We are very good at inventing new ways to create diamonds. Unfortunately, we aren’t nearly as good at agreeing on how we should talk about them.
It’s the talk of the town - the World Jewellery Confederation (CIBJO) has changed its position on lab-created diamond terminology. It now recommends ‘synthetic’ as the differentiating descriptor and has moved away from ‘lab-grown’.
The Blue Books are important global benchmarks for language, standards and disclosure, and it would be foolish to pretend that CIBJO’s words do not carry enormous weight.
So, it is hardly surprising that the news has generated considerable disagreement in some corners of the jewellery industry. Several compelling arguments support the decision, while others strongly oppose the shift.
Perhaps the most popular is simply that ‘lab-grown’ has become established language in many retail markets. Lab-created diamonds are still new – particularly when measured against the 100,000 years of jewellery history – but consumers are becoming increasingly familiar with them.
However, this argument has an obvious weakness. Just because a term has been widely used for a long time does not necessarily mean it is the right term. Likewise, just because most people have become accustomed to using a particular word does not mean the industry should be reluctant to change it.
That aside, we often say the jewellery industry is guilty of forgetting just how technical its products are, and how little the average consumer knows about diamonds and their complexities. That remains true; however, consumers are learning.
A survey published earlier this year, based on more than 10,000 US couples who married in 2025, found that 61 per cent purchased an engagement ring featuring a lab-created diamond. That represented a 239 per cent increase since 2020.
Those figures matter for reasons beyond the sheer volume of purchases. Every one of those couples has friends, family members and colleagues who have inevitably asked about the ring. If they didn't know about lab-created diamonds before, they do now.
The same applies to couples who chose a natural diamond or a colour gemstone. Most will at least have encountered lab-created diamonds, even if they bought something else in the end.
In other words, with every passing day, more and more consumers are encountering these diamonds – and many of them are learning to call them ‘lab-grown’.
The owner of one of Australia’s largest jewellery retail chains made a similar point to me following the CIBJO announcement. He has an obvious commercial interest in the debate; however, his argument was nonetheless reasonable: changing well-established terminology risks creating unnecessary consumer confusion and disrupting the trade without providing an obvious corresponding benefit.
It is hard to argue with that. He also made another important point. ‘Synthetic’ may be scientifically precise, but language is about more than scientific precision. For many consumers, the word carries connotations of artificiality, inferiority, or imitation.
This is hardly a new problem for the jewellery industry. ‘Synthetic’ has been at the centre of terminology battles for decades, including a crucial US Federal Trade Commission decision involving synthetic emeralds in the 1960s.
And, on a personal level, I have never been entirely comfortable with ‘lab-grown’ diamonds either. The problem, in my humble opinion, is the word ‘lab’.
We use clarifying descriptors for all sorts of products: cage-free eggs, grass-fed beef, free-range poultry. These terms communicate something meaningful about provenance or production.
But lab-created diamonds aren't really produced in ‘laboratories’ the way consumers might imagine. The underlying technology may have been developed by crews of scientists in laboratories – General Electric and others played important roles in its development – but commercial diamond production today happens at industrial scale, largely in factories in China and India.
How far are we willing to go in the name of transparency? If ‘synthetic’ has negative connotations, how much better would ‘factory-created’ be? How would specifying a country of origin as part of the label - whether it be India or China - appeal to Australian consumers?
Maybe ‘synthetic’ isn’t so bad, after all?
Thinking outside the box
Which brings me to the question that interests me most. Could the jewellery industry actually make ‘synthetic’ cool?
Advertising history is full of examples of businesses and brands taking words, perceptions, and supposed weaknesses and turning them into strengths.
In the 1960s, German car manufacturer Volkswagen had a problem - American cars were enormous, extravagant, and glamorous. The Volkswagen Beetle, meanwhile, was small, strange-looking and, by conventional standards, ugly.
Rather than disguise that perception, an advertising agency embraced it. ‘Think Small’ became one of the most famous campaigns in advertising history. The company told consumers that these cars are absolutely unconventional - and that’s why you should buy one.
Belgium brewer Stella Artois took a similar approach when it developed a negative reputation for being too costly. It launched the ‘Reassuringly Expensive’ campaign, turning the price tag into a positive signal of quality. Rather than apologise for being costly, the campaign turned it into a motivation to buy.
So perhaps the question for the lab-created diamond industry is not whether ‘synthetic’ sounds bad today. Most people would probably agree that it does. The more interesting question is whether it can mean something different in the future.
Imagine, if you will, a campaign that acknowledged everything consumers might instinctively associate with the word – artificial, engineered, manufactured – and then turned those characteristics into the selling proposition.
Both campaigns centre on the idea that words don’t have fixed emotional meanings. Businesses and brands can’t wish away negative perceptions; however, they can reframe an apparent weakness as a reason to buy.
A synthetic product in this context means human ingenuity has created something that nature otherwise requires geological forces and enormous periods of time to produce.
Why wait for nature?
The jewellery industry has spent years debating what to call these diamonds, and perhaps it is time to spend a little more energy thinking about what we want the word ‘synthetic’ to mean to consumers.
It’s a mistake to assume that consumers will always interpret ‘synthetic’ the way the jewellery industry fears they do today.
There is a great danger in assuming that words alone determine consumer perception of products – clever marketing can work miracles.
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