De Beers Is Out. India Now Polishes More Lab-Grown Diamonds Than Natural.

In June 2024, De Beers announced it was closing Lightbox, the lab-grown diamond jewellery brand it had launched in 2018 to test what the category would do to natural-diamond pricing. Production at Lightbox's factories wound down by the end of 2024. The consumer-facing storefront went dark over the summer. Element Six, De Beers' synthetic-diamond arm, continues to make stones, but only for industrial and technology applications now. The pivot list is plain: semiconductors, quantum, and away from anything anyone would put on a finger.

There is a small irony in the company that wrote "A Diamond Is Forever" exiting the cheaper version of its own product. There is a larger story in why.

The reason De Beers gave in its own announcement was financial. Lab-grown wholesale prices had plummeted by roughly 90% since the consumer category's early days. The economics that had supported Lightbox as a positioning experiment, where De Beers controlled the price umbrella by pricing lab-grown at a deliberately wide discount to natural, had stopped working. The discount had closed itself.

That is the headline event of the global lab-grown category in 2024–26. The headline event of the Indian category is different, and arguably bigger.

The flip

Sometime in FY 2025-26, India exported more lab-grown polished diamonds by volume than natural ones, for the first time in the country's history. The numbers, in carats: 18.8 million lab-grown, 16 million natural. India polishes more than 90% of the world's diamonds either way, so this is not a niche statistic. It is the global cutting-and-polishing supply chain reporting that, for the first time, it is putting more grown stones than mined ones into the channel.

By value the picture is the opposite, because the price collapse means each lab-grown carat is worth a small fraction of a natural one. GJEPC data for FY 2025-26 puts polished lab-grown exports at US$ 1.13 billion, down 10.55% year-on-year even as volumes climbed. Indian total gem and jewellery exports for the year stood at US$ 27.72 billion. The volume crossover is real and structurally significant; the revenue picture is, by design, modest.

That gap between volume and value is the lab-grown story in two sentences.

The math

The Indian retail price for a one-carat lab-grown diamond has fallen from roughly ₹60,000 to about ₹20,000 in twelve months, per Global Trade Research Initiative tracking. That is a 67% drop in a single year. It is not a recession dynamic. It is a category in which the cost of supply has fallen at industrial speed while marketing has only just begun to catch up to the new floor.

In the United States wholesale market, where the price data is cleanest, the drops since 2024 are similar in shape:

• One-to-three carat round lab-grown diamonds: 42% lower year-on-year in 2025.
• Three-carat rounds specifically: wholesale prices halved year-on-year.
• The deceleration in the rate of decline: from roughly 20% per year a few years ago to under 10% now. The collapse is slowing. It has not yet stopped.

What this does to retailer P&Ls is the part of the math most reports miss. As wholesale prices fall faster than retail, gross margins on lab-grown widen on paper. A US retailer's average gross margin on one-to-three carat round lab-grown rose to around 74% in Q2 2025, up nearly eight percentage points year-on-year. The catch is that absolute gross profit dollars per stone are down. Average gross profit on a two-carat round was $1,766 in September 2025 versus $1,902 in September 2024. The margin percentage is going up; the rupees and dollars are going down.

That is the worst kind of margin growth: the kind that flatters quarterly slide decks while the bank balance does not.

The hallmark line

The single most consequential thing Indian regulators have done to this category in the last twelve months is quietly draw a line on a label.

Under BIS standard IS 19469:2025, the word "diamond" on a piece of Indian jewellery now refers only to natural diamonds. Anything grown in a lab must be labelled "laboratory-grown diamond" or "laboratory-created diamond." Retailers' point-of-sale tags, invoices, certificates and online listings all have to follow it. The HUID hallmarking system, which assigns a unique identifier to each piece, makes the labelling auditable in a way pre-HUID retail never was.

Read the standard as a chemistry document and it is a clarification. Read it as a marketing document and it is a regulator drawing a moat around natural-diamond pricing. A consumer who walks into a store cannot, by 2026, mistake a "laboratory-grown diamond" for a "diamond" without ignoring an explicit label on the tag. The natural-diamond industry has been fighting for that label distinction globally for almost a decade. India has now made it the law.

What the Indian retailers actually did

The organised Indian jewellery industry has split into roughly three behaviours since the price collapse began.

Tanishq, Tata Group's flagship jewellery brand, kept its 400-plus stores positioned as natural-diamond-first, with lab-grown options introduced into specific collections rather than the core range. The signal to its loyalty base is continuity. The lab-grown line exists; it is not the headline.

CaratLane, also part of the Titan stable, runs a different play across its 250-plus stores. Lab-grown is a meaningful category in its lineup, priced more aggressively than Tanishq's, and aimed at the younger gifting and self-purchase segment. CaratLane is using the cheaper category to expand the buyer base; Tanishq is using natural-diamond marketing to defend the existing one. They are sister companies and yet visibly different bets.

Titan also recently launched beYoN, a dedicated lab-grown diamond brand opening in Mumbai, deliberately separated from the Tanishq mothership. The structure tells you something: the parent group is comfortable owning the lab-grown opportunity, but not comfortable letting it touch Tanishq's natural-diamond brand equity.

Kalyan Jewellers, the second-largest listed Indian jewellery retailer, has continued to weight its display floors toward natural with a quieter lab-grown presence, leaning on its dominance in South India and the Middle East as the more durable franchise.

The specialised lab-grown-only retailers, the cohort that includes Goenka Jewellers and a handful of others, occupy the third behaviour. They are the businesses for whom the category is not a hedge against the natural-diamond consumer; it is the entire business. Their proposition lives or dies on whether the new BIS label clarifies the category in the consumer's head, and on whether the price floor stabilises in a way that lets them plan inventory.

What comes after the price stops falling

The deceleration in wholesale price declines, from 20% per year to under 10%, is the early signal that the supply-demand equation is reaching a new equilibrium. Industrial-scale CVD reactors of the kind Surat manufacturers invested in heavily through 2024 and 2025 have a cost curve. Below a certain price floor, even the cheapest producers stop adding capacity. That floor is somewhere ahead, and the most interesting commercial question of 2026 is where it sits.

Below the floor, the lab-grown jewellery category becomes what De Beers' own internal economists likely concluded it always would be: a stable, lower-priced gemstone category sitting in a different consumer segment from natural diamonds, the way pearls and emeralds sit in different segments from each other. The natural-diamond industry has been quietly preparing for that outcome for two years, which is precisely why De Beers shut Lightbox and why BIS has clarified the label.

Above the floor, where the category sits right now, the questions are harder. Indian retailers have to price stones the cost of which is still falling under them every quarter. American wholesalers have to write down inventory bought at last year's prices. The Surat polishing ecosystem has to absorb capacity that was built when revenue per carat was higher than it is now.

That last part is the one nobody talks about enough. India polished 18.8 million lab-grown carats last year, against a total Indian polishing industry that, at last year's natural-diamond mix, supported roughly the same number of skilled hands as it has for two decades. The supply chain has flipped. The labour absorption story underneath the supply chain has not been rewritten yet.

The most interesting thing about lab-grown diamonds in 2026 is not what they cost. It is what an entire ecosystem of polishers, wholesalers, retailers and regulators is going to look like once the price floor finally sits down.