CaratWho buys diamonds now? The data says: not who the trade thinks
Average natural-diamond spend is up 25 percent to $4,063. Three-quarters of demand is non-bridal. Gen Z punches five points above its weight. The customer changed faster than the marketing did.
De Beers' latest US Diamond Acquisition Study quietly retired the industry's founding assumption. The average spend on a natural-diamond piece rose twenty-five percent in two years, from $3,242 to $4,063 — but seventy-five percent of demand by value is now non-bridal. The engagement ring, the category's mythological center since 1947, is a quarter of the business. Self-purchase, anniversary, milestone and no-occasion gifting are the other three quarters.
The generational data breaks the second assumption. Gen Z — supposedly the lab-grown generation, supposedly indifferent to mined stones — represents twenty-three percent of natural-diamond value demand while making up eighteen percent of the population. The cohort the trade wrote off is over-indexing, just not through the products or the messaging built for their parents: they arrive through vintage, through colored accents, through pieces with what Vegas trend-watchers this June called narrative — jewelry that tells a story rather than certifies a milestone.
The luxury macro agrees. Bain and Altagamma's spring study put global luxury spending at €1.44 trillion for 2025 with jewelry the leading category, growing ahead of handbags, watches and ready-to-wear. Richemont's fiscal year, closed in March, made it concrete: its Jewellery Maisons — Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels, Buccellati — grew fourteen percent to €16.5 billion at a 30.5 percent operating margin, the most profitable large-scale jewelry business ever reported.
Read together, the numbers describe a customer the mid-market has not met: paying more per piece, buying outside bridal seasonality, younger than expected, and rewarding brand, design and story with fashion-like loyalty. The branded houses and the estate market serve that customer; the anonymous three-stone-special middle does not — which is precisely where the US independents' data (tickets up twenty-two percent, units down nine) says the squeeze is landing.
The desk's view: the trade spends its marketing budget re-arguing natural-versus-grown while the actual growth — non-bridal, self-purchase, Gen Z, story-led — goes underserved. The first mid-market retailer to rebuild its case plan around the seventy-five percent will look like a genius. The data has been public for a month.