The rise of lab-grown diamonds: As demand plummets, De Beers slashes prices and a TikTok auction craze takes off, why real is no longer better

For as long as we can remember, diamonds have been the ultimate luxury good, associated with romance, eternity, love and extreme wealth. Classy. Timeless. Well, perhaps not any more. At least not if you’ve been watching TikTok’s live diamond auctions lately.

‘Hey everyone, it’s Clare from Hello Cat! We’re going live today with £1 diamond bids. Make sure you’re following. Make sure you hit that live button!’ says one auctioneer.

Meanwhile, at Diamond Districtt (sic), ‘We’re going insane, we’re hosting another crazy mega-live auction and everything will start at a dollar!’

In Britain, a very chirpy salesman at Hello Carat Jewellers is selling a 2.1 carat glittering oval as the clock ticks down over 30 seconds.

‘Go go go! Keep bidding, you can get it. Seven seconds to go. Who is going to take this down. £387! An absolutely glorious piece there!’

And over at True Carat, with more than 57,000 followers, the auction starts every minute or so with diamonds of different sizes, cuts, colours. All miraculously affordable. ‘Look at his beautiful marquis 6.7-carat diamond. Only here. Starting at one dollar. Let’s go. Let’s go! Get those bids in!’

And in they flood. With Mimi and Lisa and Jenny bidding like mad as the price shoots up to $350 (£265). Which is a lot to spend online, in 30 seconds flat, for a diamond you can’t touch, hold or see very well, let alone hold up to the light. But it’s a fraction of the normal price, of course.

Which is why, pretty much every hour, every day and all around the world, frenzied bidding is taking place for diamonds so big and shiny and shimmering they’d make the late Dame Barbara Cartland blanch.

 

Huge square-cut yellow stones. Seven carat marquise cut. Three-carat Asscher cut, emerald cut, princess, pear, baguette even, for a retro look. The bigger and glitzier the better. And a lot more affordable than the 24-carat, emerald-cut Bulgari pink, sold last week by Christie’s in Geneva for £10.9million.

Because unlike the Bulgari, these stones are all laboratory-grown and referred to as ‘labs’, or synthetic, in the business. Which means that, unlike natural diamonds, they were not formed billions of years ago deep within the Earth’s crust where extreme heat and pressure caused carbon atoms to crystallise over the ages.

No, they were all made in factories in India or China that recreate the same high-pressure, high-temperature conditions needed to produce natural diamonds. Instead, the stones grow, layer on layer, from carbon-rich gas in a plasma reactor.

Oh yes, and they take just two weeks to make and are produced by the wheelbarrow load.

But the key is that, other than the letters LG and a serial number printed on the girdle of the stone – which isn’t visible to the naked eye – they look just like natural diamonds. To us, to our friends, to everyone we want to impress. And, as a result, they’ve flooded the market.

Today, lab-grown centre stones make up 61 per cent of all engagement ring purchases – a 239 per cent increase since 2020. They are wildly popular among people aged 25 to 40 and the industry’s market value is expected to increase from £25.3billion to nearly £69.6billion by 2034.

Which means that pretty much everyone in the business now sells labs alongside natural diamonds. In London’s Hatton Garden. At UK jeweller of the year Ainsworth Jewellers.

‘It’s all changed in the last two years – it’s gone mad,’ one jeweller tells me. For a while, even De Beers, the world’s leading diamond company, made and sold its own lab diamonds alongside its precious gems, marketing them as jewellery for ‘less serious occasions’. Meanwhile, myriad online lab-grown sellers with names such as Grown Brilliance have sprung up. And, in 2023, the TikTok live auction sites began.

Just last week, Julia Pollard from Made In Chelsea was raving about the three massive diamonds she’d bought online for £90 and how addictive the sales are. Lots just tune in to watch for fun. There is even a craze for videos of bidders unwrapping their auction wins.

All of which has had a devastating effect on the once-elite diamond industry. The price of a natural one-carat stone has halved since 2021 and Bloomberg recently reported that De Beers had slashed the prices on many stones because demand is so low. In July, the company announced the temporary closure of its flagship Venetia mine in South Africa to cut costs. But while traditionalists are appalled, many consumers are thrilled. Suddenly, diamonds are open to all. Three-carat, four, five and six. All for a tenth of the price of a natural stone.

The current trend in the market was partly fuelled, according to jeweller Harriet Kelsall, by Taylor Swift’s enormous eight to ten-carat oval-cut engagement ring. ‘So now people want size. Hers was a natural one – I can’t imagine how much it cost.’ Industry insiders’ estimates range from £400,000 to £2.6million.

‘But you can get a similar sized diamond for a couple of thousand pounds,’ she adds.

Kenzie Cisneros, 24, who launched her wildly successful online lab-grown site Diamond Hideout just over a year ago, tells me it’s all about the big ones. ‘I advertise what I call my “fatties” every week and they’re hugely popular – ten-carat diamonds for between £1,200 and £1,500.’

But while she advertises her labs on TikTok, she is not keen on the live auctions, and queries the quality of the product. ‘They’re just salesmen – they could sell anything. They’re not jewellers and I can see how it taints the look of lab diamonds.’

It does all seem quite a stretch from Breakfast At Tiffany’s, and our unshakeable belief that diamonds are the ultimate seal on any classy betrothal. But perhaps we should wind back to the origins of this love affair – which are surprisingly recent. While diamonds have been around for billions of years, they’ve only been associated with love since 1938.

Which was when, having cornered most of the world’s supply, clever De Beers hired copywriter Frances Gerety to create a modern myth with the slogan: ‘A diamond is forever.’

And, hey presto, diamonds became the automatic choice for engagement rings all over. After all, what could be more romantic than the thought of a precious stone, lying deep in Earth’s crust for millennia, just waiting to be cut and polished and popped on to your ring finger? Over subsequent decades, adverts even instructed men on the accepted price tag – first a month’s salary, later two or more. But there has always been a dark underbelly to the diamond industry.

Partly because extracting the stones from the earth is such a dirty, dangerous, often exploitative nightmare. Some critics claim that to produce a single-carat diamond requires the removal of 1,000 tons of rocks and soil, expends almost 4,000 litres of water and produces more than 15st of CO2. Others say that De Beers and other conglomerates have deliberately restricted supply to keep prices up.

Over the years there have also been allegations of appalling working conditions, child labour and proceeds of diamonds funding wars (‘blood diamonds’).

So given all that, it’s not surprising that synthetic diamonds – which have been produced since the 1950s for use in industry – have finally found their market.

Or that the new lab mass-producers in India and China have been quick to pronounce their diamonds as an ‘ethical choice’.

Something that Kelsall dismisses as utter bunkum.

‘People assume that because they’re called lab-grown they involve white coats and pipettes and modern-day health and safety,’ she says. ‘They’re made in factories, in huge quantities in China and India, using a lot of dirty fuel.’ And still, too often, child labour.

Helen Dimmock, gemmologist and jewellery specialist with award-winning Ainsworth Jewellers, sees lab diamonds as different products. ‘They might look the same – physically, chemically and optically identical – but a gem stone is rare, durable and beautiful, the ultimate symbol of love. Labs are not rare.’

But that is not a distinction that bothers the TikTok buyers in their frenzied auctions. Or most young couples getting engaged in 2026 for whom cost is an issue. After all, why buy a natural diamond for £10,000 when you could get something that looks exactly the same for £1,000?

‘Anyone who says they can tell them apart is a liar,’ says Diamond Hideout’s Cisneros.

As a result of all this, for some the sheen has gone off diamonds completely. Several jewellers I spoke to last week have noticed a shift from both synthetic and natural – with couples looking for other coloured stones or perhaps a necklace or bracelet instead of an engagement ring.

There is also talk of couples cementing their love with expensive watches, and even tech – top of the range phones and laptops, for goodness’ sake.

But what of the natural diamond – is there still a demand? Yes, insist experts, who say that this lab-grown bonanza has elevated the natural diamond to a new level of elite luxury. And also that, suddenly, the more natural they look, the better.

‘If your diamond’s really big, everyone’s going to know it’s lab-created,’ says Kelsall. ‘If it’s smaller and an interesting colour, it’s more likely to be natural.’

Unless, of course, you are the Hollywood actress Zendaya, and were lucky enough to be given a magnificent natural 5.02-carat antique cushion-cut diamond at an estimated cost of £160,000 by husband Tom Holland. But for the rest of us, bidding like mad on TikTok, perhaps not so much. So next time you’re admiring your pal’s enormous new sparkler, don’t ask too many questions about where it came from.