Notes from a session at the World Diamond Congress, Singapore, July 2026. A panel on building natural diamond demand, and the moment a dealer body said out loud what most marketing has spent a decade softening.
There are diamonds, and there are synthetics. Not our line. That came from the outgoing vice president of the World Federation of Diamond Bourses, speaking on a panel about natural diamond demand, and tracing the language to a conversation with GIA's own chief executive and to a speech from Botswana's Minister of Minerals and Natural Resources.
Not lab-grown. Synthetic. Said on stage, by the people whose job is to sell diamonds for a living.
Lab-grown has functioned for years as a softer, more technical-sounding label. Hearing a dealer body's own leadership endorse synthetic instead tells you the terminology fight has reached the counter, not just the standards bodies.
Roughly half of US diamond buyers now choose lab-grown. Nobody on the panel disputed that number or treated it as controversial. It was simply the starting condition everyone else had to work around. What they argued about was what natural diamonds do with that reality.
A separate thread on the same panel was about delivery rather than messaging. The industry has spent years talking about telling a better story for natural diamonds as a category, but almost nobody has solved how one shop assistant tells the story of one specific stone, standing across a counter from one specific customer, in the ninety seconds that conversation actually gets. The proposed fix was a version of what Tracr is already attempting further up the chain: a short, verifiable record a sales associate can hand over on the spot, not just a certificate filed away after the sale.
The most concrete evidence for what is actually shifting consumer taste came from The Clear Cut's founder. Her business has sold 115% more diamonds in the warmer, visibly imperfect colour range over the past two years, alongside rising demand for antique cuts. Her reading of it: manufactured perfection got cheap and easy to obtain, so perfection itself stopped being the thing worth paying for. Individuality took its place.
One story from the same panel stayed with us. A client with a ten thousand dollar budget was quoted eighteen hundred dollars for a lab-grown two carat oval. He turned it down. Getting engaged, he said, was too significant a decision to mark with something that cheap. He chose natural, and was willing to spend the difference to do it.
Roughly half of US diamond consumers now choose lab-grown. Nobody disputed it.
115% growth in warmer, visibly imperfect colour range sales at The Clear Cut over two years.
"Synthetic," not "lab-grown." Language now endorsed publicly by the WFDB's own leadership.
Two instincts sat on this panel without being reconciled. One says differentiate hard, name the category honestly, and let the distinction do the selling. The other says lead with story and individuality, and trust the customer to arrive at natural diamonds on their own terms. We know which side of that we sit on. We just do not think either instinct works without the other.
- 1Panel: "Building Natural Diamond Demand Worldwide." World Diamond Congress, Singapore, July 2026. Panellists: Olivia Landau (The Clear Cut), Amber Pepper (Natural Diamond Council), David Bonaparte (Jewelers of America), Tim Goodman (Get-Diamonds), Moshe Salem (World Federation of Diamond Bourses). Moderated by Rob Bates.