Lab-grown diamond in manufacturing, computing, and medicine

Lab-Grown Diamonds and the End of Scarcity Pricing for a Luxury Good

Last checked: October 2026. Wholesale diamond prices change every quarter, so figures on this page are a snapshot, not a forecast.

For most of the twentieth century a diamond was sold as a symbol of rarity. Within about eight years, factories learned to grow stones that are chemically and physically the same, and the wholesale price of those stones fell by more than ninety percent. This page argues that lab-grown diamonds are the clearest real-world test of what happens when a good marketed on scarcity meets manufacturing abundance, and that the test offers lessons for other fields where scarcity is assumed rather than proven. The page serves the futurism and abundance goals of this wiki. It treats the diamond market as a research case study on how people and markets move from scarcity toward abundance, and on who captures the gains when they do.

What changed in eight years

Diamond is a form of carbon. Two industrial methods can now grow it. High pressure, high temperature (HPHT) growth imitates the conditions deep in the Earth. Chemical vapor deposition (CVD) builds a crystal layer by layer from a carbon-rich gas. Both methods produce stones that pass the standard tests for diamond.

In 2018 the United States Federal Trade Commission revised its jewelry guides and removed the word "natural" from its definition of diamond, because, in its words, lab-created products with essentially the same optical, physical, and chemical properties as mined diamonds are also diamonds. Sellers must still disclose clearly that a lab-grown stone is not mined. The legal question of what counts as a diamond was settled by physics, not by origin.

The same year, De Beers, the company most associated with natural diamonds, launched its own lab-grown jewelry brand, Lightbox, at a flat price of 800 United States dollars per carat. In May 2025 the company announced it would close the brand. Its own statement said lab-grown prices in the jewelry sector had fallen 90 percent at wholesale since launch, "tracking closer to a cost-plus model." A trade press report of the closure noted that lab-grown jewelry was by then for sale in supermarkets.

The numbers behind the fall

A quarterly wholesale price list kept by industry researcher Edahn Golan tracks trading prices for certified round lab-grown stones. Its October 2026 edition reports that the index is 93 percent below its July 2018 starting level. In the third quarter of 2026 a one carat, D color, VVS round traded at about 87 dollars per carat at wholesale, and a three carat stone of the same grade at about 142 dollars per carat.

The same source reports that round prices rose about 2 percent from the second to the third quarter of 2026, the first sign that the market may be near a floor. A separate report on the 2025 data explains why: Chinese HPHT producers stopped cutting prices once rough stones reached roughly 10 to 15 dollars per carat, and prices for smaller polished stones then rose. A price floor near the cost of production is exactly what economists expect when a manufactured good becomes a commodity.

Who kept the savings

Falling factory prices did not pass straight through to buyers. A 2025 trade report found that the average retail price for a one carat certified lab-grown round was about twice the wholesale trading price, and that United States jewelers earned an average gross margin of 74 percent on one to three carat stones. A 2026 report cited an analyst estimate that retailers were still capturing a markup of more than 80 percent above wholesale, a figure that had barely moved in a year.

This is the most useful lesson of the case for people who care about abundance. Production abundance is necessary but not enough. Between the factory and the household sit retailers, brands, and stories about meaning, and each layer can hold back part of the gain for years. Abundance reaches ordinary people faster when prices are transparent, when comparison is easy, and when many sellers compete on the same standard product.

Scarcity as a story, not only a fact

The diamond case separates two kinds of scarcity that are often confused.

• Physical scarcity means a thing is hard to make or find. Lab growth largely removed this for gem diamonds.
• Narrative scarcity means a thing is valued because people agree it is rare and meaningful. This kind survived. De Beers said it would move investment into marketing to "reinvigorate desire" for natural stones, and described lab-grown stones as a separate, low-cost category.

Both responses are rational. A seller of a scarce good has every reason to defend the story once the physics no longer protects the price. The same pattern can be watched in other fields. Some scarcity is mostly physical, such as fresh water in a desert, which is why desalination matters. Some is partly created by rules, a theme explored in occupational licensing. Asking which kind of scarcity is in front of us is a practical habit for anyone trying to solve problems in living on a limited budget.

The industrial side of abundance

The jewelry market is the visible part of the story, but the larger long-term effect may be industrial. When De Beers closed Lightbox, it said its synthetic diamond subsidiary, Element Six, would focus on industrial and technology uses, including semiconductors and quantum technologies, from a CVD plant in Oregon. Diamond conducts heat very well and is extremely hard, so less expensive, made-to-order diamond can improve cutting tools, heat spreaders for electronics, and sensors. A material that was once a luxury becomes an ordinary input to manufacturing. This follows a pattern discussed in time prices: progress often shows up first as falling hours of work needed to buy a thing.

Lessons for other abundance transitions

• Manufacturing can beat mining. When a scarce material can be built from common inputs and energy, its price tends to fall toward the cost of making it. This links diamond growth to energy costs, since both HPHT and CVD use a great deal of electricity.
• Floors exist. Prices do not fall to zero. They fall toward production cost, and producers may coordinate to stop cutting.
• Middle layers matter. Gains can be held by retailers or brands long after production costs drop.
• Old value is not instantly destroyed. Mined stones kept a separate market. Abundance often adds a low-cost option rather than erasing the old one.
• Legal definitions follow physics, slowly. The 2018 definition change shows rules can adapt to a new technology once evidence is clear.

Limits of this case study

Diamonds are a luxury good, and most people do not depend on them for survival, so lessons from this market do not transfer automatically to food, housing, or health care, where demand is not optional. Price data on this page comes from trade sources and industry researchers, not from a government statistics agency, and wholesale indexes cover only certain sizes and grades. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any stone, and resale values for both lab-grown and mined diamonds can be much lower than purchase prices.

Discussion questions, essay ideas, and learning related AI prompt ideas

• Which other goods today are priced mainly on narrative scarcity rather than physical scarcity, and what evidence would show the difference?
• Why might retail margins stay high for years after factory prices fall, and what would make them fall faster?
• Should the meaning of a gift depend on how hard the object was to produce?
• Write an essay comparing the price path of lab-grown diamonds with another manufactured good whose price fell sharply, using sourced figures.
• Write an essay on whether price floors set by producers help or harm the move toward abundance.
• Ask an AI system to explain the difference between HPHT and CVD diamond growth in plain language, and then quiz me on it.
• Ask an AI system to help me build a simple table that compares wholesale and retail prices for a product I buy often, so I can see where the markup sits.
• Ask an AI system to list industrial uses of synthetic diamond and explain why heat conduction matters in electronics.

See also

• Time prices and abundance
• Occupational licensing
• Why prices rise or fall
• Energy costs and abundance
• Asteroid mining
• Post-scarcity economy
• Marketing
• Chemistry