FACTS & FICTIONS
Learn the Truth About Lab Grown Diamonds
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Answers to all of the common questions about lab diamonds. Topics include: price, quality, resale value, time to grow, detection, appraisals, & insurance.
A purchase of jewelry from Ada Diamonds is directly supporting the development of high tech applications of diamonds such as laser lenses, surgical knives, faster charging electric vehicles, water purification devices, high pressure anvils, semi-conductors, and more.
The short answer is that the mined diamond industry fears the coming disruption of laboratory grown diamonds. Unlike the taxi lobby and the hotel lobby, the diamond lobby has worked preemptively to fight the coming disruption, doing everything possible to stymie the growth of cultured diamonds.
Science
Blue nuance is caused by the presence of excess boron resulting from HPHT growth. Lab diamonds with blue nuance will have a slight blueish tinge and have limited to no resale value.
The process to grow diamonds in a laboratory is very similar to the geological growth process. In other words, diamonds are grown above the Earth by recreating the conditions below the Earth where carbon crystallizes into diamond. Thus, the same types of inclusions and imperfections present in mined diamonds can also occur in lab diamonds.
While synthetic diamond is a commonly used term for a laboratory-grown diamond, Ada Diamonds contends that synthetic diamond is not a scientifically accurate term for lab created diamonds, as there is no synthesis required to grow a diamond in a laboratory. Diamonds are merely a form of carbon, not a complex molecule synthesized from multiple precursor elements.
There is no such thing as a fake diamond. There are just diamond simulants and diamonds. Ada Diamonds refuses to sell diamond simulants such as cubic zirconia or moissanite, as diamond simulants are cheap, inferior facsimiles of diamonds.
A Laboratory-Grown Diamond is Forever. It has the same physical and optical properties of a mined diamond. It will not change color. It will not change appearance. It will look exactly the same in a million years as it does the day you receive it from Ada Diamonds.
Environment
By utilizing grown diamonds instead of mined diamonds Ada can ensure that there is little to no harm to ecosystems, wildlife or communities in the creation of our diamonds, whereas mining diamonds out of the Earth has been proven to harm animals around the world.
While mining diamonds requires diesel and dynamite, growing diamonds only requires carbon and electricity. Because carbon is abundant and electricity can be sourced from renewable sources, laboratory-grown diamonds are truly sustainable.
Despite the best efforts of the mining industry to expand diamond mining operations around the world, humanity has already passed ‘peak diamond,’ extracting 25% fewer carats in 2016 than a decade ago. Each marginal carat mined is more difficult to extract and more energy intensive than the last as all the easy to get diamonds have already been extracted.
Economics
Other jewelers regularly tell prospective clients that lab-grown diamonds have zero resale value. This is false. Just as mined diamonds have some resale value, lab diamonds have a similar resale value as a portion of the original sale price.
It is a common misconception that the price of growing diamonds will fall precipitously in the decades ahead. It is Ada Diamonds' position that the costs to grow each diamond in a laboratory will always be greater than the cost to dig diamonds out of the Earth.
The misconception hinges on three incorrect assumptions: Diamonds are rare, there will be enough diamonds grown in labs around the world to reduce that rarity, and it is far cheaper to grow diamonds than it is to mine them.
If it is more expensive to grow a diamond than to mine one, how is Ada able to offer lab diamonds at a discount to mined diamonds? Two main reasons: It's far more profitable to mine than grow diamonds and Ada runs an extremely efficient 21st Century supply chain.
Just like a mined diamond, the price of a lab diamond varies greatly depending on the shape and quality of the diamond.
Comparisons
Lab Diamonds and Synthetic Diamonds are two terms for the same thing: diamonds created by humans above the Earth. Diamond Simulants are cheap replicas of diamonds, not diamonds.
Quite simply, a laboratory-grown diamond is a diamond. A cubic zirconia is not a diamond. In fact, a cubic zirconia contains zero carbon, whereas diamonds (mined and grown) are made entirely from carbon.