By Clementines Jewellers  ·  The Journal  ·  April 2026

I'm going to be honest with you about something that not many jewellers will say plainly: for the vast majority of buyers — and especially for anyone purchasing an engagement ring — I believe a natural white diamond is very difficult to justify over a lab-grown one. Not for ethical reasons alone, though those matter. But for reasons of pure, objective value.

This isn't a sales pitch dressed up as advice. It's the opinion I've formed from working closely with diamonds, understanding how the market has shifted, and watching how De Beers — the company that essentially invented the modern diamond industry — has responded to that shift. Their response tells you everything.

First: What's the Actual Difference?

Lab-grown diamonds are chemically, physically, and optically identical to natural diamonds. They are not simulants — they are not moissanite or cubic zirconia. They are diamonds, grown in a controlled environment that replicates the conditions deep within the earth, rather than formed over billions of years underground. A gemologist with a standard loupe cannot tell them apart. The only way to distinguish them is with specialist equipment that reads atomic-level growth patterns.

Both types are graded using the same 4Cs — cut, colour, clarity, and carat — by the same laboratories. At Clementines, every engagement ring features an IGI-certified lab-grown diamond, graded to the same rigorous standard as any natural stone you'd find at a traditional jeweller.

The Value Question Nobody Frames Honestly

The conversation around lab-grown diamonds almost always comes back to value and resale. So let me address both directly.

Lab-grown diamond prices have fallen dramatically as production technology has improved — by around 74% between 2020 and 2024 alone. Today, a comparable lab-grown diamond costs approximately 80–85% less than its natural equivalent. That's not a slight discount. That's a fundamentally different price point.

The resale picture for lab-grown diamonds is, I'll be honest, not strong. Most dealers will offer around 20–40% of the current market value, and many won't buy them back at all. But here's what that conversation usually leaves out: natural diamonds aren't a good investment either. They typically retain somewhere between 20–60% of their original retail price — and "retain" is a generous word for losing up to half your money the moment you walk out of the shop.

The more meaningful comparison is the absolute financial loss. Because lab-grown diamonds are so much less expensive upfront, the actual money lost on resale is frequently lower in real terms, even if the percentage looks worse on paper. More importantly: almost nobody sells an engagement ring. It isn't bought as an asset. It's bought as an expression of love, commitment, and taste. Framing a ring purchase around resale value is a little like buying a wedding dress and asking about its eBay potential.

"You don't buy an engagement ring to sell it. You buy it to be worn every day for the rest of your life by the person you love most."

The real case for lab-grown is simpler: the same budget that buys a 0.8ct natural diamond buys a 2ct lab-grown diamond of equal or better quality. That's a choice worth making with clear eyes, not one you should be talked out of by vague appeals to "rarity" and "value."

The White Diamond Argument

Here's where I hold a particular view, and I'll own it as my professional opinion rather than settled fact.

For most of diamond history, white — colourless — diamonds were the most prized. The whiter, the rarer, the more expensive. D colour (completely colourless) stones commanded extraordinary premiums. That hierarchy was real, and for natural diamonds, it still is.

But lab-grown technology is exceptionally good at producing white diamonds. Colourless and near-colourless lab-grown stones are abundant, consistently graded, and produced with precision that nature cannot replicate on demand. The result is that lab-grown and natural white diamonds are now, for all practical purposes, interchangeable to the eye — but not to the wallet.

In my view, for white diamonds under approximately 3–4 carats, the case for choosing natural over lab-grown becomes very hard to make. You are paying a significant premium for geological origin that is invisible in the stone itself and irrelevant to how it looks and wears. For larger stones — particularly above 4ct — and for fancy coloured diamonds, the calculus changes. But for the engagement ring market, where most stones sit between 1ct and 2.5ct? Lab-grown is objectively the stronger choice for the buyer.

What De Beers Is Telling You Without Saying It

If you want a clear signal that the industry itself knows this to be true, look at De Beers. The company that created "A Diamond Is Forever" — one of the most effective advertising campaigns of the twentieth century — is now running a campaign called Desert Diamonds, launched in late 2025. It promotes champagne, cream, and warm brown-toned natural diamonds.

Why? Because those are the stones lab-grown technology currently cannot replicate convincingly at scale. The warm, organic hues of naturally-formed coloured diamonds — the fancy yellows, the cognacs, the champagnes — emerge from the specific geological conditions of their formation. You cannot consistently grow them in a laboratory reactor. So De Beers, facing a lab-grown market that now represents over half of all engagement ring centre stones sold globally, is doing the only rational thing: pivoting to promote the stones that lab-grown cannot yet touch.

That tells you exactly where the real scarcity lies in the natural diamond market — and it isn't in colourless white diamonds.

A Note on Small Diamonds in Multi-Stone Jewellery

For pieces like tennis bracelets, pavé settings, and multi-stone necklaces — where the diamonds are small and the visual goal is maximum white brilliance — lab-grown is, if anything, an even clearer choice. Small natural white diamonds have limited resale value and are largely indistinguishable from lab-grown equivalents at that scale. The only reason to choose natural in these settings is convention, not logic.

Why I've Made Lab-Grown the Standard at Clementines

When I set out to build Clementines, I made a deliberate decision: every engagement ring would feature an IGI-certified lab-grown diamond as standard. Not as the budget option, not as the ethical consolation prize — as the best choice for our clients, full stop.

It means a client with a £2,500 budget can wear a genuinely exceptional diamond. It means I can be completely transparent about what we're offering and why. And it means I never have to oversell a stone on the basis of its underground origins when what actually matters is how it looks, how it's set, and what it means to the person wearing it.

That said — if a client comes to me wanting a natural diamond for personal or sentimental reasons, I will source one. The choice should always be yours, made with full information. What I won't do is let anyone pay a premium they don't understand for a quality they can't see.