China’s diamond prices have sharply declined, with diamonds that used to cost tens of thousands of yuan per carat now priced at just over a thousand yuan. Some sellers are even offering auctions starting at 1 yuan for 10-carat diamonds. This news quickly became a hot topic on March 5th.
According to reports from several media outlets such as “Daily Economic News” and “Cover News” on March 4th, as prices dropped, promotions like “starting from 1 yuan for a 10-carat diamond” have emerged in the market. This promotion involves auctioning off packages of 10 pieces of 1-carat diamonds with a starting bid of just 1 yuan. The price of a 1-carat diamond, which used to sell for tens of thousands of yuan a few years back, has now decreased to just over a thousand yuan.
“Daily Economic News” previously reported that a 34-year-old woman in Xichang, Sichuan Province posted online that the two wedding rings she bought for 14,000 yuan a decade ago could now only be sold for less than 200 yuan altogether.
Not only in the Chinese market, but the world’s largest diamond producer, De Beers, has also announced a price reduction for diamonds. On January 20th, during the first diamond auction of the year, De Beers significantly lowered the prices of rough diamonds above 0.75 carats.
The main reason for the significant drop in diamond prices is the flourishing development of lab-grown diamonds.
The value of natural diamonds lies in their scarcity. Public data shows that natural diamonds form under extremely harsh conditions deep within the Earth’s crust. Through long years of high temperature and pressure metamorphism, they crystallize from pure carbon. Subsequently, they are brought to the surface layers of the Earth through intense volcanic activities like eruptions and undergo exploration, mining, and meticulous polishing before being presented to the world.
However, the emergence of lab-grown diamonds has fundamentally changed the way diamonds are obtained. These diamonds are cultivated by simulating the growth environment of natural diamonds through artificial means. They are crystalline structures made of pure carbon just like natural diamonds, with identical physical, chemical, and optical properties. The core difference lies only in the formation time and environment, with lab-grown diamonds taking only a few weeks to form.
Geologist Lao Li told “Daily Economic News” on March 4th, “Natural diamonds take hundreds of millions of years to form, while lab-grown diamonds only need a few weeks.”
The industrialized production capacity resulting from this has directly led to the continuous decrease in prices. From being rare and expensive to now being accessible for just over a thousand yuan per carat, more and more Chinese consumers are expressing regret for “buying too early” and “having regrets.”