What are Lab Diamonds?  A Paragon of Human Achievement

Lab diamonds have the same crystal structure as mined diamonds: carbon atoms arranged in a cubic crystal structure. High quality lab diamonds have the same optical and physical properties as natural diamonds.

Because the growth process is similar to natural diamond growth, there are still variations in color and clarity of lab created diamonds. In other words, not all lab grown diamonds are colorless and flawless. Man-made diamonds are graded on the exact same criteria as mined diamonds (the Four Cs), by the same independent gemological laboratories that grade earth-extracted diamonds.

Unlike cheap diamond simulants, such as cubic zirconia and moissanite, lab diamonds offered by Ada Diamonds have indistinguishable brilliance, scintillation, flash, and fire when compared to mined diamonds. Trained gemologists cannot tell the difference between our diamonds and natural diamonds without specialized laboratory equipment.

Ada Diamonds proudly offers only laboratory-grown diamonds in our fine jewelry. Compared to mined diamonds, our sustainably cultured diamonds have fewer impurities and fewer defects. This makes our diamonds whiter, brighter, and stronger than the vast majority of mined diamonds. 

The ability to grow diamonds is one of the most precise and difficult manufacturing techniques that humans have ever achieved. It took almost 60 years of effort to develop the precision to grow gemstone quality diamonds. 

Today, there are two methods of growing diamond gemstones: High Pressure-High Temperature (HPHT) & Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD). Each process is best suited for certain sizes & colors of diamonds.

Common Misconceptions

There are many incorrect 'facts' promoted by the mined diamond lobby in order to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt about laboratory-grown diamonds. Below are the most common misconceptions, and here are the rest.

This is the most common misconception and is completely false. De Beers self-reported costs to mine diamonds was $104 per carat (for rough diamonds) in 2015. The marginal cost to grow each diamond in a laboratory is many times the cost for De Beers and other mining operations to dig diamonds out of the Earth, even if you ignore the fixed costs of the machinery required to culture diamonds in a lab.
The costs to cut, polish, and grade diamonds is exactly the same, regardless of the origin: grown or mined. 

The process to grow diamonds in a laboratory is very similar to the geological growth process. The same types of inclusions and imperfections present in mined diamonds can also occur in lab diamonds. If the diamond crystal grows too fast, there can be minuscule cracks (feathers) in the diamond. There can also be small inclusions of trace elements or other growth defects that cause the diamond to be near-colorless or slightly included. Lab diamonds are independently graded on the exact same criteria as mined diamonds by the exact same independent gemological laboratories that also grade mined diamonds.

There are approximately 25 million carats of diamond gemstones that are mined, cut, and polished every year, with billions of carats more in existing mines. De Beers estimates its current diamond reserves at 479.7 million carats. To build production facilities large enough to generate one percent of the current mined supply would take hundreds of millions of dollars of capital expenditure to build the facility and tens of millions of dollars a year to run the facility. It will take many years before lab diamonds are anything but an extremely small portion of the total diamond market.

This misconception hinges on three incorrect assumptions:

1. Diamonds are rare (see below)

2. There will be enough diamonds grown in a labs around the world to reduce that rarity (see Misconception #3)

3. It is cheaper to grow diamonds than it is to mine them (see Misconception #1)

While mined fancy colored diamonds and large investment grade diamonds are quite rare, there are currently over one billion carats of diamond gemstones owned globally. Experts estimate that the Baby Boomer Generation in the United States owns over 500 million carats of diamond gemstones which will be inherited or resold in the next few decades. Ada believes the much larger threat to the value of mined diamonds is the recycling and resale of previously mined diamonds.

In fact, the main reason that the diamond industry exists is not to grow diamond gemstones but instead to grow functional diamonds for industrial, computational, health care, and scientific applications.