Free diamonds?

A jewelry store up north is running an interesting sales campaign that involves free diamonds.

Only thing is...They aren’t exactly free and, truthfully, not really natural diamonds.

Meanwhile, there was a line of folks around the block waiting to get in the store the first day of the “giveaway.”

When they entered the store asking about the free diamonds, they were told you got a free one-carat laboratory-created diamond if you first made a purchase of at least $500. Always a catch!

Am I missing something here? So free isn’t free, and the diamond is not a real diamond?

Wow! If I tried to pull off this sales stunt, the line waiting to get in my shop would snake up Collier and over the Jolley Bridge, and there would be a riot when folks found out the free wasn’t exactly free. Apparently, things up north are very different. While some walked away many bit the hook.

An interesting marketing ploy. First, they spend the minimum $500 and get the 1.00-carat loose lab-created diamond. Loose means loose, no setting of any kind to hold that free gem that now needs a setting of some sort. Even a simple gold pendant and chain will cause you to spend another $500 to $1,000 and a simple gold ring mounting will run anywhere from $800 to thousands - the sky’s the limit if you want added bling. As you can now see, this is becoming less free by the minute after you step in there.

You be the judge - a swindle or a great marketing idea?

The advent of laboratory-created diamonds has recently become a hot topic throughout the jewelry business. Even when they were available to retailers twenty years ago, they were shunned by most of us. I considered them a novelty. Because something in our minds said that they are not natural, so why are they so darn expensive? Back then, very few companies manufactured them and as I mentioned, the demand was nil.

Fast forward to 2023. The public is now well aware of lab-created and diamonds; it's become a billion-dollar industry. The demand here on summer, sleepy, snoozy Marco Island, not so much. When I mention there is a less expensive way to own a nice two-carat diamond by going the lab-created route, most customers say...what’s that?

The lab diamond controversy in the jewelry business comes down to a matter of pros and cons. Many old-school jewelers like myself were first against even entertaining the thought of offering them to their clients. Then, to our amazement, a few diamond dealers we have been buying our natural diamonds from for over a half-century began offering lab created - they had no choice but to start adding them to their inventory or miss the boat and, surprise, in some major cities the lab stuff was out selling the natural diamonds. The small snowball rolling down the hill was getting bigger and bigger and gaining momentum. Now, other diamond merchants wanted their slice of a billion-dollar pie.

Up to a year ago, I was still adamantly against them until I started getting calls from my friends and relatives up north asking if I sold them. Before the demand, the one and only time I sold lab-created diamonds was for a piece I made for a client requiring many small stones. Let’s just say he was beyond frugal, pretty much a skinflint. He wanted me to use cubic zirconia’s or white sapphire instead of diamonds in this beautiful gold pendant I created for his significant other. I refused, and he got mad and I’d rather not get stuck with a hand-crafted oddball pendant that he designed that no one in the world would understand its meaning, thus I’d never sell it. I thought of lab diamonds - a heck of a lot better than putting in cubics and the cost wasn’t that much more because of their small size. He was pleased with the finished product.

That sort of got the ball rolling. It wasn’t always a matter of a customer taking the cheap way out - it was a less expensive alternative and no one but your savviest jeweler would ever know the difference...they are indistinguishable from natural diamonds!

Here’s where the controversy comes in. If someone uses the term “fake diamond,” the pro–labbers (my term) pull a nutty because in reality, they say it is in every way a diamond just not created by Mother Nature. Meanwhile, the anti-labbers claim that’s horse hockey. Lab’s didn’t take millions of years to develop and weren’t mined or found in rivers and such. To make matters worse, now many reputable diamond grading organizations are issuing certificates for them to further the justification and worth of lab-created diamonds. I just hit another nerve concerning the subject of lab-created vs. natural diamonds...WORTH vs VALUE.

A funny thing has happened to the lab diamond industry. The prices are on a downward spiral and I mean fast - they are costing less and less monthly and it has adversely affected the natural diamond market in a weird way. The cost of large fine naturals are going higher while natural diamonds below 1.00 carat are tanking.

You don’t have to believe what I’m saying here, just prepare yourself for the onslaught of TV advertising lab diamonds this coming holiday season. And oh yeah, attention Walmart shoppers - lab diamonds are available in some stores nationwide...A DIAMOND IS FOREVER.

And is a lab diamond forever a good or bad decision? The beauty of it all you get to choose.