DIY Diamonds: Luxury Gemstones Are Becoming More Accessible

Give someone a diamond, they have a diamond; give someone a machine that makes diamonds, they have diamonds for a lifetime.

There is an old Jewish parable about an island where diamonds are so plentiful that they are worthless. Reality is beginning to look a little more like this imagined island. With the rise of diamond-growing labs leading to increasingly affordable versions of these precious stones, consumers can now buy themselves machines to make their own for roughly the cost of a luxury sports car.

Chinese eCommerce marketplace Alibaba is now selling a synthetic diamond-making machine for $200,000 to consumers, as Ars Technica reported. The move plays into a broader trend of lab-grown diamonds becoming increasingly popular and — unfortunately for an industry built on the illusion of scarcity — more accessible.

On its earnings call Thursday (Sept. 12), Signet Jewelers, owner of several popular jewelry retail banners such as Kay Jewelers, Zales and Jared, shared that lab-grown diamonds are coming to make up a larger portion of overall diamond sales. In the second quarter of fiscal year 2025, lab-grown diamond fashion jewelry sales rose more than 25% and drove average transaction value. Prices of these stones have been on the decline.

“Lab-created … [has] been broadly available in jewelry since 2019,” Signet Jewelers CEO Virginia Drosos told analysts during an earnings call. “So, the story of lab diamond pricing-dropping has been a consistent story over that time period … I don’t believe [consumers] have the expectation that it will hold its value necessarily over time in the same way that natural diamonds traditionally have. So, I think we’re seeing a more educated consumer over time about the difference.”

Additionally, jeweler Pandora has been seeing young consumers increasingly buy these synthetic stones.

This demand for lab-grown diamonds, which tend to be more affordable, comes as shoppers feel budgetary pressures mount. Research from the “How Consumer Perception of Inflation Forces Many to Trade Down” edition of the PYMNTS Intelligence “New Reality Check: The Paycheck-to-Paycheck Report” series showed how consumers’ spending power is dwindling. Most consumers said their incomes have not kept pace with inflation.

These pressures are prompting consumers to cut back and trade down, the study found. Ninety-seven percent of those who live paycheck to paycheck with issues paying bills, 92% of paycheck-to-paycheck consumers without issues paying bills, and 73% of those who do not live paycheck to paycheck said they have changed their retail product purchasing behavior to cope with price increases. Against this backdrop, it makes sense that there would be more demand for lower-priced diamond options.

Overall, diamond selling is becoming more like mass-market retail. For instance, buying these precious stones is getting simpler and quicker.

“We’ve actually done what Amazon did with their Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) program and taken some of that inventory and put it closer to our customers in Europe,” James Morgan, chief product officer at B2B jewelry marketplace Nivoda, told PYMNTS earlier this year. “So, there’s some that can actually be sourced with a delivery time of just one to two days.”