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...