CaratOne carat wakes up; the price stays in bed
Rapaport's mid-July market comment finds one-carat demand picking up against falling supply — with prices unchanged. The premiums live in fancy shapes: long cushions fetch 20–25% over squares, and Belgium's half-year polished exports rose 18% to $3.7 billion.
§1Flat is the headline.
The most interesting sentence in the diamond trade this week is a quiet one. Rapaport's July 16 market comment reports that demand for one-carat diamonds is picking up while supply falls — and that prices, nonetheless, remain unchanged. After two years in which the only question was how fast polished prices were falling, flat has become a headline. The bellwether size of the American engagement market has a bid under it again; it simply does not have a price rise yet.
§2Shape carries the premium.
Where premiums do exist, they belong to shape. Ovals, marquises and emerald cuts are outperforming rounds in sizes above two carats, and elongated cushions now command a 20% to 25% premium over square ones — a spread wide enough to change what cutters plan from rough. The regional picture is summer-shaped: the US wholesale market is steady through vacation season with growing interest in lower colors, India's sentiment is improving with demand strongest in 0.30-to-0.50-carat rounds and stones above two carats, Belgium is quieting into the holidays, and Hong Kong's investment buyers keep absorbing three-to-ten-carat D-to-F flawless goods.
The trade routes tell a firmer story than the price list. Belgium's polished exports rose 18% year on year in the first half to $3.7 billion, and Dubai's polished trading climbed roughly 25% in 2025 to $18.7 billion. The Israel Diamond Exchange, meanwhile, was readmitted to the World Federation of Diamond Bourses — a procedural note with real consequences for how goods move through Ramat Gan. Volume is returning to the pipeline faster than price, which is how every diamond recovery of the modern era has started.
Volume is returning to the pipeline faster than price, which is how every diamond recovery of the modern era has started.
§3Scarcity is being engineered.
Upstream, the scarcity is being engineered rather than waited for. Ekati stops producing in mid-August, De Beers has idled Venetia for two years and trimmed its sales book, and Lucara's Karowe — fresh off its tenth thousand-carat recovery — cannot fix the small-goods market by itself. The supply side of the ledger is doing exactly what miners in a downcycle are supposed to do. What has been missing is the demand side, and this week's comment is the first suggestion that the two lines may finally be pointed at each other.
Prices that refuse to fall while demand rises and supply shrinks are not sleeping; they are coiling. The first move in every recovery shows up in the small sizes — it already has, with the 0.30-carat index turning positive earlier this summer — and one carat is next in the queue.
Flat is what a floor looks like while it is being poured.
The trade, filed to your inbox before the New York open.
Prices, tenders and the one story that moved the industry overnight — read in ninety seconds.
Subscribe free →