Lab-Grown Diamond or Natural Stone: The Honest Match-Up
The lab-grown diamond has shaken up jewellery: chemically identical to natural diamond, sold at a fraction of the price, and everywhere in shop windows. Should you give in? Here is our view as natural gemstone dealers — with its arguments, and an angle too few people consider.
Lab-grown diamond: what are we talking about?
A lab-grown diamond is carbon crystallised in a laboratory (HPHT or CVD processes) in a few weeks. Same physical properties, same brilliance, same hardness as natural diamond — only gemmological laboratories can tell them apart with their instruments. So it is not an imitation: it is a real diamond… made by man.
The real issue: value over time
Lab-grown diamond production is unlimited, and its industrial costs fall year after year. The mechanical consequence: their resale price follows the same downward slope. Conversely, a quality natural gem draws its value from a finite stock, created by the Earth millions of years ago. One is a manufactured product, the other a geological rarity — two opposing logics of value.
The option nobody thinks of: the natural coloured stone
The “natural vs lab-grown diamond” debate overlooks a third path: for the price of a lab-grown diamond, you can acquire a superb natural stone. An unheated white sapphire (hardness 9, crystalline brilliance) for a white stone; a blue sapphire, a spinel or a pink tourmaline for a ring like no other. Natural, rare, traceable — and on the same budget.
Our position, in full transparency
We sell only natural gems, sourced at the mine. Not out of hostility to lab-grown stones — they have their place, disclosed, in accessible jewellery — but because what we love in a stone is its story: millions of years of geology, a deposit, miners, a journey. That is the story you wear on your finger. Come and talk about it with us in Paris.
