If no one sent you the photo of an ad for free lab-grown diamonds at the Jewellery & Gem World (JGW) show in Hong Kong this week — well, maybe you need more diamond contacts on WhatsApp.
The biggest topic of conversation from the fair was not the trading or the glamour but the fact that Universal Chains, a Thai jewelry manufacturer, was promoting its “Gen Z Diamonds” collection featuring gold and complimentary man-made diamonds. The message on the banner: “We only charge for the gold[.] The lab diamonds are free.” Attendees shared the picture widely on chat apps and social media.
This is not the first time a company has used the low value of synthetic diamonds for marketing purposes. New York-based The Clear Cut gives away a lab-grown diamond as a travel replica to customers who buy a natural diamond. Philadelphia-based retailer Steven Singer Jewelers had a similar offer, which has now expired.
But those were both natural-diamond jewelers trying to underscore the value gap between the two products. Universal Chains, exhibiting in hall 3, is in the lab-grown space itself: It cuts and polishes lab-grown diamonds in Surat and Mumbai and through a collaboration with a factory in China, its marketing director, Akash Sharma, told Rapaport News on Thursday. Lab-grown diamond jewelry is a small part of the business, but he foresees growing demand for synthetics as prices fall to levels similar to cubic zirconia (CZ) and moissanite.
“The thinking behind this program is we are seeing the lab going in that direction,” said Sharma. “There is [cubic] zirconia, there is Swarovski, and now the lab[-grown diamonds] came in. You can see the rough [production] cost is around $2 or $3 [per carat], and we can see from [the] last one year or two years it’s continuously dropping down.”
Price slump
The wholesale price of a 1-carat, F-color, VS1-clarity lab-grown diamond with a grading report from the International Gemological Institute (IGI) nearly halved to $90 per carat in September compared with $165 per carat in February 2024, according to research by Garry Holloway, founder of Melbourne, Australia-based Holloway Diamonds and of diamond resource PriceScope. He used listings from online lab-grown sales platforms to estimate this.
Currently, Sharma explained, the cost of the polished is the rough price plus the expense of manually cutting and polishing it. Once machines are widely available for this, it will be about as cheap as those simulants, he said.
Sharma believes the main market for lab-grown will be fashion jewelry in silver settings, matching the low price point. The gold jewelry with lab-grown diamonds Universal Chains is touting — a small segment of its business — is more about the metal than the stones, he said. The gold price has risen 43% in the past year to $3,668 per ounce at press time, according to Goldprice.org.
“I believe…gold is still…not going to stop here and [at least] not go down,” he added. “We are telling our clients that is the right time even to restock it for the season, because I think it might cross $4,000 in the coming week.”
The “free” stones studded in the jewelry are mostly about adding sparkle to what is essentially a gold product. “We are not charging for the lab[-grown diamonds], so…they are buying gold only,” Sharma noted. “It’s an investment for them.”
He wasn’t surprised how much attention the market gave to the promotion, which the company had been planning for six to eight months. “When the price point came of the lab-grown where we [were] able to buy at such [a] price, [only then could] we offer these prices,” he added.
Main image: The banner at the JGW show in Hong Kong.
