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Like a thunderclap followed by a jag of lightning—that’s how suddenly the desire to be engaged, and to receive the requisite sparkling diamond, struck me. From that moment, my husband and I became jewelry-obsessed. While he plunged headfirst into the labyrinth of 4Cs and the Diamond District, I agonized over every design detail—right down to the precise curvature of the prongs that would cradle my diamond. Yet, for all our meticulous deliberations, one possibility never crossed our minds: a lab-grown diamond. We were traditionalists, and tradition dictated a mined stone. (Plus, if I’m really being honest, we were a little snooty about it.)
But if I were to do it all again, would I make the same choice? It’s all hypothetical, sure, but it’s worth an answer—and to get it, I’m turning to those who’ve already broken free from the diamond dogma: jewelers and brides who’ve said “yes” to the lab-grown diamond.
“The diamond industry pulled off one of the most brilliant marketing campaigns of all time. They managed to equate the value of your marriage with how much a man spends on a rock. It’s actually a pretty ridiculous concept when you break it down,” says Jessica Sailer Van Lith, co-founder of the just-launched lab-grown jewelry line La Pietra (and former Vogue editor). She reminds me, gently but pointedly, that everything I thought I knew about diamonds was engineered by Big Diamond.
For decades, the diamond industry—buoyed by De Beers’s 1947 masterstroke of marketing, A Diamond Is Forever—didn’t just make diamonds desirable; they made them compulsory. A proposal without one was about as unthinkable as a wedding without a bride. Never mind if that diamond was plucked from the earth under dubious or unethical conditions—its supposed rarity (or rather, the carefully curated illusion of it) made it the only acceptable choice.
Then, in the 2000s, Big Diamond struck again, this time with a new villain: lab-grown diamonds. Identical in composition, indistinguishable to the human eye, but, according to the natural diamond industry, lacking in that all-important divine provenance. Their argument? A diamond must be plucked from the depths, kissed by volcanic fire, and blessed by time itself—anything less is a mere trinket. But if it looks like a diamond, sparkles like a diamond, and, crucially, is a diamond, then the real question isn’t about authenticity—it’s about value. And, like beauty, value is in the eye of the beholder.
To illustrate this, Sailer invokes another symbol of engineered exclusivity: the Birkin bag. “Imagine if Hermès introduced an AI technology that could produce a perfect Birkin bag using the same materials in the same atelier, but in a fraction of the time. The craftsmanship would be identical. Would you want one?”
I pause, considering the thought experiment. To someone like me, who prizes tradition and craftsmanship, the proposition feels almost radical.
“Maybe?” I tell her. “But… would I need to tell people it’s an AI-Birkin? And would I need to tell people a four-carat diamond is lab-grown?”
If a Birkin signals patience (or at least a well-placed SA relationship) and a big hulking diamond signals wealth, then was I obligated to disclose that I’d chosen the more convenient, cost-effective, and ethical alternative? The very thought feels absurd—but then again, isn’t that the whole point of luxury? Not just to have, but to be seen having—as in Thorstein Veblen’s definition of conspicuous consumption, first coined in 1899?
Natasha Lisle, a newly engaged Brit living in Manhattan, pokes a hole in this fashion theory. “I don’t think anyone actually asked about it?” she says of her lab-grown diamond, a gorgeous emerald-cut stone flanked with diamond baguettes in an Art Deco arrangement. (“I wanted it to look like the top of the Empire State Building.”) “My friends mostly just wanted to hear about my proposal,” she tells me. And of course they did: What kind of friends (frenemies!) want to hear those details best kept confidential on a GIA certificate?
“I wanted a big fat rock—I’m very tall, like six foot tall, and so I knew that in order for it to make an impact on my hand, it needed to be a big sucker,” she adds. After considering the ethical implications and realizing they could get a larger, higher-quality stone for the same price, Lisle and fiancé chose lab-grown.
“I had to unlearn a lot of what I thought I knew about diamonds,” she said, leaving me with an analogy of her own. “It’s kind of like Ozempic; some people think the weight loss is not as legitimate—but it’s still weight loss. Is my ring less legitimate because it was made a certain way?” she poses. We conclude that the people who feel the need to know if Ozempic assisted someone’s new figure are the same people who care that someone’s ring is lab-grown.
Kym Canter, another former editor-turned-lab-grown diamond doyenne, has a word for this group: snobs. “I find that within my friends in fashion, they all go, ‘Really? You’re going to do lab-grown?’ It’s like second-class citizen stuff in the diamond world. Lynn Yaeger is one of my best friends, and Lynn is so anti-lab-grown. We fight over it all the time.”
Canter herself doesn’t see lab-grown diamonds as a replacement for mined diamonds so much as a new frontier for the girls’ best friend. With her line, The Invisible Jewels, she’s festooning hairpins with diamonds and turning them into press-on beauty gems for the face and body. “I felt that the opportunity in lab-grown diamonds was to create something that had never been created before—expand the category. That was my personal interest. The whole thing about a diamond is the story, right? They’ve always been symbols of wealth, of love, of power. And I think now there’s sort of a diamond story for everyone.”
Essentially: diamonds went from something your husband acquired with a sizable chunk of his salary to being an impulse purchase—something you can just stick on your face like a beauty mark for a night out. It’s a seismic shift in consumer behavior that’s shaken up the diamond industry in a big way.
Per the Wall Street Journal, “Natural-diamond jewelry sales in the U.S. declined 0.7% through November compared with a year earlier, while lab-grown diamond jewelry sales rose 12.5%.” And as for prices? They’re free-falling—due to a lower demand for mined diamonds and technology advances in the production of lab-grown diamonds which make them less expensive to create. There’s never been a better time to buy, especially when you consider the surprisingly long history of lab-grown diamonds.
It was in the 1950s when General Electric first cracked the code on recreating the high-pressure, high-temperature conditions necessary for diamond formation. When first created they were relegated to industrial use—cutting, drilling, and polishing rather than adorning fingers and décolletages. The technology, while groundbreaking, wasn’t yet refined enough for gem-quality stones. But by the 1980s and ’90s, researchers were making significant progress, developing methods to create gem-grade diamonds. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that the jewelry world really started paying attention. Startups began to emerge, producing high-quality lab-grown diamonds at a fraction of the cost of mined ones. By the 2010s, they were making their way onto red carpets and celebrity ring fingers, shaking up the old guard of fine jewelry. Leonardo DiCaprio, fresh off Blood Diamond, became an investor in lab-grown diamond startups, like Vrai, giving the movement a Hollywood sheen. Meghan Markle sported a pair of lab-grown diamond earrings on a royal tour, proving sustainability could be just as glamorous as tradition. Even De Beers, after years of dismissing them as mere “synthetic” stones, couldn’t resist dabbling in the category, launching its ill-fated Lightbox brand, before pivoting back to mined diamonds.
Consider also that the great-great-grandson of Louis Cartier, Jean Dousset, has an eponymous jewelry line that’s practically synonymous with lab-grown diamonds. In 2020, he launched his brand’s flagship store on La Cienega Boulevard in West Hollywood—not as a quiet experiment, but as a bold declaration. Here, lab-grown diamonds aren’t just an alternative, they’re the future of fine jewelry. While he acknowledges the ongoing debate around the energy-intensive process of creating them, he sees their potential as limitless—untethered from the constraints of scarcity, ethics, or exorbitant pricing.
“Lab-grown diamonds have freed us from the constraints of rarity and price, allowing designers to be more creative than ever before,” Dousset tells me. “We can experiment with bolder designs, larger stones, and unexpected settings without the usual limitations.” Case in point: a recent ring he designed in celebration of Beyoncé’s Grammy-winning Cowboy Carter—a glittering 3.94-carat lab diamond, not in a traditional cut like emerald or oval, but shaped into the unmistakable silhouette of a horse’s head, perky ears and all. He’s also dreamed up a feline counterpart, a cat-shaped diamond ring he hopes will one day find its way onto the finger of self-proclaimed cat lady, Taylor Swift.
I finally ask Dousset the question I’ve been dancing around: Do brides actually care that their rings cost less? Don’t they want to wear an insurance liability to Pilates? Don’t they want their partners to feel the financial gravity of the purchase—the weight of the ring reflecting the weight of the commitment?
Biologically speaking, I tell him, grand displays have always been part of courtship. Peacocks don’t fan out their iridescent feathers for fun—it's a spectacle of desirability, a show of genetic superiority. A diamond, whether lab-grown or plucked from the earth’s depths, operates the same way: a shimmering signifier of devotion, resourcefulness, and the ability to provide.
His answer? “Spending less on a ring isn’t about cutting corners—it’s about rejecting an outdated notion that value is purely tied to scarcity.”
Case in point: recent bride-to-be Paris Jackson, who commissioned a ring from Dousset. It goes without saying that Jackson doesn’t need to pinch pennies. “Jean brought a truly innovative approach, collaborating with me to design a piece that beautifully integrated unique metalwork, silhouettes, and accents,” she says of her five-carat vintage-inspired ring. “The result was not only deeply personal but also elevated the entire experience into something truly magical.”
Jennifer Fisher, the jewelry designer behind the eponymous brand and her omnipresent sculptural hoops, has increasingly incorporated lab-grown diamonds into her designs. She echoes the sentiment I’ve been hearing again and again: “It’s not about affording a mined diamond; it’s about choosing not to buy into the old narratives. More women are realizing that lab-grown isn’t a downgrade—it’s just smart.”
Fisher and I swap stories of women who wear lab-grown rings proudly. Take Hannah Bronfman, whose husband surprised her with a second engagement ring years after their wedding. “He felt he was in a completely different place than when he first proposed to me,” she says in a TikTok, “and he wanted something that reflected where we are now.” And then there’s PR exec Arielle Patrick, who went the custom route with C1V1L Jewelry, documenting the process of designing her lab-grown engagement ring.
I hear all this, and it’s compelling—but I can’t help asking the question no one wants to say out loud: Worst case scenario, don’t you want to be able to sell your ring after the divorce? I save this inquiry for my divorced friend, the only person I trust to answer it honestly.
“I’m going lab-grown all the way,” she tells me flatly. “That is, if I get married again.” After her first marriage ended, she tried selling her 3.5 carat mined diamond engagement ring—only to be met with a pitiful offer. “I’m talking pennies on the dollar,” she says, reminding me that, like a car driven off the lot, a diamond is a depreciating asset. “You’re going to lose money—might as well lose less.”
She’s resolute, and the data backs her up: Since its peak in 2022, the average price per carat for mined diamonds has dropped by roughly 26%. Meaning the ring I was proposed to with just two years ago? It’s now worth considerably less. For the same price, I could have had a bigger diamond—and kept a chunk of change.
So what does this mean for big diamonds? Not Big Diamond, the industry, but big diamonds, as in carats? If five-carat rocks are no longer financially out of reach, does bigger is better still hold up? If everyone has a big rock, do you still want one?
Sailer Van Lith doesn’t think size will be the next status symbol. “I’ve always appreciated when people choose a piece of jewelry—especially an engagement ring—that just suits them,” she says. La Pietra, the brand she co-founded, isn’t about bigger stones for less money; it’s about craftsmanship and taste. “I always notice when women who could have something massive go for something small and elegant instead. There’s something really chic about that.”
So, if I were to do it all again, would I still go mined? In hindsight, the answer is crystal—or lab-grown diamond—clear.
