In the market for a diamond? Stones that are manufactured, not mined, are gaining in popularity
CBC
When Evelyn Schaffer first saw her engagement ring, she was speechless. It was a 0.76-carat, oval-cut stunner — and she said no one has been able to tell that the diamonds were created in a lab.
"I've never seen anything like it and it's gorgeous," Schaffer said. "The lab-grown diamonds are actually more sparkly in my opinion."
As consumer awareness grows, the popularity of gems that are manufactured, not mined, is surging. By some estimates, lab-grown diamonds make up nearly 20 per cent of the total global diamond jewelry market.
Schaffer, a 30-year-old music teacher, and her fiancé, Ene Mwadi, 26, said their motivation was partly financial. Recent innovations have made lab-grown diamonds much more affordable, with some one-carat rings available for less than $2,000 — nearly 70 per cent cheaper than their natural counterparts.
"I didn't want us to start our marriage with a bunch of debt over a ring," Schaffer said.
The Edmonton couple also had concerns about traditional diamonds, which are often associated with environmental damage and labour abuses in the developing world.
For Mwadi, whose family left Congo because of the conflict stemming from resource mining, it was important to avoid that harm.
"With lab grown, it's just kind of a way to help with sustainability," he said.
One way to create a lab-grown diamond mimics how they're formed in gas clouds in outer space.
Technicians place a sliver of pre-existing mined diamond, like a tiny carbon seed, inside a plasma chamber and expose it to the right temperature, pressure and gasses. The process releases carbon pieces, which layer onto the seed, growing the diamond.
Lab-grown diamonds can be created in just a few weeks, compared to natural diamonds which take millions of years to form deep beneath the earth.
U.S.-based Vrai is one of the few companies that controls its entire supply chain, from growing and cutting the diamond to designing the ring and delivering it to the consumer.
For a long time, the only option was mined diamonds that have "environmental and human tolls on the communities they come from," said Vrai CEO Mona Akhavi. "We are looking at an industry that's changing."
The company is expanding across North America and Europe; it opened its first Canadian showroom in Toronto earlier this year. Akhavi said Vrai is seeing huge demand from millennial and Gen Z consumers.