Notes from a session at the World Diamond Congress, Singapore, July 2026. A panel on growth in the Asian market ended up being about something else: whether natural and lab-grown diamonds can share a market at all.
A lab-grown diamond in China now sells online for roughly the price of a cup of coffee. Not because the stone changed. Because pricing information travels fast there, and once the wholesale collapse became visible, retail followed almost immediately. In the United States the same slide has taken years, and by most accounts it still has not finished.
That single data point is the size doom loop argument taken to its logical end. A product whose entire pitch rests on manufactured abundance eventually prices itself down to match what abundance is actually worth.
Everyone who bought synthetic two or three years back is now holding something worth a fraction of what they paid. Natural diamonds never had that problem.
Hong Kong's diamond trade offered a structural answer to the confusion this creates. Decades ago, following a crisis of trust over undisclosed synthetic rubies and sapphires, retailers there signed a pact: sell natural or sell lab-grown, never both under the same brand. A retailer wanting to carry both had to open a second, separately named business to do it.
Backing that pact is Hong Kong's Trade Descriptions Ordinance, a law from the 1980s that makes misrepresenting a stone's nature a criminal offence, not a civil dispute. The claim made on the panel was that this combination, legal weight plus an industry-wide separation agreement, has kept Hong Kong free of a major disclosure scandal for years.
One brand, one category. Retailers sell natural or lab-grown, never both under a single name.
Criminal liability under the Trade Descriptions Ordinance for misrepresenting a stone's nature.
Years without a major disclosure scandal, by the trade body's own account.
Contrast that with a practice also raised in the same discussion: some US jewellers now build a piece around a synthetic centre stone while setting the surrounding melee in natural diamonds. Disclosed, technically compliant, and the opposite instinct entirely. One market draws a hard line between the two categories. Another blends them within a single object and trusts the paperwork to carry the difference.
An audience member asked whether the industry had matured enough that natural and lab-grown could simply diverge on design, each developing its own aesthetic, so a shopper's choice of style would signal the material without anyone needing to ask. The panel's answer, in substance, was no. Successful designs get copied regardless of what they are made from, and price point drives what gets made far more than category loyalty does.
We do not carry lab-grown material at Kinchos, so the wall-or-blend question does not arise for us in the way it does for a retailer selling both. But it is worth knowing which instinct the trade itself trusts more, because it tells you something about how seriously this industry now takes the confusion it spent the last decade creating.
- 1Panel: "Growth Opportunities in the Asian Market." World Diamond Congress, Singapore, July 2026. Panellists: Lin Qiang (Shanghai Diamond Exchange), Kent Wong (Chow Tai Fook Jewellery), Lawrence Ma (Diamond Federation of Hong Kong), Anoop Mehta (Bharat Diamond Bourse), Brijesh Dholakia (Hari Krishna Exports). Moderated by Rob Bates.