Lab Diamonds Are Too Perfect for Their Own Good
Last year, a funny thing happened at Ring Concierge’s Manhattan showroom. A bride-to-be brought her engagement ring back to the popular jewelry store after wearing it for a few weeks and wanted to trade out her diamond for a worse one. The woman was worried that the original rock was too clear, too bright, too perfect for its large size, Ring Concierge’s CEO, Nicole Wegman, told me. She wanted to replace it with a lower-quality stone of a similar size—something a little less bright white.
Brides sometimes bring in new rings for tweaks; maybe they want the fit adjusted, or they’re having second thoughts about the setting. Occasionally, they decide they want to pay the extra money to go bigger. That the central diamond is too good, however, is just not a complaint that jewelers get, except in cases of totally blown budgets. But this particular bride wasn’t worried that she’d spent too much money, Wegman said. In a sense, the bride was worried that she hadn’t spent enough. She and her fiancé had selected a lab-grown diamond—a gem that’s chemically identical to a mined diamond at a fraction of the cost—in order to get the kind of size and clarity that would push a natural stone far beyond their means. Now she was concerned that everyone they knew would take one look at the big, perfect stone on her finger and immediately see the trade-off.
In recent years, lab-grown diamonds have flooded into the market, causing something of an existential crisis in the natural-diamond industry, which has spent decades making the diamond engagement ring into a singular goliath of American luxury shopping. This. A real stone—and its symbolic value in life and romance—no longer requires all that expense, or all of the baggage of mined stones’ bloody imperial history. Diamonds, it would seem, are now a solved problem.
