Detection and Disclosure

Laboratory-grown diamonds have been around since the 1950s, and in the early 2000s, they started to become prevalent in jewelry. Laboratory-grown diamonds were never intended to replace natural diamonds or defraud the jewelry buyer. In fact, laboratory-grown diamonds are byproduct of decades of research and scientific achievements to craft nature’s hardest substance into a material that can be used on industrial drill bits, space shuttle windows, in supercomputers, and create products that are more durable, and biologically compatible.

Laboratory grown diamonds are diamonds. They have the same chemical formula (carbon), the same crystal system (cubic), and the same optical and physical properties. This is why it requires advanced testing, detection, and disclosure, to ensure natural and laboratory-grown diamonds are differentiated. It can be a complex process and is more than possible – we do it every day, and screen and test millions of diamonds every year.

Because laboratory-grown diamonds have the same chemical, optical, and physical characteristics of their natural counterparts, this opened up the jewelry industry to claims that it’s impossible to separate natural and laboratory-grown diamonds. This is inaccurate and false.

GSI has created a scalable, proprietary process to test diamonds of all shapes, sizes, and colors, mounted, or unmounted, to determine growth origin (natural versus laboratory-grown), any treatments or enhancements, and disclose everything clearly and transparently on our reports.

GSI works across the jewelry industry to provide retailers and suppliers the information, testing services, and confidence they need to ensure what they sell is exactly what it is represented as. The diamond pipeline has many steps to add value to the diamond, from rough, all the way into a finished piece of jewelry. Mixing of natural and laboratory-grown diamonds can inadvertently happen, but differentiating between the two is not only possible, but has been refined by GSI.

To learn more, listen to our Plumb Club podcast: “From the Laboratory: Everything Retailers Need to Know About Detection and Disclosure.”