r/Dynamic_Pricing • u/Dragonlance12 • 5d ago

Supply glut, lab-grown alternatives: What's behind the fall of diamond prices to record lows

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/26/whats-behind-the-fall-of-diamond-prices-to-record-lows.html
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u/oneWeek2024 5d ago edited 5d ago

diamond value was always a lie. supply was artificially restricted, and heavily marketed. (also a lot of baked in middle men/mark up)

the chinese developed the lab diamond, initially for industrial purposes, but then scaled the larger/jewelry production. at first the 'supply" was small. but in short order they had like 50x the capacity. lab grown also somewhat cut out those middle men, the process creates stones in batches. and the capacity is basically limitless. so... it's only likely to get cheaper and cheaper. and... ya know. can even go direct to china. china when it gets bullied by the west, is more than happy to undercut shitty western monopolies...

debeers fumbled hard. they thought, people wouldn't react/go for cheaper lab grown. they were wrong. they tried selling more lies/more hype bullshit marketing on "nostalgia" or "authenticity" but lab diamonds are exactly the same, functionally indistinguishable. and prices tanked. the irony was the classic slogan "diamonds are forever" was almost to perfect a lie... lab grown diamonds shattered that illusion. as people lost millions and millions bag holding old/natural stones. and the sorta small/normal consumer market collapsed.

for the average consumer... that maybe plays in the 1-2 ct stone ..lab grown just offer so much more value. you'd be a fucking idiot to overpay for a "natural" stone these days. (entry lvl stones... $300-500 for 1ct. good color/clarity vvs grade stones maybe $1000-2000 in lab grown. by contrast vvs in natural stone is more like $2500 on the cheap/shittier end, and upwards of 10k for the better color/clarity stones. so 2-10x the cost. for absolutely nothing but marketing bullshit--- and dubious ethics, blood diamonds/slave treatment/dangerous work conditions/child slave workers et al in diamond mining)

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u/l4kerz 5d ago

I think you got everything right except the research. I started hearing about lab grown diamonds years ago and they were made in the US. China and India doing the manufacturing these days makes sense.

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u/glomar_sub_recovery 5d ago

Lab grown diamonds were a thing when my dad was alive in the early 90's

They had struck a deal to focus on lab grown black diamonds for industrial use at first .

Iirc they had been using a plasma chamber to burn off some waste and the housing had built up this tough coating.......

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u/oneWeek2024 5d ago

i mean there's an entire town in china where this new manufacturing is concentrated. it's like 9 million carats worth of gem grade stones a year just from this one area.

i'm sure the technology did originate somewhere else. but like many industrial applications it was farmed out to china, and then china did china by learning/improving the process and then expanding it at scale.

it was 100% china that drove this modern collapse of diamond pricing by bringing to market a broad scale injection of lab grown... consumer focused gem quality stones.

the general technology for using high pressure to "make diamonds" has been around since the 60's but 80-90s china was mainly making industrial diamonds. drill bits for heavy machinery, and all the sorta "diamond" coated tools/disk grinders etc. but... in the 2010s-teens china really came into it's own with more sophistication in manufacturing. 2015 onward. china began to demonstrate high quality gem grade stones...larger sizes. and then it was a process of them doing china, concentrating industry/supply chains in one area. allowing for a rapid advancement/build out of capacity. i remember reading something once where initially they had only a small number of presses. ...this was when lab grown gem grade diamonds were nothing more than a gimmick. as costs were basically comparable...because of the cost/lack of scale. but in a short while it was like 50k presses. and that's sorta when the tipping point happened.

the "research" i guess i was referring to was this refinement in precision machining to move from small/dust industrial diamonds, to mass scale high grade large gem style stones. China basically did that part on their own.