Zircon and Moissanite, this is how some people understand man-made diamonds. They are man-made, but not cultivated diamonds.
Just like the three concepts of meat, artificial meat, and vegetarian meat, it can always cause a lot of misunderstandings. Meat is real meat, and artificial meat is also real meat, just real meat grown in the laboratory, while vegetarian meat is fake meat. It’s just trying to get closer to meat in texture and taste.
Zircon and Moissanite are “fake meat” from this perspective. They are “diamond-like” products, with a major component different from the pure carbon of diamonds. Zircon and Moissanite are essentially zirconia and silicon carbide.
Rough uncut diamonds are more like “artificial meat”. They are lab-grown man-made diamonds that mimic the natural environment in which natural diamonds form. Lab-grown diamonds are all “real diamonds” in terms of chemical, physical, and optical properties. It just doesn’t go through hundreds of millions of years like natural diamonds but simulates the environment in which diamonds can form in a scientifically efficient way, drastically shortening the time.
There are two ways to grow diamonds. One is high temperature and high pressure, using graphite and diamond powder as the carbon source to simulate the diamond growth environment (HTHP); the other is the CVD method, where diamond slices are placed in a vacuum chamber filled with hydrogen and methane, and formed under specific pressure. Uniform diamond coating.
Both methods are done in a laboratory and cost more than imitation diamond products, so the overall price is not as crazy as zircon and moissanite.
According to Ping An Securities, a one-carat lab-grown diamond costs 8,000-15,000 yuan, while a one-carat medium-quality loose diamond costs 35,000 yuan. In other words, the price of cultivated diamonds is still not cheap, and the same standards as natural diamonds will be used, but the price may be about 10%~40% of 4C natural diamonds, and the cultivated diamonds backed by some big brands are even slightly smaller than natural diamonds Cheap.
Of course, there is still a lot of room for growth in the price of lab-grown diamonds. It doesn’t take hundreds of millions of years after all. As technology matures, lower prices for cultivated diamonds are also predictable changes. According to statistics, from 2017 to 2020, the retail price of cultivated diamonds has dropped by 30%.
As a laboratory product, improving production efficiency is profitable for natural diamonds, and it is not impossible to reduce the price of cultivated diamonds with improved production efficiency.