Girls, just say no to lab-grown diamonds
These days, when I spot a proper bobby-dazzler of a diamond on a woman’s ring finger, I feel a bit sick. Not with envy, but with the queasy certainty that I am looking at a comically large, factory-made fake. A real diamond is one of the most ancient things in this world. Under the heat and pressure of billions of years trapped in the earth, scraps of carbon transformed into a precious stone. Everything we have valued in diamonds – the hardness, the fiery glitter, the rarity – comes from that long and improbable journey. The impersonations – although we’re meant to call them ‘lab-grown’ or ‘synthetic’ – are mainly produced in Indian or Chinese machines and cost a fraction of the real thing.
