So … diamonds are forever, you say. Are we sure about that? The diamond market has, over the past few years, seen a cataclysmic shift that threatens its foundations to the core with the sweeping advent into the market of lab-grown diamonds. The question now is not only what the future of the industry will be, but indeed whether it has a future at all.
This anxiety has crystallised during Anglo American’s prolonged attempt to sell the 85% it owns in the world’s largest diamond miner, De Beers — a goal that was set two years ago by CEO Duncan Wanblad. There’s a number that puts it all in focus: $1bn. That’s the sum Anglo now wants for De Beers, a company that was started in 1889 and folded into the firm created by Ernest Oppenheimer.
Pause on that number. This is over 94% less than the $18bn value back in 2001, when Anglo and the Oppenheimer family took it private. Even 15 years ago, when Anglo bought the Oppenheimers’ 40% stake for $5.1bn, this valued the company at nearly $13bn.
In a remarkable admission last month, Wanblad acknowledged that Anglo had misjudged the threat of lab-grown stones. “Hindsight would probably show that we might have wanted to have been a little bit more aggressive on the signals we were getting,” he said.
Wanblad said everyone assumed this was just a cycle rather than a structural change, adding that a fifth of the current natural diamond supply is “on its way out over the next 12 months or so”.
That is probably no exaggeration, given what is happening on the shop floor.
In 2025, lab-grown stones accounted for 61% of engagement ring purchases among more than 10,000 US couples surveyed by The Knot, up 239% since 2020. Wholesale prices of lab-grown diamonds, meanwhile, have fallen an extraordinary 96% since 2018, according to diamond analyst Edahn Golan’s price index.
Given this dynamic, you can see why the average realised price of De Beers’ rough diamonds fell 32% in the first half of this year to $105 a carat, below even its pandemic-era level, leading to a $113m cash loss. Even if the consortium led by former De Beers CEO Gareth Penny does end up paying $1bn for De Beers, as insiders say, you’ll find no shortage of critics who will argue that even this is too much.
Asked whether De Beers got it wrong, its vice-president, David Johnson, tells the FM that “synthetic lab-grown diamond sellers often positioned the product as ‘the same but cheaper’. However, there is increasing recognition that the two products are entirely different in terms of authenticity, value, origin and uniqueness.”
As a result, he says, the two categories — natural, and lab-grown — will become “fully established as separate” over the next decade.
At the same time, Johnson concedes the adjustment has been harsh. And one factor in the decline has been changing tastes in China’s luxury sector, which once accounted for 15% of natural-diamond sales but now sits at just 5%.
The FM interviewed a cross-section of people in the diamond market, from jewellers to analysts and diamond executives, to answer the foundational question: is this the end of natural diamonds?
It is a poignant moment, but if you were to have a chart of the biggest losers from the synthetic revolution, there would be two names right at the top: Anglo American and Botswana.
Avi Krawitz, publisher of The Diamond Press and a veteran analyst, says the story began not with consumers, but with jewellers. Eight years ago, most customers didn’t know what a lab-grown diamond was. Retailers did — and they loved them because the margins were spectacular.
A customer would arrive with $5,000 to spend on an engagement ring. The jeweller could offer a modest natural stone or a much bigger, whiter, apparently more impressive lab-grown stone for the same money, while making an unusually large percentage margin.
Retailers, which were making profit margins of 35%-45% on natural stones, could suddenly make a margin of more than 1,000% in some cases.
The extent to which this has changed the game is clear from the dynamics among the Sightholders — the elite group of diamond dealers De Beers would select to be given preferential access to its rough diamonds. It was seen as a sign of “prestige” to be a Sightholder, of which De Beers now only has 45 globally.
Yet this year, one Indian Sightholder gave back this prized position to focus on lab-grown alternatives. Ostensibly, this was to reduce its risk, given what is happening to prices, but this must have focused the minds of other parties in the polishing game.
Now, says Krawitz, “the cat is out of the bag”. Customers enter stores already knowing about lab-grown diamonds and asking for them.
The stigma has diminished dramatically — underscoring how the bottom has fallen out of the most successful marketing campaign in history, the “diamonds are forever” campaign created in 1947 by New York advertising firm NW Ayer & Son.
Before that iconic campaign, diamonds featured in just 10% of engagement rings; within 50 years, four-fifths of brides had diamond rings.
Diamond jeweller apocalypse
One of the more extraordinary facts about this moment is that exploding demand hasn’t stopped synthetic prices collapsing. The explanation, according to Krawitz, is brutally simple: “They’re producing too many diamonds.”
He describes the lab-grown trade as “a bit of the Wild West” — the antithesis of the old natural-diamond industry which had De Beers regulating supply, controlling distribution and moving all the chess pieces.
Synthetic diamonds have no equivalent central governor. Chinese and Indian manufacturers simply keep making more of them.
James Campbell, a former De Beers director and executive for more than 20 years, who in the 1990s ran what was its industrial diamond operation, tells the FM that the scientific breakthroughs occurred decades ago. Today the business is increasingly about the economics of manufacturing — equipment, utilisation, quality of the carbon inputs and, importantly, electricity cost.
Possibly 50% of the jewellers across the board that sell diamonds are either not surviving or have closed down – Donald Greig, Charles Greig Jewellers
This is the difference. Natural diamonds form through a geological temperature and pressure phenomenon over millennia. The supply depends on finding a diamondiferous kimberlite pipe or diamonds in such a pipe, spending billions on building a mine and then accepting whatever assortment nature sends up the conveyor belt.
Synthetic diamonds, by contrast, are created using a temperature and pressure regime in a lab akin to the natural process, called high pressure high temperature. There is a second methodology called chemical vapor deposition (CVD). But both are manufactured products which have a nasty habit of becoming cheaper.
That is exactly what happened. Prices at wholesale have fallen much faster than prices at retail, opening a potentially fascinating second disruption.
Krawitz says the size of that gap surprised him — if the stone has become vastly cheaper at the factory gate, while retail prices remain relatively elevated, today’s extraordinary jewellery margins invite somebody to undercut them.
His phrase is excellent: there may now be an opportunity for a “disruption of the disruptor”.
Or put simply: lab-grown diamonds first attacked natural diamonds, but the next price war could be lab-grown diamonds attacking other lab-grown diamonds.
This is where things could get interesting for natural diamonds.
The cheap price was initially lab-grown diamonds’ great strength in the jewellery sector. But extreme cheapness can become a weakness if you are selling something whose appeal depends on luxury and status. There are already signs of this paradox.
For many local retailers, the synthetic revolution has been devastating.
“Possibly 50% of the jewellers across the board that sell diamonds are either not surviving or have closed down,” says Donald Greig of Charles Greig Jewellers.
Greig counts himself lucky that, while it has certainly had an impact on the business, his company hasn’t gone under. “The diamond market has changed forever. It’s actually very sad, in a way. We’ve been in business for 127 years,” he says.
But for other more bespoke jewellers, the explosion of lab-grown diamonds has been brilliant for business.
Jewellery designer Kirsten Goss considers them “fantastic” and a welcome arrival on the market. Goss finds herself relatively insulated from the diamond price crash as her “higher-end client base” is still quite “natural-diamond-orientated”, but she is happy to work with those who want lab-grown diamonds worked into their jewellery pieces. “I’m open to both, and I’m enjoying the benefit of being open to both.”
Others agree. “In a way, the lab-growns coming onto the scene has almost been better for us because we sell more than we might have done before,” says contemporary jeweller Geraldine Fenn. She works regularly with lab-grown diamonds, and with natural diamonds when they are being reworked from old vintage pieces, or rare and scarce diamonds.
Equally, speciality jewellers known for more than just selling big old solitaires have escaped relatively unscathed from the crash. All of them point with some pity to retailers such as Browns and Tiffany’s, whose entire business model revolves around the sale of flawless, one- to two-carat engagement rings.
The bridal market, at this point, is hard to call. De Beers’ 2026 research found that synthetic diamonds represented only 15% of sales by value at “independent” US jewellers, against 85% for natural diamonds. But “independent” jewellers are evidently not the whole market, since the total number of lab-grown engagement rings has rocketed from just 12% in 2019 to 60% today.
“Traditional engagement rings no longer have the status they once had,” says Goss. “The classic solitaire bling piece is dead, dead, dead.”
Mining dies, jewellers thrive
At the luxury end of the market, there is little evidence of the diamond apocalypse that some describe. Jewellery has recently been among the strongest categories at Richemont, LVMH and Kering. Krawitz says it is therefore “a little premature to call time on the natural diamond industry”.
But here lies perhaps the most important distinction in the whole story: natural-diamond jewellery may have a perfectly viable future even while natural-diamond mining undergoes a savage contraction.
Cartier can choose the diamonds it wants; a mine cannot.
A mine produces a vast assortment: wonderful stones, ordinary stones, tiny stones, brownish stones, included stones and industrial material. Historically, the whole basket had value. But synthetic diamonds have most strongly attacked precisely those relatively generic categories for which rarity and provenance confer the least obvious advantage.
Krawitz argues that this helps explain why mines dependent on those categories have become uneconomic. Whereas De Beers would always have been able to sell the industrial diamonds amid the splendid jewellery stones, this is no longer an option.
And the outcome is dismal: Venetia has been paused; other mines are shutting or cutting back. Wanblad said that if a fifth of current natural-diamond supply vanishes in the next year, not many closed operations are likely to return.
Campbell takes the argument further. He thinks the crisis has essentially killed the appetite to finance new diamond mines — banks won’t want the risk and shareholders have seen what has happened to listed diamond producers.
Lucara Diamond, which is listed in Canada and owns the Karowe Mine in Botswana, has seen its stock fall 84% since it listed in 2009. This is despite the fact that it focuses on large, high-quality diamonds, including the 2,488-carat Motswedi, dug up in 2024 and estimated to be worth north of $100m.
London-listed Petra Diamonds, which had four mines in South Africa and Tanzania, has seen its price plunge 92% in the past five years.
“Who is going to finance it?” asks Campbell, given this trajectory. His conclusion is that there will inevitably be a hiatus in new natural-diamond production, and that somebody betting on that hiatus lasting less than 10 years would be “very brave”. Campbell suggests this lull could last beyond 15, 20 or even 30 years.
In a way, the lab-growns coming onto the scene has almost been better for us because we sell more than we might have done before – Geraldine Fenn, jeweller.
This creates a delicious economic irony. Lab-grown diamonds reduce demand for natural diamonds, so natural prices fall. As a result, mining investment collapses, so mines close and natural-diamond production falls. Eventually, genuine scarcity could reassert itself.
Campbell describes the present moment as a dislocation that may, over time, “dislocate again in favour of the natural diamond”.
In this scenario, lab-grown diamonds would become the mass-market product: large, extremely clean, inexpensive and available in almost limitless supply. Natural diamonds, however, would move upwards thanks to their rarity, individuality, provenance, luxury appeal and history.
This is leading to a situation where the natural-diamond industry is trying to reframe what it once called “defects” into “character”. An inclusion is unique; a champagne tint tells a story; an old cut has history. And this returns us to De Beers’ own extraordinary strategic errors.
De Beers’ own goals
Krawitz believes De Beers’ retreat from broad category advertising occurred at exactly the wrong time. A generation grew up without being relentlessly taught the cultural mythology contained in the 1947 slogan, “A diamond is forever”.
“They’ve realised they’d lost a generation,” he says. And this generation became “an easy sell for lab-grown”.
But in the timeline of De Beers’ errors, a special place should be reserved for Lightbox.
Back in 2018, De Beers itself launched the lab-grown jewellery brand Lightbox, reasoning that if synthetics were going to exist, it could establish them as inexpensive fashion jewellery rather than treasured substitutes for natural stones. It seemed like a variation of the corporate cliché that any good business “disrupts itself”.
In reality, Krawitz says, it was a spectacular own goal.
“In hindsight it was probably their biggest mistake,” he says. De Beers, the company whose name had defined natural diamonds for more than a century, effectively gave synthetics “a rubber stamp”.
There’s a feeling that, still today, Anglo doesn’t really understand the diamond industry – Avi Krawitz, publisher, The Diamond Press
Worse, he argues, De Beers went in half-heartedly: neither trying to dominate the synthetic business nor standing firmly outside it.
De Beers’ Johnson defends Lightbox, saying it was “transparent about what synthetic lab-grown diamonds are and what they are not”.
He says Lightbox didn’t price synthetic diamonds on the same scale as natural diamonds and, over time, the lab-grown diamond industry has increasingly reflected De Beers’ approach of lower prices and narrow grading.
Campbell, however, argues that Anglo made other strategic errors, including managing a unique luxury-marketing machine too much like just another mining operation, which eroded the “panache and pizzazz” of diamonds.
Asked whether synthetics were the fundamental cause of De Beers’ problems, Campbell says Anglo and De Beers are inclined to blame CVD, but “the main cause was themselves|.
Krawitz agrees, saying that diamonds aren’t copper or iron ore; there are thousands of categories, each with its own tiny market.
“There’s a feeling that, still today, Anglo doesn’t really understand the diamond industry,” he says. The company was “out of its depth” in controlling the industry.
He jokes that the Oppenheimers deserve an “investor of the century award” for selling De Beers when they did in 2011. It is hard to argue with that arithmetic.
But the more poignant loser may be Botswana.
Diamonds account for roughly 80% of its exports and about a quarter of its GDP. The collapse in the market has placed its economy and public finances under acute pressure. A handbag-maker can introduce a new handbag, but Botswana cannot introduce a new Jwaneng diamond mine.
That is why the eventual shape of De Beers matters far beyond jewellery counters. Botswana owns 15% of the company and wants greater influence. So, whoever buys Anglo’s stake will inherit not merely mines and brands, but one of the strangest political-commercial relationships in global business.
Future imperfect
The most plausible future isn’t that one type of diamond vanquishes the other. Rather, it is coexistence.
Lab-growns are also gaining adherents within the industry, with Fenn being one example. While appreciating a natural diamond, she loves that lab-growns democratise the jewellery market for those with lower budgets. “For people at the top of the industry, that’s exactly why they don’t like them, because it takes away some of the exclusivity around diamonds,” she says.
Indeed, there is tangible anti-lab-grown sentiment today — much of it a backlash to the anti-natural-diamond sentiment of a younger generation, who often have concerns about the sourcing of natural stones.
Consumers often prefer lab-growns for the fact that they are not mined in an environmentally damaging process. And Fenn says the detailed traceability of lab-growns is reassuring for clients who worry about the less-than-ethical origins of certain natural diamonds mined in conflict zones, fearing a “blood diamond” origin.
“The counter to that is, what are you using energy-wise to create a lab diamond? The components you use to create a lab diamond are also mined. So, you never get away from it,” Fenn argues.
It’s a tough [ask] to sell a natural stone that costs 10 times more than a lab-grown stone and looks exactly the same. I don’t know if there is a marketing way out of that – Geraldine Fenn
Often what wins is the fact that lab-grown diamonds cost 85% less to produce. This is enticing for the younger generation who “haven’t been fed the Kool-Aid their whole lives”, says jeweller Eric Loubser.
This newer generation missed out on the “diamond is forever” marketing and are not swayed by the arguments made by diamond companies that a natural stone is better.
Loubser says the antipathy towards lab-grown diamonds is largely driven by natural-diamond miners. “It’s because they have stockpiles of natural stones and they need to sell them — you can see the panic. They’re not even hiding it well,” he says.
Campaigns to reignite the allure of natural diamonds in the younger generation have also largely fallen flat.
De Beers, notably, pursued this in its ‘Desert Diamonds’ marketing campaign, which was meant to highlight and celebrate earth- and desert-toned natural diamonds, ranging from warm whites to champagne, whisky and sunset browns.
Johnson disagrees that the campaign didn’t work. He says it was important as it “supported consumer understanding of the difference between a unique, naturally scarce gemstone, and one that can be reproduced to order in limitless quantities”.
But few jewellers believe the diamond market could ever be renewed with a marketing campaign. “That ship has sailed,” says Goss.
Fenn agrees: “It’s a tough [ask] to sell a natural stone that costs 10 times more than a lab-grown stone and looks exactly the same. I don’t know if there is a marketing way out of that.”
And yet, diamonds are what they are because of marketing.
“If De Beers had not had that monopoly, and artificially pushed up the price of diamonds, and their price had been a real reflection of how common they were, then everyone could have had a diamond and there would be no market,” Fenn says.
Leaning on youth
And yet, despite this dismal prognosis, De Beers is surprisingly upbeat.
Johnson says the diamond company expects a “gradual recovery” over the next 10 years as natural diamonds and lab-grown diamonds increasingly become two separate products. “While rough diamond trading conditions currently remain challenging, global consumer demand for natural diamonds increased in 2025 after three years of decline. Meanwhile, we have seen demand for larger, higher-value diamonds remain resilient.”
And, contrary to what Loubser says, Johnson says it is the younger people who are driving the resurgence. Gen Z shoppers, typically aged between 14 and 29, are “already the second-largest buying cohort in the industry behind millennials, accounting for 23% of natural-diamond demand value in 2025”.
This group is buying a relatively greater share of diamonds, and spending more: Gen Z buyers spend about $3,700 per piece on natural-diamond jewellery — almost double the $1,959 spent by the more financially secure boomers, aged 62–80.
“Their intention to buy natural diamonds is also increased — 51% of Gen Z consumers state they are likely to acquire natural diamonds over the next year, up from 45% in 2023,” he says.
Jewellers are also seeing the sun behind the clouds.
“If you look at the prices of rubies, sapphires and emeralds in the past five years, they’ve gone up tremendously,” says Greig. “A lot of that is because they have replaced a certain portion of the diamond market.”
But as much as De Beers is touting the resurgence, jewellery may eventually combine the two: inexpensive lab-grown pavé around a valuable natural centre stone, for instance. Synthetic producers, after all, have an interest in maintaining a viable natural-diamond business, since their product has piggybacked on the diamond myths.
As Campbell puts it, this means the future will be an “uneasy coexistence and respect for each other”.
This article first appeared in the Financial Mail.
