Millennials are falling for a new kind of diamond

When San Francisco resident Nathan Chan was shopping for an engagement ring for his fiancee in 2018, he was looking for a diamond but “wasn’t too thrilled at what I found.”
Then a friend told him about lab-grown diamonds. “I had no idea that such a thing could even be a thing,” says Chan, 29.
Drawn to the freedom and options offered by San Francisco’s Ada Diamonds, Chan purchased a cushion-cut synthetic diamond, structurally and chemically identical to a natural one, that weighed just under 2.25 carats. The total cost, including the setting: $14,000.Cheap Jewelry Websites
Diamonds are an American cultural obsession, a highly visible signifier of wealth and romance among the famous as well as the average person. U.S. sales topped $43 billion in 2017, according to powerhouse seller De Beers — and worldwide sales rose to $82 billion.
For decades, engagement rings have featured traditional mined diamonds. But in recent years, those stones have come under fire for their environmental and human impacts. Are they the so-called “blood diamonds,” produced with child labor? Do their profits subsidize wars and terrorists? And what about the tons of earth that have to be moved and massive craters bored to get at them?As Millennials approach the age of engagement and marriage, they are demanding answers to those questions. Socially conscious, they insist on knowing the provenance of what they eat and wear, and how it’s made. And that includes the sparkly stuff.
“I definitely didn’t like the idea of going with an earth-mined diamond,” says Chan’s wife, Susan Vang-Chan, 29. “I wanted something ethically sourced.”
Through tech and science, companies like Ada Diamonds, the Diamond Foundry, Chatham Created Gems and even De Beers are creating synthetic diamonds that are aesthetically indistinguishable from the natural ones, even to the trained eye. (Screening machines exist that can detect lab-made diamonds by looking at their growth patterns.)