(idexonline.com) - The tide is turning for lab-grown diamonds. The world's biggest bourse, Bharat, in Mumbai, India, voted earlier this week to allow them back on to its trading floors. Members overturned a ban introduced five years ago to prevent them being mixed in with mined gems. Technology to distinguish one from the other has come a long way since 2015, and so has the willingness of diamantaires to embrace a product that is cheaper to produce and more profitable to sell. Only last month De Beers, creators of the modern diamond industry, opened its $94m Lightbox factory in Portland, Oregon, USA, which will soon be producing 200,000 carats a year of polished lab-grown gems. It has a super-simple pricing policy - $800 per carat, any diamond, any size, any cut. Lab-growns currently account for about three per cent of all gem-quality diamond sales worldwide (2020, Statista) and that figure is forecast to reach 10 per cent within a decade. The Bharat Diamond Bourse has recognized which way the wind is blowing. If it doesn't join the lab-grown revolution, it will become irrelevant as diamond traders will simply take their trade elsewhere. So is BDB setting a precedent? Can we expect Antwerp, Ramat Gan, Dubai and others to embrace lab-growns any time soon?
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