The man-made diamond boom is over, and prices for ultra-trendy lab-grown diamonds are set to tumble this year, industry veterans say. Paul Zimnisky, a leading diamond analyst, foresees jewellers scaling back their business in lab-grown diamonds while ramping up their focus on natural diamonds over the next year. In fact, most jewellers aren’t even bothering to stock lab-grown diamonds in inventory, and are only purchasing them on consignment, he told us.
It’s the opposite of what jewellers have been doing since 2018, when the hype for lab-grown diamonds took off. {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"ImageObject","caption":"Lab-made De Beers diamonds; they used to be all the hype in the industry.
Photo: De Beers","url":"https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/canvas/2024/06/04/29ca8e7e-d521-4c08-a1f3-701d3ce71503_e54985f0.
jpg"} Lab-made De Beers diamonds; they used to be all the hype in the industry. Photo: De Beers “Some of the fad is starting to fade a bit,” Zimnisky said, pointing to lower-priced retailers like Walmart and Pandora, who have started to “aggressively” push lab-grown stones. “I think it’s become a lot more mainstream.
” Prices for lab-grown diamonds will continue to fall over the next year, he said. Zimnisky didn’t have a price target, but said he believed loose lab-grown diamonds could see nearly the same price decline as they did in 2023, which the jewellery analytics firm Tenoris estimated to be about 20 per cent in the .
