What Falling Lab-Grown Diamond Prices Reveal About The Value Of "Real"

A one-carat lab-grown diamond now costs $400 to $750 at retail, down from roughly $3,410 per carat in 2020, an 88% collapse that has pushed De Beers to a $2.3 billion impairment on its diamond unit and parent company Anglo American to a $3.7 billion net loss for 2025.

The cause was supply, not quality. Global lab-grown production capacity grew more than 300% between 2020 and 2023 as new factories scaled up across China and India, flooding the market faster than retailers could sell through inventory. Wholesale prices fell a further 14% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026, according to diamond industry analyst Edahn Golan, whose latest report found "no clear bottom yet in sight."

Lab-grown stones now account for 61% of US engagement ring purchases, per The Knot, up from 12% of center stones in 2019. Pandora removed natural diamonds from its collections entirely in 2024 in favour of lab-grown and alternative stones; its sales have grown since. De Beers has responded by cutting its own rough diamond prices and trimming production 12%, after years of privately discounting stones up to 25% below its published price list.

The clearest sign of how far the downturn has spread came in July 2026, when De Beers announced it would suspend production for two years at Venetia, South Africa's highest-value diamond mine and the source of more than 40% of the country's diamond output. The mine employs more than 4,000 people. De Beers cited collapsing prices driven by weaker Chinese luxury spending, competition from lab-grown stones, and trade tensions compounding a downturn that began after the pandemic, according to the BBC. Anglo American, which put De Beers up for sale in 2024, has yet to find a buyer.

The environmental comparison between the two is less settled than either side's marketing suggests. A polished natural diamond carries an estimated 160kg of CO2 emissions per carat, according to the Diamond Producers Association, on top of the roughly 1,750 tonnes of earth displaced to extract a single carat, land that mining operations cannot fully restore. Lab-grown diamonds can emit as little as 0.028kg of CO2 per carat when grown on renewable electricity, per producer Diamond Foundry, but as much as 511kg when manufactured in coal-reliant grids, where most current global supply is concentrated. Which stone costs the planet less depends almost entirely on what was powering the factory, a detail that rarely makes it onto a price tag.

The bigger shift is what the price collapse has revealed about the nderlying product. A lab-grown diamond is chemically and optically identical to a mined one, indistinguishable to most jewellers without specialised equipment. What separated their prices for a century was not the stone but the story attached to it: that something took a billion years to form before a person found it. Remove the story, and the value built on top of it goes with it.

That logic is now circling back on lab-grown stones too. Resale values sit at 20% to 40% of original purchase price and continue falling 15% to 20% annually, because expanding supply leaves no scarcity story to support a floor. Natural diamonds, whose market share has fallen to 16% of US sales, still have one.

The shift is real, but it isn't only loss. De Beers' shrinking share of a smaller pie is being absorbed elsewhere: by lab-grown producers building an entirely new price tier, by a growing antique and vintage jewellery market where a stone's history is the selling point rather than its size, and by smaller independent jewellers whose sales are holding up precisely because they lead with craft and story rather than carat weight. Overall US jewellery sales are still projected to grow 5% to 6% in 2026. The money has not left diamonds so much as it has redistributed toward whoever tells the more convincing story about the stone, whether that stone is a century old or a week old.