Over the last five years, the industry has made several efforts to increase awareness of lab-grown diamonds. Today, there are affordable machines to detect natural and lab-grown diamonds, thus maintaining pipeline integrity for both products.

Moreover, Bharat Diamond Bourse, the largest diamond bourse in the world, has recently allowed the trading of lab-grown diamonds by placing strict guidelines so that the two pipelines - natural and labgrown - stay separate through transparency in dealings and proper disclosures.

In a webinar titled “Overview of Laboratory-Grown Diamonds” at IIJS Virtual 2.0, Karan Kundra from GIA covered all the aspects of identifying lab-grown diamonds.

Some of the topics covered in detail were:

• How natural and lab-grown diamonds differ from each other?

• The atomic arrangement of natural vis-à-vis lab-grown diamonds

• How laboratories end up identifying lab-grown diamonds?

• What are the different diamond types and their characteristics?

Karan also discussed the three common methods through which we can replicate the natural diamond, i.e. HPHT, which is high pressure high temperature, CVD, which is chemical vapour deposition, and the third is NPD, which stands for nano polycrystalline diamond.