It didn't wait
for the closing ceremony.

A personal note, written after the World Diamond Congress, Singapore, July 2026.

I spent three days in a room with people who love this industry enough to argue about a single word for an hour. Synthetic or lab-grown. Golconda as a place or Golconda as a grade. Whether rarity can be measured or only felt. It was, genuinely, some of the best company I have kept in a long time. Our closing ceremony was on the 15th, songs and thank yous, and Fabio, our DES president, telling us, more than once, that this was not the end but the beginning.

By then the news had already reached most of the room. Venetia's pause was announced on the 13th, while sessions were still running. Ekati went into receivership on the 14th, the day before we closed. Nobody had gone anywhere yet. We were still sitting together in Singapore when both of those landed.

Ekati was Canada's first diamond mine, open since 1998. Its price per carat had fallen from ninety two dollars to twenty four in a single year, and when the court-supervised sale process closed with no buyers, there was nothing left to do but shut it down. Venetia is De Beers' only mine in South Africa, a two point three billion dollar underground operation, finished less than two years ago, built to run into the 2040s, paused for two years before it had properly begun.

I want to be careful here, because these are not the same kind of event and I do not think it is honest to treat them as one. Ekati failed. Nobody wanted it, not even at a steep discount, and a mine that helped launch an entire regional economy is now heading into reclamation instead of production. Venetia was paused, by choice, by a company deliberately managing supply to protect the value of what remains. One is a casualty. The other is a decision. Both, from where I sit, land the same way: less natural rough coming out of the ground, at the exact moment we were all in a room discussing how to convince people that rarity still means something.

I keep thinking about the panel on fancy colour diamonds, where someone described a stone as being worth more not because of how it looked but because it comes to market once every five or six years, and how satisfying that sentence is to say out loud. Rarity, spoken about that way, is comfortable. It is a story you tell a client across a table, evidence that what they are buying will not simply be made again next week in a factory somewhere. It is a much less comfortable thing to watch happen in real time, in a press release, to a mine and the people whose jobs depended on it.

We do not carry lab-grown at Kinchos. That was never a marketing position, it has just always been the honest one for us. But I do not think that decision gets to feel simple this week. A smaller, more expensive, more genuinely scarce supply of natural stone is not a talking point when you actually depend on it, it is a real constraint on a real business, ours included. The same forces that make natural rarer also make it harder to source, harder to price with any confidence a year out, and harder to promise a client the same piece could be made again if they wanted a matching one.

I do not have a tidy conclusion for this one. I think the honest version is that I came home from that closing ceremony feeling more certain than ever that full disclosure and natural sourcing are the right position for this house, and less certain than I would like about what the supply side of that promise looks like five years from now. Both of those things are true at once. I would rather write that down plainly than pretend the congress ended with more clarity than it actually did.

Agneta