CaratLab-grown now costs 73% less; naturals win the ring back
A study of appraisal data finds lab-grown diamonds priced 73% below naturals, up from a 27% gap in 2019. As the discount widened, natural stones reclaimed 57% of engagement rings, the reversal grown diamonds were supposed to prevent.
§1The discount is now a canyon.
The gap between a natural diamond and its laboratory twin has become a canyon. Analysing appraisal and insurance records from March 2019 through May 2025, the insurance-technology firm BriteCo found lab-grown diamonds now priced roughly 73% below comparable naturals. In 2019 the discount was 26.6%. By 2025 it had widened to 72.8%. A one-carat natural averages around $4,200 in the data; its grown equivalent sells for about $1,000 or less.
The widening is a supply story with a demand twist. Grown-diamond output from Chinese and Indian producers has climbed relentlessly, and a manufactured good made in ever-greater volume behaves the way manufactured goods do: the price falls toward the cost of making it. Natural prices, having spiked through the pandemic years, have drifted back down but nothing like as far. The two lines have been diverging for six years, and the distance between them is now the widest it has ever been.
§2Cheaper did not mean winning.
Here is the twist the grown-diamond industry did not script. As lab-grown got cheaper, it did not consolidate its grip on the bridal market; it started to lose it. BriteCo's data has natural stones back to 57.3% of engagement rings sold in late 2024 and early 2025, a reversal from a lab-grown peak of 47.7% share. The cheaper the grown stone became, the more it read to some shoppers as a fashion purchase rather than an heirloom, and an engagement ring is the last place many buyers want to feel they economised.
The cheaper the grown stone became, the more it read to some shoppers as a fashion purchase rather than an heirloom, and an engagement ring is the last place many buyers want to feel they economised.
§3Price was never the whole game.
For retailers the divergence is a margin puzzle with no clean answer. A grown-diamond sale is a smaller ticket that keeps shrinking as wholesale prices fall, which is why several chains have hedged by selling both and steering the emotional pitch toward natural. The risk is a two-tier counter that trains the customer to see the grown stone as the discount option and the natural as the real one, useful for natural margins, corrosive for the grown-diamond brand the same store spent five years building.
The lab-grown industry made a bet that price was the whole game, and winning on price turns out to have been the losing move. At a 73% discount the grown stone has priced itself into a different product category, beautiful, honest, and no longer competing for the meaning a buyer wants an engagement ring to carry. Naturals reclaiming the ring is not nostalgia; it is what happens when one side of a market keeps cutting price until the cut becomes the message.
The number to watch is not the discount. It is the share.
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