How Lab Diamonds Destroyed De Beers

How Lab Diamonds Destroyed De Beers

It’s all about the timing.

If you look at the last 10 years of the diamond market, specifically the "Lab Grown" sector, it is impossible to explain the current reality with standard economics. You have a market that held steady for years, then collapsed by 80% in the span of three months, exactly coinciding with a G7 embargo on Russian naturals. The "Russian Lab Diamond" doesn't exist. It is, and always has been, a Russian Treated Natural. The technology they claim is for "growing" stones is actually the technology for laundering them.

The standard claim is that 98% to 99% of all diamonds sold in the jewelry industry before lab diamonds were Type 1a or 1b that can contain nitrogen, a little nitrogen tints the diamond yellow so a Type 1a or 1b diamond rated by the GIA as being in the I-J-K range would look distinctly yellow against a stark white background, lots of nitrogen creates the fancy yellow diamond colors. SI inclusions in Type 1a and 1b diamonds will be visible to the naked eye and will typically have carbon spots that look like black dirt specks. Type 2a diamonds with no yellowing nitrogen and no black spots only come from kimberlite pipes in South Africa (Cullinan/Premier Mine), Botswana (Karowe & Jwaneng Mines), Lesotho (Letšeng Mine), Angola (Luele & Catoca Pipes) Sierra Leone (West Africa - famous for the 968-carat Star of Sierra Leone), Canada (Victor & Ekati Mines) and Russia (Alrosa-owned Udachnaya & Mir Pipes).

The 1990s Origin (Growth vs. Treatment)

The origin of jewelry grade lab diamonds begins in the 1990s. While Russian scientists in Novosibirsk were famous for their BARS Split Sphere presses, they claimed this massive hardware was for growing industrial diamonds. In reality, they were apparently perfecting the same technology General Electric developed in 1999: High-Pressure High-Temperature (HPHT) Annealing.

Russia sits on a massive supply of Type IIa diamonds from mines like Alrosa. These are the chemically purest stones on earth (nitrogen-free), but most suffer from "plastic deformation" internal stress that gives them a brown tint instead of the yellow tint that comes from the presence of nitrogen in Type 1 stones. Slightly brown Type 2a diamonds in the I-J-K range were worth ~$2,500–$3,000 a carat pre-embargo, whereas a naturally mined Type 2a D-colored untreated Internally Flawless Round Brilliant diamond weighing 1.01 carats is currently worth well over $15,000 a carat. Companies like Cartier and Winston exclusively use natural D & E colored Type 2a White Diamonds of at least VS quality and with no black carbon inclusions that they source from Russia, Canada and Africa. 

2014: The Setup (The Coup & The War)

The timeline of lab diamonds runs parallel to the timeline of the Ukraine War. In February of 2014 Kiev Ukraine experienced the Maidan Revolution, and Hunter Biden was hired at Burisma just 6 weeks after the coup. Soon after US weapons systems began flowing into the Ukraine, triggering an 8-year bloody Civil War along the Donbas with the military equipment that was supplied and funded mostly by the United States. While Hunter Biden never actually stepped foot in the Ukraine he did receive around a million dollars a year salary from the Ukrainian gas giant Burisma, which we know was half for access to the vice president of the United States, his father, and the other half was for his job arranging the delivery of weapons to the Donbas. We know this because as soon as Joe Biden was no longer vice president Hunter Biden's salary was cut from around 1 million a year down to a half million a year, meaning a half million was exclusively for the foreign influence on his father the vice president.

2015: The Tech Demo (St. Petersburg)

In May of 2015 New Diamond Technology (NDT) in St. Petersburg unveiled a 10.02 carat E-Color, VS1 Emerald-cut stone and said that they had grown it with HPHT in a BARS press.

2018: The Revelation

Three years after the St. Petersburg announcement Russia started shipping color treated natural diamond rough, which brings into question the origin of the 10 carat Emerald cut diamond 3 years earlier, was it really grown from a seed crystal, or was it a color treated natural? Either way, after decades of trying the Russians had finally perfected putting I, J, and K brown-tinted natural stones into their BARS presses to relax the crystal lattice. This process didn't "grow" anything; it relaxed internal stress lines, erasing the brown tint and turning a slightly dull stone worth around $2,500 to $3,000 a carat into a D-Color gem worth more than double, but they had to admit that they had used HPHT to color treat, color enhance, or bleach the natural diamonds.

A YouTube video posted in 2018 revealed that they had already perfected the HPHT color treatment method for Russian Natural diamonds just under a carat. The person in the video specifically said that the people were taking I-J-K colored natural diamonds and moving them up to D color. He showed two pear-shaped sparkly small stones, both weighing 0.92 carats. One was a D-Color and the other was an E-Color; both were VVS1 clarity. The only difference was that the D-Color had an asterisk next to D, and if you looked at the notes down below it said that it was "HPHT Color Treated." If they can take I-J-K colored rough diamonds with a slight brown tint and bleach them to pure white D colored diamonds, I would assume they can bleach diamonds darker than I-J-K colored rough to E, F, and G color.

But it turned out that it was too hard to explain the process of Color Treating to customers, as Clarity Enhancing by drilling holes with lasers to burn out black inclusions already existed and was considered far inferior to an untreated stone due to the holes being filled with resin. It was too hard to distinguish the different treatment methods or enhancement methods, and so over the span of the next 6 years the Russians were only able to capture 2% of the international diamond jewelry market with their Color Treated Naturals.

Also in 2018 De Beers launched Lightbox out of Element 6 to grow Type 2a diamonds in an industrial factory called a “lab,” and then in 2019 they closed their only mine that regularly produced high quality Type 2a diamonds called the Victor Mine in Ontario Canada.

2022: The Proxy War & The Motive

After 8 years of battling US funded Ukrainians in the Donbas, in February of 2022 Putin pushed across the line. In just 18 days the Russian military wiped out all of the US military equipment in the Ukraine and declared "Mission Accomplished" regarding demilitarization. Instead of accepting the outcome, the US political machine restarted the conflict. The US Congress voted unanimously to resupply the Ukraine with military equipment, and then President Biden rubber-stamped it. So now for the last four years the US has funded a second consecutive Proxy War in the Ukraine totalling 12 years now since the Maidan Revolution. The US and the West imposed sanctions in 2022 that targeted Russia's revenue streams: gas, oil and diamonds, and froze 300 billion dollars worth of Russian Oligarch cash and gold held in the West that is generally recognized to be "Putin's money." As sanctions hit Russia needed a way to keep the cash flowing to fight the US-funded war. They established the Indian Laundromat.

Russia sold US sanctioned crude oil to India to be refined and either used in India, or to be exported to the West, with India claiming that it had no choice but to violate the sanctions because they had to prioritize their domestic energy security. Russia also continued to ship their "Treated Natural" rough diamonds to Surat under a loophole that allowed embargoed Russian diamonds to be cut and finished in India.

2024: The Liquidation (The Crash & The De Beers Exit)

On March 1, 2024, the G7 implemented the Indirect Ban, closing the Surat Loophole that allowed Russia to ship their diamond rough into India. Suddenly, Indian cutters could no longer legally export Russian natural diamonds that they cut to the West and yet they still had HPHT color treated Russian rough stones on their workbenches that they had started the day before. Surat and Russia were both sitting on vaults of Russian "Treated Natural" rough that at the time did account for 2% of global diamond sales but were now contraband. What to do?

They didn't stop cutting. They just changed the paperwork from "HPHT Color Treated" to "HPHT Lab Diamond." By switching the label and deleting the origin they bypassed the embargo entirely. As the owner of one of the Diamond CVD Reactors in Surat said in the summer of 2023, "Once a diamond is cut there is no way to tell if it came from a lab or a mine." To be clear, that only applies to Type 2a diamonds, De Beers made 3 machines that can tell instantly the difference between Type 1a or 1b and lab grown, just not Russian naturals from lab grown.

To move this massive embargoed stockpile the owners of the rough in Russia just had to lower the price, they took their $6,000 "HPHT Treated Naturals" and slashed the price to 10% on the dollar just to start, undercutting the De Beers Lightbox price of $800 a carat and with far better quality stones. They sold them for $600 a carat in March of 2024, and then $400 in April, and $200 a carat by May of 2024. They traded price for volume, instead of struggling to sell one "HPHT Color Treated" natural diamond for $6,000, they could now sell 30 "HPHT Lab Grown" diamonds for $200 each, around 10% of what the actual stones were worth before the HPHT color enhancing, which apparently only takes a few hours vs the many weeks it takes to grow an HPHT diamond from a seed crystal. The volume made up for the price drop, and the war funding continued uninterrupted.

Surat cuts over 90% of the world's diamonds, making it the perfect gray market for the Russian HPHT treated naturals to disappear into. Amidst the chaos of billions of stones they blend the Russian supply with diamonds sourced from China and the output from their own CVD reactors. They are then cut and sold as a "HPHT Lab Grown," “HPHT Lab Diamond," "CVD Lab Diamond,” and since most CVD diamonds require the same HPHT finishing step like the color treated Russian naturals some could be labeled “CVD Grown and HPHT Color Treated Diamond.”

By May of 2024 just three months after the G7 embargo on Russian naturals went into effect and by the time the price dropped to $200 a carat for D-VVS quality, after six years the world’s largest diamond company was never able to replicate the 10-carat E-color VS quality stone the Russians showcased in 2015. In fact, Lightbox struggled to produce E-color VS quality in anything over a few carats, so De Beers announced the end of Lightbox jewelry, folding it back into Element 6. They exited the market because they knew that the game was rigged. They knew they could not compete with a $200 "Lab Diamond" because they knew that stone wasn't grown in a lab. It was a Russian natural brown diamond, annealed in a BARS press, cut in India, and relabeled to evade sanctions. How did they know? Because De Beers had also manufactured all of the machines (DiamondSure, DiamondView, DiamondPlus) that had allowed jewelers to "test" for lab diamonds.

These machines didn't actually distinguish between a lab-grown stone and a natural one; they simply screened for Type 2a diamonds, stones with no nitrogen. This is the exact geological identification of the Russian Alrosa state supply. The machine sees "No Nitrogen" and flags it for further testing, which in the real world just means grabbing a 20X loop and looking for a girdle inscription from the IGI or the GIA, no inscription or an inscription from the IGI and they declare it a "lab" diamond, an inscription from the GIA would be looked up and would usually prove it was an untreated natural stone worth over $15,000 a carat. This allowed the Russians to pass off their natural origin Type 2a color treated diamonds under the guise of science. While the test  did distinguish lab-grown Type 2a diamonds from 98% of natural diamonds that are Type 1a or 1b, it also allowed Russia to pass off embargoed Russian Type 2a rough as lab diamonds.

2025: The Return (The Tariff Hammer)

Following his victory in the 2024 election President Trump took immediate action to sever the financial lines of Russia and to enforce compliance with the Russian embargo. Understanding that the Indian Laundromat and other third-party loopholes were keeping the Russian war machine alive, he dropped massive tariffs on any nation purchasing Russian oil. He gave the world a binary choice: stop buying Russian oil or lose access to the American market. This ultimatum forced the buyers to finally halt the purchase of Russian crude, but he didn't explicitly target the diamonds. The mere existence of cheap lab diamonds at places like Luvansh had crashed the price of all diamonds including the diamonds that came from mines. By 2025 diamonds that were worth $7,000 a few years earlier fell to 50% of their value on Blue Nile's website, meaning the value of the I-J-K brown Type 2a diamonds used to create the color treated naturals have also fallen to half their original value or $1,250 a carat.

2026: The Endgame (The Settlement & The Vanishing Act)

It is now February 2026. The unsanctioned oil sales funding Putin's war efforts in the Ukraine are being choked off by Trump's tariffs, with Trump slashing India's tariffs from 50% down to 18% after they agreed to stop buying the embargoed Russian oil, and to instead buy our US produced sweet crude oil. Putin's Shadow Fleet is also being boarded and seized due to lack of Western insurance by all of the NATO countries on the Baltic Sea, Kaliningrad has been isolated and Moldova is talking about joining Romania. And to top it off Trump took over Venezuela and the US Coast Guard seized a Russian Shadow Fleet oil tanker heading to Russia that had reflgged in the Atlantic that was carrying heavy sour crude which is essential for the manufacturing of many industrial chemicals for Putin’s war machine, and now both Putin and Trump say that they want to end the Ukraine War.

For the time being the diamonds appear to be flying under the radar, though Trump also asked for diamonds to have accurate country of origin labeling by March of 2026, with both China and Russia in the spotlight. China because they always try to get around US sanctions like the time they built a deep sea port in Vietnam and a highway straight to the docks from China and then everything got labeled "Made in Vietnam," and they may have actual HPHT Lab Grown diamonds in China that they are shipping into Surat. But it is also possible that the US will bust this whole Russian HPHT color treated natural diamond conspiracy wide open, and then we will hear the truth: That De Beers always considered any HPHT stone to be a Lab Diamond, whether it is a color treated natural produced in hours, or it was grown from a seed crystal in weeks in an HPHT press or a CVD reactor, or if it was fissure filled. If it was grown or treated in a factory that we call a lab then it is a lab diamond. Treated, grown, it is all semantics. The only diamonds that are natural are not treated in any way. And if it is cheaper to sell treated Russian naturals than to grow diamonds, then the color treated option wins. Instead of going back to struggling to sell just a few of their vast supply of I-J-K stones for $1,250 a carat, or a few more color treated ones at $3,000 a carat, maybe the Russians should just keep selling their top quality Russian HPHT "Lab Diamonds" for $244 a carat, or $500, or $1,000, whatever price is just under the cost of actually growing them from seed crystals.

The "lab diamond" market is currently at a historic low, with sites like Luvansh currently showing 105 stones available that are all 1.01 carat D-Internally Flawless Ideal Cut Round Brilliants, all priced under $400, with 95 of them sitting at exactly $244, though I have seen them listed as cheap as $235 in the last few weeks.

You have to realize that these stones are just listings on a virtual website. This "virtual warehouse" is a digital mirage that will likely disappear the moment the sanctions are lifted. When the war settlement is finalized these virtual listings may vanish. The physical stones, currently carrying IGI paperwork can be pulled back, their "Lab Grown" girdle inscriptions can be polished off, and they could be resubmitted to the GIA as Color Enhanced Russian Naturals. Because these two grading companies do not share databases, the unique maps of internal flaws won't bridge the gap, and IF literally means internally flawless, so all of these IF stones have nothing to map anyway.

They could be reborn as the HPHT Treated Russian Naturals that they always were and relisted for $3,000 a carat, and the untreated I, J, and K stones may reappear at $1,250 to $1,500 a carat.

When the embargo on Russia is lifted I predict that all of the 1.01 carat stones on the Luvansh website with IGI certificates will disappear instantly, and if the actual cost of producing legitimate lab-grown HPHT diamonds means that they should retail for $2,100 for a D-IF 1.01 Carat Ideal Cut Round Brilliant like on Blue Nile, then the value of the exact same stone from Luvansh with IGI paperwork should be valued at $2,100 as well, because the IGI grades 70% of all lab diamonds.

A single D Color, IF Clarity 1.01 carat Ideal Cut Round Brilliant is an investment piece and I don't think it matters what you paid for it. If I am right, a $244 investment plus tax and shipping that appreciates to $2,100 is about a 700% Return On Investment as arbitrage. No one will ever admit that any of this happened, at all, they will just make up some excuse for why the lab prices spike, with the lowest quality lab diamonds jumping in price from $200 back to over $800 a carat again like before De Beers closed Lightbox.

Or maybe Russia will keep the price down at $244 for 1.01 D-IF rounds to utterly destroy any legitimate labs producing them for $2,000 like on the Blue Nile website. In that case the price doesn't spike back up after the embargo is lifted. Maybe these $244 stones could eventually stabilize at $1,000, whatever is the maximum profit for Russia that still undercuts actual lab diamonds grown from seed crystals.

And now in February of 2026 the Anglo American group has put their 85% stake in De Beers up for sale, and the country of Angola is looking to acquire 20% - 30%. This is after a $2.9 billion drop in De Beers valuation last year and $1.6 billion drop the year before, bringing its estimated value to only $5 billion in 2026 due to the devaluing of the entire diamond market by "lab diamonds."

If you think that India has been violating embargoes and buying Russian oil but not buying, cutting, and selling embargoed Russian diamonds, I don't know what to tell you. I am not a financial advisor, so don't invest based on my advice, but from a stacker's perspective you can buy 1 diamond at a time when you have an extra $250 and wait to see if they suddenly forget how to make cheap "lab diamonds." For jewelry you can also currently buy a set of 1 ctw F/G SI1 diamond earrings set in 14K white gold for $349, 2 ctw for $499, or 3 ctw for $700 at Luvansh, and again, an SI in a lab diamond will be eye clean with no black spots. If you want you can upgrade to D-Color and VVS1 Clarity in the 2 ctw for $749, or in the 3 ctw for $1,199. Select 4-pronged martini with screwbacks so they don't droop and are secure.

Blue Nile charges $350 for the empty 14K gold post earrings for the 1 ctw stones, and then you have to add the stones which raises the price to over $1,000 for their 1 ctw stud earrings, so Luvansh basically gives you the diamonds for free in their 1 ctw. Diamond studs are truly one of the best uses of round brilliant diamonds, and almost all women like them. If you compare prices you'll find that while most online retailers like Blue Nile charge much more than Luvansh, Walmart is currently selling a very comparable set of 2 ctw diamond stud earrings for the exact same $499. That's right. You can also go onto Walmart's website and buy supposedly lab grown 2 ctw studs in 14K white gold with G/H color and VS/SI Clarity from a vendor called "Pompeii3" for $499, in the past they were unable to match the quality and price of Luvansh, but that no longer applies. If you want an investment maybe get the D-IF 1.01 Carat Ideal Cut Rounds from Luvansh, if you want absurdly cheap jewelry with very decent stones either get earrings from Luvansh or from Pompeii3 on Walmart's website.

If you don't buy them soon they may disappear forever and be replaced by studs that cost 2 or 3 times as much for the exact same quality. There is always a possibility that I'm wrong and that you really can grow D-IF 1.01 carat HPHT diamonds from scratch and retail them for $244 a carat, but if I'm right and these are color treated naturals this is an opportunity for arbitrage, and we only have to wait until the Russian Sanctions end and the price for lab grown diamonds jumps back to $800 a carat for G/H-SI1 lab diamonds like it was 2 years ago before the West placed an embargo on all Russian diamonds. Five different countries in Africa and Canada could copy the Russian system and start bleaching their own brown-tinted diamond rough, unless the technique and the equipment is completely proprietary Russian tech so that they have cornered the market on the cheapest lab diamonds on earth.