As the great grandson of Louis Fran ç ois Cartie, the founder of the Cartier Jewelry Empire in 1847, Jean Dousset also had a slight understanding of diamonds. In his childhood, table topics often revolved around gemstones.
Although the Cartier family sold the company to luxury goods holding company Richemont in 1964, Dousset has always been passionate about high-end jewelry. In 2009, he launched his eponymous brand, designing engagement rings, tennis bracelets, earrings, and more. He had been using natural diamonds before, but this month he decided to completely shift the brand towards nurturing diamonds.
Jean Dousset
This is a risky move, but Dousset believes that now is the best time. We are at a critical moment where the quality of cultivated diamonds is as good as natural diamonds, but the price is much lower. This is a liberation. My clients can buy the diamonds they really want without compromise, and I can design anything I want without considering the price. Jean Dousset's 1.0 carat cultivated single stone engagement ring is priced at about $6000, About half the price of natural diamonds of the same quality.
Dousset is not fighting alone. There are now start-up companies that are completely focused on cultivating diamonds, including Vrai and Idyl; At the same time, the mass market jeweler Pandora announced last year that they would completely give up diamond mining. Even luxury brands have entered this market. Luxury group LVMH has just invested in Lusix, an Israeli company that produces and cultivates diamonds; Breitling and TAG Heuer have both launched watches embedded with cultivated diamonds.
Cultivating diamonds seems to have the potential to become mainstream, with the industry's output expected to reach $50 billion by 2023, up from $19 billion in 2020. This transformation reflects a change in the views of young consumers on the value and cultural significance of diamonds, which can also change the jewelry purchasing behavior of future generations.
Creating Diamonds in the Laboratory
Natural diamonds are an amazing item. It is composed of pure carbon, compressed by extremely high pressure and temperature hundreds of miles underground, and transformed into a gemstone over millions of years. Although mankind has known diamonds for thousands of years, in the early 1900s, jeweler began to market diamond wedding rings as a symbol of love and commitment, and the global demand for diamonds surged. Suddenly, people all over the world want to have such a gem.
For over a century, scientists have been seeking to manufacture diamonds with chemical composition consistent with natural diamonds, in order to avoid the challenges faced in mining. In the 1940s, the Nobel laureate in physics, Percy Williams Bridgman, made a significant breakthrough. He developed a machine that can apply greater pressure to materials. General Electric in the United States became interested in this technology, and the 'Project Superpressure' became synonymous with manufacturing diamonds in the laboratory. In 1954, General Electric Company produced the first batch of cultivated diamonds.
Over the past seventy years, more and more companies have attempted to use technology similar to the initial General Electric project to manufacture diamonds. There are two ways to cultivate diamonds nowadays. The first type is high-pressure high-temperature (HPHT), where pure carbon is placed in a metal tube and then pulse heated and pressurized to crystallize into diamonds. The second type is chemical vapor deposition (CVD), which exposes tiny natural diamonds to carbon rich gases and high temperatures, causing particles to adhere to the original diamond and increase its size.
Over the past two decades, Dousset has been closely monitoring the development of the diamond industry. Even though cultivated diamonds have the same structure as natural diamonds, he said he cannot find cultivated diamonds that are cut and polished with the highest quality. Fifteen years ago, no one truly understood the cultivation of diamonds, and their prices fluctuated greatly. However, the main problem was that I believed their cutting was not good. The cutting and polishing techniques of diamonds were the backbone of jewelry production
But in recent years, the quality of cultivated diamonds seems to have improved to the point where they can compete with natural diamonds, stimulating a wave of technology startups to enter the field, including Diamond Foundry, Lusix, and Clean Origin. Even De Beers, the world's largest diamond mining company, has opened its own laboratory Lightbox.
Ornella Siso
Ornella Siso stated that the diamond industry has undergone tremendous changes in the past five years. Her family has been engaged in the diamond business in Antwerp, Belgium for decades, where 84% of the diamond raw stones are cut. They see more and more cultivated diamonds appearing in the Antwerp market, and they are no different from natural diamonds. They are 90% cheaper than natural diamonds, but they are exactly the same.
In 2021, Siso resigned from his job on Facebook and founded Idyl, using cultivated diamonds to make jewelry. The price of pure gold jewelry designed by this brand is only a small part of the mining gemstone: a diamond bracelet costs $695, and a 0.5 carat necklace costs $895. I am very clear that it will completely change this industry. The beauty of this technology is that it will continue to improve, and the size and quality of diamonds will also continue to improve.
What Young Consumers Want
Siso said that most of her customers stumbled upon this brand while searching for ethical diamond jewelry after hearing about human rights violations related to the diamond trade. Although many jewelry brands indicate that their brands are not infringing, some consumers still tend to purchase cultivated diamonds because they do not have the risk of being contaminated by these issues.
Meanwhile, Dousset stated that initially some consumers viewed cultivated diamonds as cheap imitations of cubic zirconia. But when they learn that cultivating diamonds is exactly the same as natural diamonds, they will change their outlook. Cultivated diamonds and natural diamonds now have the same rating and certification methods (based on cutting, color, clarity, and carat), making consumers confident that they are getting real diamonds.
After understanding this, many people will be attracted to cultivating diamonds because they can obtain higher quality diamonds within their budget. I have seen many people bring pressure when buying diamonds, and except for a few wealthy people, all those who want to buy diamonds have to compromise on quality.
Dousset said that with the cultivation of diamonds, people can now buy the jewelry they truly want. Couples can design larger diamond wedding rings that perfectly match their desired style without exceeding their budget. Siso also noticed the same thing. Many women can now purchase daily jewelry set with diamonds without worrying about wear and tear in their daily lives.
Although startups such as Jean Dousset and Idyl are optimistic about nurturing diamonds, natural diamonds still dominate the majority of the market. In 2022, nurturing diamonds accounted for 10% of the diamond jewelry market, up from 2% in 2018. Many large jewelry companies still focus on providing natural diamonds.
Virginia Drosos, CEO of Signet Jewelers (which owns 11 brands including Kay, Zales, Jared, and Blue Nile), said that the company has started offering cultivated diamonds, but customers often choose natural diamonds. Cultivating diamonds is very popular among customers with limited budgets, but they are more favored by customers due to the rarity of natural diamonds
Meanwhile, Alexandre Arnault, Tiffany's executive vice president for products and communication, recently told students at Oxford University that the brand has no intention of venturing into the diamond industry. We believe in natural diamonds. Would you rather have something that belongs to Earth forever, or something that was made in a microwave somewhere.
However, Tiffany's parent company LVMH has invested in Israel's nurturing diamond company Lusix, indicating that it is considering the possibility of using nurturing diamonds for luxury goods. In fact, another LVMH brand, TAG Heuer, recently released a watch worth $376000, adorned with over 12 carats of cultivated diamonds.
As for Dousset, after decades of observation by his family, he believes that the jewelry industry has been constantly changing and developing. He pointed out that De Beers and other jeweler were promoting diamonds from the beginning, so they could do the same thing for cultivating diamonds. "My great great-grandfather was a forward-looking thinker of his time," Dousset said, pointing out that he had created unusual watch and jewelry designs at that time. You need to constantly innovate.