Do Lab Grown Diamonds Hold Their Value? The Honest Answer

No. Not in the way people hope, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

I sell lab grown diamonds. I make the rings myself in a Southbank studio in Melbourne. Writing that first sentence costs me sales and I would rather lose those sales than have someone find out in five years that I let them believe something convenient.

The longer answer is more useful than the short one, though, because the reason lab grown diamonds do not hold their value applies almost as brutally to mined diamonds, and once you understand the mechanism you stop asking the wrong question.

What has happened to lab grown prices

Lab grown diamond prices have fallen substantially since 2020. That is not a controversial statement in the trade, it is just one the retail side is quiet about.

The cause is straightforward. A lab grown diamond takes roughly two to twelve weeks to grow in a reactor. When demand rose, producers added capacity, mostly in India and China, and they added a lot of it. Growing technology also improved: better seed plates, better yields, larger stones from a single run. Supply expanded to meet demand and then kept expanding, and prices did what prices do when supply is not constrained.

I am not going to print a percentage. Figures circulating for the category vary wildly depending on which spec and which market anyone is quoting, and a precise number would give this a false authority. The direction is what matters and the direction is unambiguously down.

For you as a buyer that is good news at purchase and bad news at resale. A stone you bought in 2023 is competing on the second hand market against a brand new one at the same spec that costs less than yours did. There is no scarcity underneath the category to arrest that.

What happens when anyone resells any retail jewellery

Here is the part that reframes the whole question.

Take a mined diamond solitaire bought new from a chain retailer. Walk it into three dealers and ask for offers. Every one of those offers will start well below what was paid, and often shockingly below. This is not because the stone was bad. It is because of what a retail price is made of.

When you buy a piece of jewellery at retail, the price covers:

• the stone, at whatever the seller paid wholesale
• the metal, at its weight in gold or platinum
• the labour: CAD, casting, setting, finishing
• the certification
• the warranty and the aftercare that sits behind it
• premises, staff, insurance, marketing
• ten per cent GST

When you sell it second hand, the buyer pays for the stone and the metal only, and only at the price they can replace them for themselves, because a dealer buying your ring is competing against their own wholesale supplier. Nothing else in that list returns. The labour does not come back. The GST does not come back. The marketing that got you through the door certainly does not come back.

This is true of mined. It is true of lab grown. It is true of a gold chain, a tennis bracelet and a signet ring. It is one of the most reliable facts in the industry and it is almost never said aloud, because the mined trade has spent decades encouraging people to think of a diamond as a store of value, and it works.

What you would realistically get

I can tell you the structure of the answer even where I will not invent a number.

Your ring has a hard floor, and that floor is metal. Gold and platinum have a genuine recovery value by weight, quoted daily, and a refiner will pay something close to melt less a margin. On a substantial 18ct or platinum setting that floor is not nothing.

Above the floor sits the stone, and what it fetches depends entirely on who is buying.

A dealer or pawnbroker buys to resell at a profit, against their own wholesale supply. On a lab grown stone that supply is cheap and getting cheaper, so their offer will be low. Some will not take lab grown at all.

A jeweller on consignment may do better, because you are reaching a retail buyer rather than a trade one, but you wait, you pay a commission, and the ring has to be something their customers want.

A private sale, through Facebook Marketplace, eBay or Gumtree, reaches a retail buyer directly and will usually produce the best number. It also requires you to persuade a stranger that your certificate is real, which is much easier when the stone is laser inscribed on the girdle with an IGI report number they can look up themselves. That inscription is quietly the most useful thing on a second hand sale.

An auction house is realistic only if the piece is signed, period, or carries an unusual stone. An ordinary modern solitaire will not get a hearing.

Whichever route, the number is a fraction of what you paid, in both materials. Anyone quoting you a single confident percentage for the Australian market is guessing.

Why this matters less than people assume

Ask yourself what else you would compare it to.

Nobody buys a wedding dress and expects to recover the price. Nobody prices a honeymoon on its resale. Nobody asks what their dining table will fetch. Engagement rings sit in a strange category where a very effective marketing campaign, running since the middle of last century, taught several generations to think of them as an investment, and that idea has outlived the market conditions that made it faintly plausible.

An engagement ring is worn on a hand every day for decades. That is the return. Judged that way, the questions that matter are whether the cut grade is good enough that it looks alive in ordinary light, whether the shank is thick enough to survive the way you use your hands, whether the claws are properly finished, and whether whoever made it will still be there when a claw wears. Those are answerable. Resale is a distraction from all of them.

There is also a version of this that cuts in favour of lab grown. If jewellery loses most of its retail premium the moment it leaves the counter regardless of material, then paying several times more for the same carbon in order to lose the same premium is a strange way to protect value.

When it does matter

Three situations where I would take this seriously.

You are buying an appreciating asset on purpose. A small, real category of diamonds does appreciate: fancy coloured stones, particularly Argyle pinks since that mine closed in 2020, and signed period pieces where you are paying for the maker and the age as much as the stone. If that is genuinely what you want, buy there, from a specialist, with independent advice. It is not what an engagement ring is and it is not what we sell.

You expect to trade up. Some couples buy modestly now and want a larger stone in five or ten years. The thing to ask about is not resale, it is upgrade policy: whether the maker will credit the original stone against a larger one, and on what terms. Ask before you buy, and get it in writing, because a verbal upgrade promise is worth nothing when the person who made it has left.

Divorce, estates and settlements. Rings get divided, valued and argued over. What matters then is documentation: a current valuation, the certificate, the receipt. Not a hopeful assumption about what it is worth.

The practical thing to actually do: insure it properly

This is the part with a real answer, and it is the part almost nobody bothers with.

Get the ring valued for insurance, and understand that an insurance valuation is not a resale value. It is a retail replacement value: what it would cost to have the piece remade or replaced today, at retail, in the current market. It is deliberately a higher number than anything you would be offered second hand, because its job is to make you whole after a loss, not to predict a sale. People see the two figures and conclude somebody has lied to them. Nobody has. They measure different things.

Then:

• List it as a specified item on your home and contents policy. Unspecified jewellery cover usually caps out at a low per item limit and often only covers loss inside the home. A specified item is covered worldwide and for the sum insured. This is the single most common gap I see.
• Make sure the valuation carries the IGI report number and the stone's measurements and grades, not just "diamond ring, one carat". If it is ever replaced, that document is the specification the replacement is built from.
• Say on the valuation that the stone is lab grown. Insurers are increasingly explicit about this and a mismatch at claim time is a fight you do not want.
• Refresh the valuation every few years. Metal prices move, and a valuation from 2019 will not replace anything in 2026.
• Keep a photograph of the ring on the hand and a copy of the certificate somewhere that is not the same drawer as the ring.

Every lab grown diamond we set is IGI certified and laser inscribed with its report number, and every ring carries a lifetime warranty on craftsmanship and on the optical properties of the stone. Those are the things that protect you in practice, alongside a properly specified insurance policy. A resale figure is not.

If you want to talk through any of this before you buy, we take appointments at the Southbank studio and run design consultations by video call. You can book an appointment, or start with the lab grown diamond engagement rings collection to see what the money buys.

FAQ

Will a jeweller buy my lab grown diamond back?

Some will, many will not, and those that do will offer against their own wholesale cost, which is low and falling. Ask the maker about buyback or upgrade terms before you buy rather than after.

Do mined diamonds hold their value better than lab grown?

Marginally, and far less than people assume. A mined solitaire bought at retail still loses the labour, the overheads, the marketing and the GST the moment it leaves the counter. The exception is the narrow category of rare fancy colours and signed period pieces.

Should I buy a mined diamond instead if I care about value?

Only if you are buying into that narrow collector category, and then you should be taking specialist advice and not buying an engagement ring. For an ordinary certified white stone, you are paying several times more to lose the same retail premium. We have set the two side by side in lab grown vs natural diamonds.

Is moissanite any different on resale?

No, and it is cheaper to start with, so there is less to lose. Moissanite is bought for what it is: a very hard, very bright stone that gives you maximum presence for the money. The moissanite engagement rings collection starts at AU$800.

What is my ring actually worth for insurance?

More than you would be offered on resale, because insurance values retail replacement. Get a current written valuation from a qualified valuer, list the ring as a specified item on your contents policy, and make sure the certificate number is on the paperwork.