Lab-Grown Diamonds Shift Toward Higher Quality as Prices Keep Falling

The lab-grown diamond market is no longer selling on carat weight alone. As wholesale prices continue to soften, retailers are leaning harder on color, clarity and cut, and some growers are answering with D-flawless collections built to compete on finish, not just size.

That shift matters because the category has already been repriced so severely that bigger stones no longer carry the same premium they once did. Wholesale lab-grown prices have fallen 90% to 95% from 2015 levels, when the product first began to go mainstream. Analyst Paul Zimnisky has said a very nice colorless VS 3-carat lab-grown diamond could be bought at wholesale for $300, a number that captures how far the market has moved from scarcity toward compression. In that environment, retailers need more than weight to defend average selling prices.

The grading system is changing with it. GIA, based in Carlsbad, California, said on June 2, 2025 that it would stop using the same color-and-clarity nomenclature it uses for natural diamonds on lab-grown stones. Beginning October 1, 2025, the lab-grown assessment began describing stones as either “premium” or “standard” based on an overall evaluation of clarity, color and cut. GIA set the fee at US$15 per carat, with a $15 minimum. That move underlined a simple reality: most lab-grown diamonds cluster tightly in color and clarity, so the market is shifting attention to the details that separate one stone from another.

De Beers Group sharpened that message further when it said on May 8, 2025 that it intended to close Lightbox, its lab-grown jewelry brand. Lightbox launched in 2018 with transparent linear pricing of $800 per carat, a model that once framed the category around affordability but now looks like a relic of an earlier phase. At the same time, India’s polished lab-grown diamond exports climbed from about 7.81 million carats in fiscal 2023-24 to about 15.29 million carats in fiscal 2024-25, while one market report put the country’s FY2024 imports at about $1.38 billion and exports at about $1.344 billion. Production is scaling even as prices ease.

The clearest sign of the new market is Grown Diamond Corp.’s D-Flawless GCAL 8X Collection. The company had already been producing D-flawless stones for two years, originally for Brilliant Earth, before putting a named collection behind them. That is the direction of travel now: cut precision, matching, polish and overall finish are becoming the language of value. In lab-grown, the winners are no longer simply the largest stones in the tray. They are the ones that look deliberate, balanced and complete.