transaction is clean in the sense that it is uncomplicated. It is not clean in the sense of being without consequence.

Then there is the environmental claim. Lab diamonds, the story goes, are better for the planet. No mining. No disrupted land. No ecosystem damage. The responsible choice for the environmentally conscious buyer.

There are labs where this claim holds. A small number of producers, mostly in Europe, run on verified renewable energy. Their environmental footprint is genuinely lower. They have earned the sustainability label and they apply it honestly.

They are also a small minority of global lab diamond production.

The majority of lab diamonds sold today come from India and China, where production has scaled at extraordinary speed to meet demand. That scaling runs on coal. The reactors that grow lab diamonds require extreme heat and pressure sustained over long periods; the energy consumption is enormous, and in Surat and Zhengzhou, that energy comes largely from the grid, which runs largely on fossil fuels.⁴ There are also significant water demands for reactor cooling that the sustainability narrative rarely mentions. Independent analysis has found that producing one polished carat of lab diamond releases three times as many greenhouse gases as the mined equivalent.⁵

The retailer who calls every lab diamond environmentally friendly is not lying about the European lab. They are borrowing its credibility to sell something made under entirely different conditions, by a producer they may not be able to name, using energy from a source they have certainly not verified. The label has been detached from the specific and applied to the category. That is not transparency. That is greenwashing with a clean conscience.

The question a buyer should ask is not "is this a lab diamond?" It is "which lab, powered by what, and can you show me?" Almost no retailer can answer that. Which tells you everything about how seriously the sustainability claim is being made at the point of sale, where it matters most.

We are not arguing that natural diamonds are without complication. We are arguing that lab diamonds are not without complication either; and that the marketing of lab diamonds has been spectacularly successful at pretending otherwise. Two claims. Better for people. Better for the planet. Both true in specific, limited circumstances. Neither true as a category.

The question to ask before any purchase is not "which story sounds better?" It is "where does the money go, and who benefits, and who doesn't?" Asked of a natural diamond from a documented source: communities in Botswana, schools, hospitals, a teacher's salary, a child's university place. Asked of a lab diamond: a factory, its overheads, its shareholders.

Both are legitimate choices. Only one of them is being sold honestly.

We do not carry lab diamonds. That is not a moral verdict on anyone who does. It is our position, clearly held, and we are transparent about why. Within that position, we disclose everything about the stones we do carry. Treatments. Origins. Anything a client needs to know before they decide. That is what honesty actually requires. Not a clean story. The true one.

If you want that conversation, we are here.