In today's very modern era, the movement to do-away with overly classical romanticism sometimes gets the best of our judgement. Diamonds are not immune to this trend. Some recent surveys suggested that a portion of the millennial population in the US are deeply rooted in the preference of man-made diamonds over natural diamonds. Why, you might ask? When natural diamonds are more valuable and have been known to appreciate in value over the years, in contrast to man-made diamond's relatively young popularity in the jewelry market.
Well, they believe in one very keen marketing observation that was shared by many of these man-made diamond growing companies. If a diamond is man-made, then there is no chance for it to be a conflict-diamond. If you've all watched the movie "Blood Diamond", starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Connelly and Djimon Hounsou, you'll know what the word conflict-diamond refers to.
Now, the worldwide diamond industry has several policies in place, to combat the usage of conflict diamonds on the marketplace. The Kimberly Process, created by the United Nations General Assembly in the year 2000, was one of these policies enacted to siphon conflict stones out of the pipeline. It entailed the inclusion of disclaimers and affirmations that neither buyers nor sellers were trading goods known to be derived from war-torn sources.
An excerpt of this can be seen below:
“The diamonds herein invoiced have been purchased from legitimate sources not involved in funding conflict and in compliance with United Nations resolutions. The seller hereby guarantees that these diamonds are conflict free, based on personal knowledge and/or written guarantees provided by the supplier of these diamonds.”
Despite this though, there are some who believe that conflict diamonds still make their way into some channels of the jewelry industry, and the allure of buying man-made or artificially grown diamonds helps people to feel better that their stones are conflict-free. This marketing point has been the subject of debate, even among high profile personalities in the trade like Martin Rapaport.
A lab-grown / man-made diamond factory, with large machines that create the temperatures and pressures required for artificially making diamonds.
Both man-made and natural diamonds hold large monetary value equivalents (or high price tags) for most modern day consumers, even those that belong to the millennial age group. Diamonds grown artificially though, since they can be produced by machine and are technically factory-produced items which can therefore be made continuously, hold lesser a smaller price tag. Lab-grown diamonds are about 40-60% cheaper than natural counterparts, depending on where you buy them.
The portion of the millennial group that prefers to use natural diamonds, bank on the joint appeal of the stone's performance as an investment, and the contradictory stigma of man-made diamonds still being called 'fake' by a large part of the world's population, mainly due to personal opinion.
Unfortunately the terms "genuine" and "real" do not help much, as people can associate different meanings to these words. Man-made diamond has the essential chemical structure and composition that diamond has, BUT it was made artificially by people. Whether that sounds like a fake stone or a real stone to you, it's really up to your opinion. Gemologists like us only differentiate between the two by proper and distinctive naming, citing one item as a natural diamond and the other as a man-made diamond.
Regardless of which stone suits your preference, Gemcamp Laboratories can differentiate natural diamonds from man-made counterparts using highly advanced spectrometric equipment. Take note that by using the term 'man-made diamonds', we are referring to carbon-based artificially grown stones that form with the essential diamond structure. These are neither cubic zirconia or moissanite, and they cannot be detected by thermal diamond testers, electric testers, or any usual over-the-counter testing instrument.
