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Blood Diamonds, Open Pits and the Lab: Are Lab-Grown Diamonds Really the Ethical Choice?

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  Most people start thinking about where a diamond comes from at roughly the same moment they start shopping for one. You type "engagement ring" into a search bar, and three clicks later you're reading about civil wars, child labour and open pits you can see from space. Then the next tab tells you lab-grown diamonds are "100% eco-friendly" and the problem is solved. Neither tab is giving you the whole picture. So I went through the actual reports, including the ones paid for by the mining industry and the ones paid for by lab-grown producers, to answer one question: are lab-grown diamonds really the more ethical, more environmentally friendly choice? The short answer Yes, on most counts, with one honest caveat. A lab-grown diamond involves no mining, moves no earth, and cannot fund an armed conflict, and its origin is far easier to trace. The caveat is energy: growing a diamond takes a lot of electricity, so its carbon footprint ranges from very low (renewable p...
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Moissanite vs. Lab-Grown Diamond: Which One Actually Makes Sense for an Engagement Ring?

A coworker of mine got engaged over the summer, and when she showed the ring around at lunch, someone asked if it was "real." She just laughed and said "depends what you mean by real," because the stone wasn't a mined diamond at all. It was moissanite. Nobody at the table actually knew what that meant, which, fair enough, most people don't until they start shopping for a ring themselves. So here's the actual answer, because it comes up constantly and the internet does a bad job explaining it clearly. Moissanite isn't a fake diamond or a diamond substitute in the cubic-zirconia sense. It's its own mineral, silicon carbide, first discovered (in trace amounts, in a meteorite crater in Arizona) by a French chemist named Henri Moissan back in 1893. Natural moissanite is so rare that basically none of what's sold today is mined, it's all created in a lab, which is exactly what makes it usable for jewelry at scale. Lab-grown diamonds are a diffe...
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