For many people buying diamonds today, a stone’s origin is increasingly important. Nearly 20 years of journalists reporting on ethical, social, environmental, and human rights abuses connected to the mining of diamonds has caused a surge in demand for diamonds that can be traced to a responsible source.

Because of consumers’ desire for responsibly mined diamonds, a few companies are making a big effort to track selected mined diamonds, so they can assure a consumer about these gems’ ethical origins. But the reality is that for most diamond dealers and retailers, it is practically impossible for them to tell you where any given diamond was unearthed. That’s because the trading network for mined diamonds is vast and complicated; a single diamond can pass through many hands before it reaches a jewelry counter. Basically, there is no way for most retailers who purchase diamonds from diamond dealers to guarantee an individual diamond’s chain of custody from the mine to your finger.

As a result, many consumers who want to be assured of ethical origins are buying lab-grown diamonds
and we can clearly see that really builds demand. While lab-grown diamonds market share is estimated today at only about 1%-2% of the global market value of rough diamonds, this growing demand will mean a 15% market share in smaller diamonds and a 7.5% share in sales of larger diamonds by 2020, according to a recent Morgan Stanley report.

AIDIA lab-grown diamonds tell you all you need to know about their “provenance” via their name. Provenance, by the way, is a French word that’s used to state an object’s place of origin, earliest known history, or famous owners. Auction houses and others who buy and sell expensive objects use provenance as a way to help estimate an object’s value – and to build demand for it.

Though value is in part expressed by what we will pay for any give object – today “value” has an additional meaning. For conscientious diamond buyers, value also includes a gem’s ethical, social and environmental pedigree. Responsible diamond buyers today want to know where their diamonds were sourced and a guaranteed responsible source, like AIDIA’s growing facilities, adds real value to their purchase, much more than the dollar amount they paid for it.

To sum it up, while provenance and value are responsible for the increased demand for lab-grown diamonds and lab-grown diamond jewelry, they are not the only factors that come into play.

Stay tuned for more.