Ethical

Several years ago, the mined diamond industry came under scrutiny with unethical production practices were exposed. These diamonds, sometimes referred to as blood or conflict diamonds, were funding violence and exploiting miners and their families. Thanks to the Kimberley Process, established in 2003, these unethical practices have been significantly reduced. But all in all, mined diamonds result in 1 injury for every 1,000 workers annually, while lab-grown diamonds result in zero. If avoiding conflict or blood diamonds is important to you, lab-created diamonds provide peace a mind that a natural diamond often cannot, and you may find reassurance in knowing the exact origin of your diamond.

Price

Mined diamonds and lab-created diamonds have the exact same costs when it comes to cutting, polishing, and inspection. However, up to that point, the costs and processes are very different.

Mined diamonds have a long supply chain. To get a diamond from its raw form to a retail-ready gemstone requires miners, distributors, cutters, polishers, jewelry manufacturers, and retailers.

The lab-created diamond supply chain is much shorter by skipping the mining process. To put it simply, a lab-created diamond touches fewer hands, making it ultimately up to 20% less expensive than mined diamonds.

Environmentally kind

As with the mining of any natural resource, the diamond mining has a significant impact on the environment. For every carat of diamond that is mined, nearly 100 sq ft of land is disturbed and almost 6000 lbs of mineral waste is created.

However, lab-created diamonds are inherently and significantly less detrimental to the environment as it takes considerably less energy to grow a diamond in a lab than it does to dig it out of the ground. In fact, it is actually in the interest of the growers to minimize the amount of energy they use in the process to save money and decrease their costs.