In 1948, diamond company De Beers launched a marketing campaign with the slogan “A diamond is forever.” Fifty years later, the company created another campaign justifying the price of diamonds with the slogan, “Isn’t two months’ salary a small price to pay for something that lasts forever?”
Now, De Beers is aggressively cutting prices to bring sales up, and you can buy a diamond-making device for $200,000 on Alibaba.
It’s a sign that diamond production is democratizing, reports Ars Technica.
In the past five years, lab-grown gem sales have burgeoned and made the price of mined stones less appealing, according to diamond expert Paul Zimnisky. The lab-grown diamond market was $13 billion last year and is expected to reach about $22 billion by 2031.
Ankur Daga, CEO of the fine jewelry company Angara, estimated that half of all engagement rings sold this year will have lab-grown stones, a significant jump from 2% in 2018.
“The diamond industry is in trouble,” Daga told CNBC in June.
As of press time, natural 1-carat diamonds cost around $4,000 while lab-grown diamonds of the same weight go for around $620.
How a lab-grown diamond machine works
The 44-ton device uses high-pressure high temperature (HPHT) technology to take a diamond seed, or a tiny diamond particle that starts the whole process, and transform it into a lab-grown diamond. Alibaba focuses more on business-to-business products, so the machine they have for sale would likely be bought and used by a company with specialized knowledge.
Lab-grown diamonds are up to 90% less expensive than natural diamonds and look exactly the same to the human eye. They can only be told apart with special equipment in a professional gemological lab.
They also don’t carry the same environmental and social concerns as naturally found diamonds, which have to be mined in unsafe conditions.
Even with this kind of growth, and machines like the one sold through Alibaba, Zimnisky says that naturally-found diamonds will still have a place in the future.
“Human desire for rare and valuable objects runs pretty deep within us,” Zimnisky told NPR. “I don’t think that’s going to, all of a sudden, change.”