A lot of money is pouring into the global diamond industry, but demand for diamonds has been less than lustrous of late. A new player might be changing up the industry – diamonds grown in labs.
AILSA CHANG, HOST: The global market for diamond jewelry is worth $80 billion a year. Money is flooding into this industry, but why when demand for diamonds isn’t as lustrous as it once was? Cardiff Garcia and Sally Herships have more from the Planet Money podcast The Indicator.
CARDIFF GARCIA, BYLINE: So marriage rates are on the decline. At the same time, the cost of producing diamonds is still obviously very high. You have to mine diamonds, which is labor-intensive. It’s dangerous. It’s expensive. And of course diamonds are a dwindling natural resource. There’s only so many of them in the ground. That leads us to our mystery. Why is all this money pouring into the diamond space?
SALLY HERSHIPS, BYLINE: Well, according to Bain’s global diamond report, in the U.S., affluent consumers are continuing to buy diamonds. And demand in China grew last year for the first time in a half a decade.
But there is also something else, a new kind of diamond, one that is grown in a lab. They’re chemically the same as the diamonds we dig up out of the earth. So all that money coming in – that is for these new diamonds, man-made rocks.
For the rest of this article: https://www.npr.org/2019/03/28/707722624/lab-grown-diamonds-shake-up-the-diamond-industry