How much are diamonds really worth?

The diamond market is built on manufactured scarcity, engineered culture and, where necessary, blood.

The Jeweler’s Offer

Suppose you try to sell a ring back. The woman behind the counter looks at it for about four seconds. It is a round brilliant, 1.2 carats, VS2 clarity, set in platinum. The receipt from three years ago says $8,400. She sets it back on the glass counter and tells you she can offer $900, maybe $950 if you can wait a few weeks. She is not trying to cheat you.

You can walk out and try five more stores, or an online resale platform. Unless you are very lucky, very patient, or know someone in the trade, you will usually be offered far less than you paid for a stone that was sold to you, perhaps sincerely and perhaps with real affection, as a store of value, a symbol of permanence, an investment in love. The gap between what you paid and what you can get was built into the market on purpose.

What You Are Buying

A diamond is carbon. Specifically, it is carbon atoms arranged in a crystal lattice under extreme heat and pressure, typically 150 to 200 kilometers beneath the Earth’s surface, mostly between one and three and a half billion years ago. It is the hardest natural substance on Earth. It refracts light with unusual efficiency, which produces the sparkle that has transfixed humans across cultures for thousands of years.

None of that, by itself, determines scarcity. Diamond as a material is not rare: most of what mines recover is industrial or near-gem material, and the industrial market is now supplied almost entirely by synthetic stone. Gem-quality diamonds are less common, since only a fraction of recovered rough meets the clarity, color, cut and size thresholds demanded by jewelry markets. That fraction is real; what producers manage is the degree of scarcity in the gem segment. Global output, roughly 110 to 130 million carats a year in the early 2020s and under 100 million in 2025, when producers cut output in the face of weak prices, reflects what the industry chooses to extract and sell, not only what the ground contains. How many gem-quality diamonds reach market in a given year is a business decision, made by a small number of companies with a shared interest in keeping supply tight.

What makes a gem diamond economically valuable is the story attached to it. You are paying for a narrative about love, permanence, status and worth, one constructed deliberately, in boardrooms and advertising agencies, beginning in the late 1930s.

The 4Cs: Real Properties, Artificial Thresholds

The Gemological Institute of America's 4C grading system of cut, color, clarity and carat describes real physical properties of real stones. The problem is in how those grades translate to price. A color grade of D versus E, both in GIA’s ‘colorless’ range, represents a difference that is invisible to the untrained eye and subtle even to a trained grader comparing master stones, yet it can command a substantial price premium. Similarly, VS1 and VS2 clarity grades both mean very slightly included: the inclusions are assessed under 10x magnification and are almost never visible to the naked eye. The consumer paying a premium for these distinctions is paying for a difference they cannot see, recorded on a laboratory certificate. The industry profits from the precision of its grading because that precision sorts stones into price tiers the buyer cannot verify without specialized equipment.

What It Costs: The Numbers

The question has a rough numerical answer. Take a typical natural-diamond engagement ring: a round brilliant of about one carat, in the G–H color and VS–SI clarity range, in a simple gold or platinum solitaire. Among US couples married in 2025, those who chose a natural diamond spent about $7,000 on the ring on average, while the average across all engagement rings, most of them now lab-grown, was $4,600. The table below breaks down an illustrative $7,500 natural-diamond ring. Only some stages can be anchored to published figures; the others are estimates, and the last row is what is left over.

Cost component	Illustrative amount	Share of $7,500	Basis
Mining the rough (average operating cost)	$300	4.0%	De Beers unit cost of about $75 per carat (2023) × about 4 carats of run-of-mine rough per polished gem carat (estimate)
Cutting and polishing	$100	1.3%	De Beers data for 2013: $10–50 per carat in India, $60–150 in southern African centers (generous estimate for a one-carat stone)
GIA grading report with laser inscription	$134	1.8%	GIA US fee schedule, 2026 ($119 + $15)
Retailer’s markup *	$3,750	50.0%	Traditional ‘keystone’ (cost-doubling) markup; actual markups vary
Everything else: the miner’s capital costs, royalties, overheads and margin; cutters’, traders’ and manufacturers’ margins; the metal setting; insurance and logistics	$3,216	42.9%	Remainder ($7,500 minus the rows above); not separately observable
Consumer pays	$7,500	100%

* The retailer’s markup is the difference between what the store pays for the ring and what it charges. Out of it come rent, staff, security, insurance, marketing and the cost of financing stock, and then profit. For comparison, Signet Jewelers, the largest US jewelry chain, reports a gross margin of about 40 percent of sales. Because that figure is struck after store occupancy and distribution costs, Signet’s markup over the merchandise itself is higher.

The mining cost: $300

De Beers guided to an operating cost of about $75 per recovered carat for 2023 (the actual figure was $71), and sold its rough that year for an average of $147 a carat. Both are averages across all qualities, including near-gem and industrial material. Allowing for roughly half the weight being lost in cutting and for the large share of recovered rough that is not gem quality, a fair estimate is that about four carats of average rough are mined for every polished gem carat — roughly $300 of mining cost. Rough good enough for a one-carat G–H, VS–SI stone sells for far more than the $147 average, so the miner’s margin on this particular stone cannot be read from De Beers’ accounts.

That margin has also shrunk sharply: De Beers’ average realized price fell to $105 a carat in the first half of 2026, and the company reported an underlying EBITDA loss of $511 million for 2025.

The miner’s margin, however, does not capture De Beers’ full influence on the retail price. For most of the twentieth century De Beers controlled the large majority of the world’s rough supply and spent heavily to create demand, and the $7,500 price level rests on market conditions it built. What the same stone would cost in a fully competitive market is unknowable, since no such market has ever existed, but on the estimates in the table the physical inputs of mining, cutting and grading come to well under $1,000. Every other number in the table sits on top of a price level that the cartel era established.

The polisher’s wage

In 2013 cutting and polishing cost $10 to $50 per carat in India, against $60 to $150 in southern African centers such as Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. The wage paid to the individual polisher is only part of that cost. India’s cost advantage is a large part of why India, chiefly Surat, now cuts and polishes around 90 percent of the world’s diamonds by volume, though many large, high-value stones are still cut elsewhere. The factory owner keeps what is left of the factory’s price after wages and overheads. The polisher receives only a small fraction of what the finished ring sells for.

The retailer’s share

The jewelry store’s share is the largest single slice of the price. Under a traditional keystone markup the store charges about double what it paid and keeps roughly half the price, around $3,750 on a $7,500 ring, though actual markups vary widely. Much of what the store pays out of that is fixed: rent, staff and security cost the same whether it sells one stone that month or twenty, and profit is what remains. Signet Jewelers, the biggest US chain, has reported operating margins of between about 2 and 12 percent of sales in recent years. Inventory also moves slowly: even Signet holds roughly five to six months of stock, and individual natural stones at smaller jewelers can sit for a year or more, accumulating carrying costs. What the breakdown does convey is the ratio that matters: on these estimates, the physical costs of mining, cutting and grading the stone come to only a few hundred dollars. Almost everything else is captured along the chain — by the miner, the traders and manufacturers, and the retailer who ties the stone to an emotion.

The Same Purchase, Two Prices

US couples married in 2025 who chose a natural diamond spent about $7,000 on the engagement ring on average, for an average center stone of about 1.6 carats. Couples who chose lab-grown, 61 percent of all engagement rings, spent about $4,300 for an average 2.0-carat stone. A lab-grown diamond is essentially the same material as a mined one, and carat for carat it retailed for roughly 70 to 90 percent less in early-2024 analyst estimates; lab-grown prices have kept falling since. The price difference is overwhelmingly the story: the geological history, the scarcity narrative, the marketing. If you buy the natural stone knowing this, you are making a considered choice about what you value. If you buy it believing the price reflects the stone's intrinsic properties, you are paying for a fiction.

De Beers: How the Cartel Held

The scarcity behind diamond prices has been maintained by a supply cartel that held its position through economic warfare, political manipulation, the co-option of states and, in its earliest decades, physical violence and imprisonment.

Cecil Rhodes arrived in Kimberley in 1871 at eighteen years old. Over the next two decades, with backing from Alfred Beit and the Rothschild bank, and through legal maneuvering, share acquisitions and relentless pressure on rivals, he consolidated the Kimberley mines into a single company and came to control some 90 percent of the world’s diamond output. De Beers Consolidated Mines was formed in 1888. The point of the amalgamation was to end competition between producers and keep supply in line with demand.

The mechanism for maintaining control was simple and ruthless: sell through De Beers or face its stockpile. The company held vast reserves of rough diamonds sorted by size and quality, which gave it the ability to flood world markets should its control be threatened. The best-known test came in 1981, when Zaire stopped selling its industrial-grade diamonds through the single-channel Central Selling Organisation. De Beers flooded the market with industrial diamonds from its stockpile, prices for Zairian goods collapsed, and by 1983 Zaire was back, on far less favorable terms than before.

The ‘sightholder’ system turned this power into ritual. A few hundred approved buyers, fewer than 200 by the 1990s, were summoned to London about ten times a year. Each was handed a box of rough diamonds chosen by De Beers, at a price set by De Beers. The buyer could look, but could not pick the stones or haggle: the box was taken whole or refused, and buyers who refused risked not being invited back. Losing your place, in an industry where De Beers controlled 80 to 90 percent of global rough supply for most of the twentieth century, could mean your business was finished.

De Beers was indicted in the United States in 1994 for conspiring with General Electric to fix the price of industrial diamonds. GE was tried and acquitted. De Beers, with no US presence, stayed beyond the court’s reach, and for a decade its executives risked arrest if they traveled to the United States. It pleaded guilty in July 2004 and paid a $10 million criminal fine, small beside its 2003 sales of about $5.5 billion. Separately, De Beers settled a civil class action, without admitting wrongdoing, by agreeing to pay $295 million to US buyers of diamonds purchased between the mid-1990s and March 2006; the deal was approved in 2008. The plaintiffs had alleged decades of price-fixing. No one went to prison, and the Oppenheimer family’s fortune remained intact.

During World War II, De Beers restricted American access to industrial diamonds required for precision manufacturing and weapons production. The United States needed them and could not obtain sufficient quantities because De Beers feared that a post-war US military stockpile, once demobilized, would be sold onto the open market and depress prices. The journalist Janine Roberts writes that former CIA Director Admiral Stansfield Turner later made the same charge. The Michigan State economist Walter Adams called De Beers’ wartime conduct ‘truly shameful.’ De Beers eventually released more supply, but only under arrangements that kept the company in control, including placing the supply organization in Canada.

The Compound System

The closed compound system that De Beers introduced at Kimberley in 1885–86 was, in effect, a prison run by a corporation. The compound held approximately 3,000 Black workers within a 25-acre enclosure surrounded by a 12-foot wall of brick and corrugated iron, with netting over the entire structure to prevent diamonds being thrown out. Workers lived under contract for periods of three to six months. They could not leave without permission, women could not enter, and family visits were prohibited. Workers finishing their contracts were stripped, washed and searched before they were permitted to leave, and discharged men were confined for several days so that any swallowed diamonds would pass through their bodies. In 1885, De Beers became the first private company in South Africa to employ convict labor, and it built a company-operated branch prison on its own property. The closed compound became a model for the migrant-labor compounds and hostels later used across South African mining.

Manufacturing a Tradition

In 1938, De Beers had a problem. American diamond sales had slumped through the Depression and the company was sitting on a large stockpile of unsold rough. Its chairman, Ernest Oppenheimer, had held the post since 1929, having won it, the financial writer Albert Alletzhauser says, partly by threatening to flood the market unless the board gave it to him. He needed a way to create demand.

He hired an advertising agency. The Philadelphia firm N.W. Ayer & Son was retained by De Beers in 1938 with a specific brief: make Americans see a diamond engagement ring as a necessity. The agency set itself the goal ‘to create a situation where almost every person pledging marriage feels compelled to acquire a diamond engagement ring.’

It worked: the campaign is widely cited as one of the most effective demand-creation efforts in commercial history. Before the Second World War only about one American engagement ring in ten contained a diamond; by the late twentieth century roughly eight in ten did. The slogan ‘A Diamond is Forever,’ written by Ayer copywriter Frances Gerety in 1947, was named the best advertising slogan of the twentieth century by Advertising Age in 1999.

The slogan also carried a commercial instruction: keep the diamond. A stone that stays in a family never enters the secondary market and never competes with new ones, which kept prices high and the cartel’s stockpile necessary.

The campaign was subsequently deployed globally. Japan is the most instructive case. In 1967, when De Beers and its agency J. Walter Thompson began marketing diamond rings in Japan, about 5 percent of Japanese brides received a diamond engagement ring. The campaign presented diamond rings as a sign of modern Western values and romantic seriousness. By 1981, the figure had risen to 60 percent. As a mass custom, the diamond engagement ring in Japan is less than sixty years old, and it was built by a South African mining company working through an American advertising agency.

De Beers did not discover the two-months-salary rule, the idea that an engagement ring should cost two months of the giver’s income. Its early advertising suggested one month’s salary as the appropriate spend. In the 1980s its advertisements raised the benchmark to two months, asking: ‘How else could two months’ salary last forever?’ The rule took hold in American culture so effectively that it is still repeated today as if it reflected some independent standard of romantic sincerity.

The Engagement Ring Before 1938

Diamond engagement rings existed before the De Beers campaign and had become fashionable among the well-off around the turn of the century, but they were far from standard practice. Engagement rings, where given at all, were often set with sapphires, rubies, emeralds, or semi-precious stones. The diamond engagement ring was a luxury of the wealthy, and the middle class did not expect one. De Beers and N.W. Ayer & Son turned it into a mass custom, with pricing norms, ritual significance and guilt for men who could not or would not comply. Through advertising, not buying a diamond ring became a statement about the quality of your love.

The Resale Trap

The jeweler’s $900 offer for an $8,400 ring is the ordinary outcome of a resale market that is structurally suppressed.

Unlike gold, silver, platinum, or nearly any other precious material, diamonds have no standardized commodity market. There is no exchange where stones trade at a single public price the way gold does; the trade’s price lists and dealer networks quote asking prices, and they are not open to consumers. A diamond’s value at any given moment is whatever a willing buyer and seller agree on, in a transaction where the seller almost always has less information and less leverage than the buyer.

Gold trades at a published spot price. Sell your gold ring and you will receive close to the metal’s market value, minus the jeweler’s margin. Sell a diamond of equivalent retail purchase price and you will typically be offered substantially less than you paid. The diamond has not degraded. The retail price you paid was never the stone’s resale value: it covered the retail chain’s costs and margins and the mythology attached to the stone, and none of that survives the trip back across the counter.

The secondary market’s suppression serves the primary market perfectly. If diamonds could be resold at close to their purchase price, every diamond ever sold would compete with new ones, prices would fall, and managed scarcity could not survive millions of resale stones entering the market. Instead, the ‘A Diamond is Forever’ campaign gave people a cultural reason never to sell.

The resale trap has a second side, which has to do with timing and has been plain since 2022. Polished diamond prices move with the Rapaport benchmark, which in turn responds to rough supply and demand. Natural diamond prices peaked in 2021 to 2022 as post-pandemic consumer spending surged and supply chains remained constrained. From that peak through the end of 2024, asking prices for one-carat natural polished diamonds fell by more than 40 percent on Rapaport’s index, and they fell roughly another 10 percent in 2025. A consumer who paid a 2022 retail premium for a natural stone and tries to resell today faces two compounding losses: the structural gap between retail and wholesale value, and the decline in the wholesale benchmark itself. Over the same period, gold more than doubled in price.

After the Monopoly

The story most people know about De Beers ends in the early 2000s, when the monopoly appeared to break down. Producers in Australia and Canada began selling independently, and a 2006 European Commission antitrust decision required De Beers to phase out its purchases of Russian rough from ALROSA, ending them from 2009. De Beers’ share of global rough supply fell from about 90 percent in the 1980s to roughly 30 percent by the late 2010s, and to about a fifth of world output by volume in 2024–25. The narrative that followed was one of market liberalization.

What replaced the De Beers monopoly was a pair of dominant producers with the same interest in tight supply. ALROSA, Russia’s state-controlled miner, produces roughly 30 percent of the world’s rough diamonds by volume, more than any other company. Its board has included senior government officials. Its interests in maintaining high diamond prices are structurally identical to De Beers’. Neither company has any incentive to flood the market; both accumulate stockpiles and advocate supply restraint.

Pricing power in the trade has never depended on volume alone. Polished diamonds are priced against the Rapaport Price List, a weekly asking-price benchmark, and dealers quote prices as a percentage above or below ‘Rap.’ For decades De Beers’ rough prices set the tone for that whole chain. Its grip has weakened: by 2025 De Beers was cutting prices and running at a loss, and its owner Anglo American, which holds 85 percent, has been selling the company since 2024. In July 2026 Botswana’s government said Anglo had chosen a consortium led by former De Beers chief executive Gareth Penny as preferred bidder, though Anglo said it was not exclusive with any bidder. Botswana, which owns the other 15 percent, holds pre-emption rights, and no sale had closed by October 2026. Even so, De Beers’ sight prices remain a key reference for the trade.

The deeper history lies in ALROSA’s relationship with De Beers over the preceding decades. The Soviet Union began producing diamonds commercially in the 1950s from the kimberlite deposits of Yakutia. Those diamonds threatened to flood the market and destroy De Beers’ pricing. Rather than compete, De Beers negotiated. The two companies reached supply-coordination agreements that brought Soviet production inside the cartel’s orbit; their precise terms were never made public. From the 1950s on, the ‘Western’ diamond monopoly ran, in operational terms, as a Cold War co-management arrangement.

After Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the United States and Britain sanctioned ALROSA and the US banned direct imports of Russian diamonds. The trade kept flowing. Most Russian rough went to India, mainly Surat, for cutting, and because cutting legally changed a stone’s country of origin, it could re-enter Western markets as an ‘Indian’ polished diamond. Belgium, the EU’s diamond hub, kept importing Russian rough directly until the EU’s own ban took effect on January 1, 2024. Only from March 1, 2024, did the G7 extend its ban to Russian diamonds polished in third countries, first for stones of 1 carat and above, then from that September for 0.5 carat. The mine-to-market traceability system the G7 promised has been repeatedly delayed. Since January 2026, EU importers of polished stones of 0.5 carat or more must make reasonable efforts to verify origin and file a due-diligence statement with each customs declaration, but no digital tracing system is required.

The Botswana Exception

Debswana, formed in 1968–69 as a joint venture between De Beers and the Government of Botswana, runs the Jwaneng and Orapa mines, two of the most valuable diamond deposits on earth; the government has held 50 percent of it since a 1975 renegotiation. Diamonds supplied about 80 percent of Botswana’s export earnings through most of the 2010s and early 2020s and, in good years, a third or more of government revenue, though the 2023–25 slump cut mineral revenue to under a tenth of government revenue in 2024/25 and pushed the economy into recession. Botswana’s GDP per capita has grown from under $100 at independence in 1966, among the lowest in the world, to upper-middle-income status today. The diamond industry is a material part of that story, and it is a story that functions as the industry’s most credible rebuttal: if De Beers were purely extractive, the argument goes, Botswana would look like Sierra Leone or Angola, and it does not.

Botswana’s success was negotiated, carefully and over decades, beginning with the Seretse Khama government’s 1967 law vesting mineral rights in the state, and the 1975 renegotiation with De Beers that gave the government a 50 percent share of Debswana’s diamond profits. Botswana had the political clarity, and the bargaining power of sitting on some of the richest deposits in the world, to insist on that arrangement, and it insisted. Most diamond-producing countries did not achieve a comparable deal. Their governments lacked the leverage or the institutional capacity, or in some cases were too compromised to demand it.

Botswana shows what a government with rich deposits and the will to bargain hard could win from De Beers. The Sierra Leone and Angola cases below show what happened where those conditions were absent, and even within Botswana the benefits have not reached everyone. The forced removal of the San people from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, which coincided with De Beers’ exploration license for the Gope deposit inside the reserve, is also part of the Botswana diamond story.

The premium that funds Botswana’s government revenue is the same constructed scarcity premium paid by consumers in New York, London and Tokyo who have no idea what they are paying for. Under that pricing architecture the Botswana government collects the premium and the world’s consumers pay it.

The Kimberley Process: What It Certifies

The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, established in 2003 following the Sierra Leone and Angola blood diamond scandals, certifies only that rough diamonds are not ‘conflict diamonds’: stones sold by rebel movements to finance wars against legitimate governments. It does not certify that the diamond was produced without forced labor, that no workers were killed in its extraction, that the country of origin listed on the certificate is accurate, or that no human rights violations occurred at any point in the supply chain. In December 2011 Global Witness withdrew. It had helped create the Kimberley Process and had been an official observer since 2003, and its announcement said the scheme had ‘become an accomplice to diamond laundering.’ Its co-founder Charmian Gooch wrote that the decision to endorse exports from Zimbabwe’s Marange fields had turned it into ‘a cynical corporate accreditation scheme.’ The Kimberley Process continued without them, and continues today; India holds its chair in 2026.

The Certification Problem

The GIA’s grading standards are rigorous and have been a consistent source of friction with dealers who prefer looser interpretation. Its record is not spotless: in 2005 it dismissed four employees of its New York laboratory after an internal investigation into grading practices there. But the grading system’s larger effect is a pricing structure that consumers cannot independently verify, and the cause lies mainly in how the industry uses the grades the GIA produces.

The problem is the price cliff. At every grade boundary the price moves because the certificate says the grade has changed, even where the perceptible quality has not. Take the VS1–VS2 boundary from the box above, a distinction made under 10x magnification: it can carry a noticeable price difference on a one-carat stone, for a difference the buyer cannot see.

The larger certification problem sits below the GIA, in a proliferation of lower-tier independent grading laboratories with demonstrably looser standards. The EGL network was the most prominent example: in 2013 overseas EGL laboratories graded some stones as much as three color grades higher than GIA, IGI and EGL USA, which graded broadly in line with one another. In the same 2013 comparison IGI, the International Gemological Institute, graded in the same ballpark as the GIA. It is now owned by Blackstone, has been listed in India since December 2024, and certifies most of the world’s lab-grown diamonds. Even so, grades from different laboratories are not interchangeable, and many dealers price stones accordingly; a buyer comparing certificates from different labs is not necessarily comparing like with like.

The GIA, a nonprofit, earns most of its operating revenue from services paid for by the trade, chiefly laboratory grading, supplemented by royalties and a large investment portfolio. This creates a structural dependency, even if it does not translate into grade inflation at the GIA itself: the industry’s ability to charge premiums at every grade boundary depends on consumers trusting GIA certificates, which means the industry has a direct financial interest in the GIA’s continued authority. The GIA’s integrity is, paradoxically, something the industry needs to protect in order to keep extracting the premiums it creates. That does not make the GIA corrupt, but it makes the institution useful to the trade in ways the GIA itself may not fully control.

The Lab-Grown Test

If natural diamond value came from physical properties such as hardness, optical performance and chemical structure, a laboratory-grown diamond, which shares those properties, should sell for about the same price as a mined one. Instead it sells at a steep discount, and the industry argues that it should, because it lacks the geological history and the scarcity premium.

A laboratory-grown diamond has essentially the same chemical composition, crystal structure and principal physical properties as a mined one: the same hardness, the same refractive index, carbon atoms arranged in the same lattice. The differences lie in microscopic growth features and trace impurities that only laboratory instruments can reliably detect; a trained gemologist with standard equipment cannot reliably tell the two apart. Until 2025 the GIA graded laboratory diamonds on the same D-to-Z color and clarity scales it uses for mined stones; since October 1, 2025, it describes colorless and near-colorless lab-grown diamonds only as ‘premium’ or ‘standard,’ saying the natural-diamond terms should not describe ‘a manufactured product.’

The cost to produce a laboratory diamond has fallen dramatically. Bain & Company estimated that growing a carat by chemical vapor deposition cost about $4,000 in 2008 and $300 to $500 by 2018, and costs have kept falling since as capacity in India and China has grown. In early 2024 the analyst Paul Zimnisky put lab-grown retail prices at roughly 70 to 90 percent below comparable mined stones, up from roughly 28 to 40 percent in 2018, and the gap has widened further since. The price is collapsing because no artificial scarcity mechanism controls supply. Anyone with the capital to build the relevant reactor can produce diamonds, so supply is, in principle, unlimited.

The industry’s response has been largely psychological. The Natural Diamond Council (which relaunched as The Diamond Collective in September 2026) has run advertising campaigns emphasizing ‘realness’ and ‘rarity.’ In 2018 De Beers launched its own lab-grown brand, Lightbox, positioning it deliberately as inexpensive fashion jewelry rather than bridal and pricing it at a flat $800 per carat to reinforce the message that lab-growns are ‘less than.’ In May 2025, citing a roughly 90 percent fall in lab-grown wholesale prices since Lightbox’s launch, De Beers announced it would close the brand and focus its jewelry business entirely on natural diamonds; its Element Six unit still makes synthetic diamonds for industrial uses. The argument being made, openly, is that a mined diamond is worth more because it was not made in a factory in a matter of weeks.

If accepted, this argument places a mined diamond’s extra value in its story, since the carbon is identical, and that story is owned by a marketing apparatus that has been running for nearly ninety years.

Where Lab-Grown Prices Are Heading

Lab-grown diamond prices have fallen steeply, and it is not obvious where the floor lies. Chemical vapor deposition technology continues to improve in efficiency. Forecasts differ in emphasis: some analysts expect lab-grown prices to keep falling as reactor capacity grows, others think most of the decline has already happened. Either way, the mined diamond market faces a competitor that is all but physically identical and costs a fraction of the price, and its central answer has been persuasion: that the story attached to a mined stone is worth thousands of dollars more than the one a buyer could attach to a lab-grown stone. Whether that persuasion will hold is the central business question of the diamond industry in the 2020s.

The Bodies in the Supply Chain

The diamond industry’s record of violence runs from 1884 to 2019, from southern and western Africa to Siberia. It includes acts directly committed by companies and states in the industry, acts funded by diamond revenues, and acts of structural violence embedded in labor systems that persist today.

Kimberley, 1884: The Strike That Was Shot

In April 1884, white miners at the De Beers, Kimberley, Bultfontein, and Dutoitspan diamond mines went on strike. Their grievance was that the mining companies had extended to them a practice that had been imposed on Black workers since the mines began: mandatory strip searches at the end of every shift. When they struck, mine managers, the Commissioner of Police, and armed special constables assembled at the mine perimeter. On April 29, police and militia opened fire. Seven white miners were shot dead. Black workers, who had endured the same strip-searching for years with no vote and no union, were not passive: at least a thousand of them joined the strikers’ march that day, and when De Beers opened its closed compound in 1886, its workers struck for about a week.

Kimberley, 1888: Fire in the De Beers Mine

On July 11, 1888, a hauling wire broke at the De Beers Mine in Kimberley. The skip fell, breaking oil lamps, and ignited the wooden shaft casing. Smoke filled the galleries. In all, 202 workers died. Rhodes’s economies on safety have been blamed by his recent biographer William Kelleher Storey for the accidents that followed, this fire included, though contemporary reports disagreed about exactly how it started.

Angola and Sierra Leone: Diamonds as Weapons of War

In Sierra Leone, the Revolutionary United Front made amputation a signature tactic. A UN panel of experts in 2000 called diamonds ‘a major and primary source of income’ for the rebels, worth an estimated $25 million to $125 million a year. Victims were reportedly asked to choose between ‘long sleeves’ (amputation at the wrist) and ‘short sleeves’ (amputation at the elbow or above). Before the 1996 elections, rebels told some victims their hands were being cut off so that they could not vote; others were sent to carry a message to the government. Children were abducted and forced to fight, and some were forced to execute their own parents. Eleven years of war, from 1991 to 2002, killed tens of thousands of people and left many survivors mutilated. The RUF’s three senior surviving commanders were convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity in 2009 and sentenced to terms of up to 52 years.

The diamonds that funded these atrocities moved through Liberia and on to the trading centers, including Antwerp, that handled legitimate stones. De Beers, the main buyer of rough diamonds, bought Angolan stones on the open market through most of the 1990s, until in 1999 it announced it would stop buying any Angolan diamonds outside its contracted supply.

In Angola, UNITA financed its war largely with diamonds through the 1990s, in a civil war that killed an estimated 500,000 Angolans. Savimbi’s forces mined civilian roads, burned villages and carried out massacres. The UN Security Council banned imports of unofficial Angolan diamonds in 1998.

Zimbabwe, Marange, 2008: A Massacre in Real Time

The operation was called Hakudzokwi, or Operation No Return. On October 27, 2008, Zimbabwean military helicopters with mounted automatic rifles flew over the Chiadzwa diamond fields in Marange and opened fire on artisanal miners working below. Soldiers on the ground pursued fleeing miners with AK-47 rifles. People were trapped and died in tunnels in the stampede. Soldiers forced surviving miners to dig mass graves for those who had been killed. Over three weeks, the military killed at least 214 people, by Human Rights Watch’s count; the US State Department cited NGO estimates that security forces killed 200 to 300 people in the Chiadzwa fields.

After the massacre, the military ran the fields with forced labor, children included, and officers ran private diamond smuggling syndicates. The Kimberley Process was presented with Human Rights Watch’s findings and its own review mission’s recommendation to suspend Zimbabwe. The scheme decides by consensus, and there was none: in November 2009 it adopted a work plan instead. Marange exports, halted for a time, resumed under a Kimberley Process monitor in 2010, and in 2011 the scheme approved exports from Marange companies outright. Global Witness resigned from the Kimberley Process in December 2011, citing above all the scheme’s 2011 decision to approve exports from Marange companies, as well as its failures over Côte d’Ivoire and Venezuela. Diamonds that left Marange in 2010 and 2011, with the massacre already on record, reached the global market as certified conflict-free stones.

Yakutia, 2008: A Union Organizer Taken Into the Forest

Valentin Urusov was an electrician at an ALROSA subsidiary in Udachny, a diamond-mining town near the Arctic Circle. In June 2008 he set up an independent trade union, Profsvoboda, as an alternative to the company-backed union, and it quickly signed up about a thousand members. On September 3, 2008, men led by the head of the local federal drug-control service seized him; by his account they drove him into the taiga, handcuffed him, forced him to his knees and fired three shots over his head.

He was then charged with possessing hashish oil, allegedly found in his pocket during a search witnessed by an ALROSA security chief — evidence he and his supporters say was planted. He was sentenced to six years, later reduced to five. The drug-control chief who led the operation was later convicted of fraud and abuse of authority over payments he allegedly received from ALROSA, though he denied any link to Urusov’s case. Urusov was released early, in March 2013, after about four and a half years in custody.

When the Mir underground mine was commissioned in 2009, the most prominent independent union organizer in the region had just been jailed, and no independent union represented its miners. On August 4, 2017, water from an aquifer exposed by the old open pit broke into the mine. Of 151 workers underground, 142 were brought out that day and one more the next; eight men were never recovered. In 2019 the mine’s former head, Alexei Burkser, was charged with breaching safety rules — and was found dead in his cell the next day.

So What Is a Diamond Worth?

On the estimates above, the physical costs of mining, cutting and grading a one-carat diamond come to a few hundred dollars, and the person who polished the stone receives only a small part of that. The ring in the breakdown sells for $7,500. The rest pays for everything the table cannot see: the miner’s capital and royalties, the margins along the chain, the store, and the story and brand that make the price possible at all.

The personal value is the one variable the industry cannot manufacture, and it has spent most of its money convincing you that it equals the market value. A diamond can have enormous personal value as an heirloom, a symbol or an object whose beauty you enjoy, while still being a poor financial transaction. You can know exactly how overpriced something is and still want it. The problem is buying it believing the price measures the stone.

Lab-grown diamonds have exposed the construction. Physically all but identical, they sell for far less, and in 2024, for the first time, they made up the majority of engagement ring center stones in the United States. De Beers long marketed lab-grown diamonds as ‘fashion’ rather than ‘bridal,’ because the bridal market is where the premium lives, and in 2025 announced it was abandoning lab-grown jewelry altogether to concentrate on natural stones.

Whether natural diamonds hold their price over the next twenty years depends above all on whether the story holds, and in nearly ninety years it has never faced a physically identical competitor at a fraction of the price.

Back to the Jeweler’s Counter

The woman looking at the $8,400 ring and offering $900 is a clear-eyed participant in a market whose prices she did not set and cannot change. Those prices were set by the system that sold you the ring at $8,400 in the first place, a system that for a century kept supply tight and demand hot, and where necessary used political influence, economic warfare and physical violence to keep its grip.

You can buy a diamond knowing all of this. People buy Ferraris knowing they are paying for a brand rather than transportation, and first-class tickets knowing economy gets there at the same time. The transaction becomes irrational when it rests on false premises: that you are purchasing scarcity, that you are making an investment, that the tradition is ancient, that the stone’s value is inherent.

None of those premises survives the record. The scarcity is managed; the investment can lose much of its resale value the moment you walk out the door; the mass tradition is less than sixty years old in Japan and under ninety in America, and in both countries it was built by De Beers’ advertising agencies, N.W. Ayer & Son in the United States and J. Walter Thompson in Japan.

Appendix: Documented Timeline of Violence and Criminal Conduct in the Diamond Industry

This appendix sets out the incidents described in the main text, and some others, in chronological order.

Gen AI Disclaimer

Some contents of this page were generated and/or edited with the help of a Generative AI.

Media

Cathodoluminescence image of a diamond, taken in a scanning electron microscope – Wikipedia

The Glorious Studio – Pexels

Lê Minh Hải – Pexels