By Ahmed Bin Sulayem
Ahmed Bin Sulayem is Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, DMCC.
For years, the global diamond trade navigated the rise of factory-created diamonds with a pragmatic indifference, treating the naming debate as a secondary concern, yet over the last six months, an unprecedented surge of energy has been poured into defining exact phrasing. Trade bodies that spent years casually moving between “Lab-Grown,” “Created,” and “Synthetic” are suddenly engaged in intense debate over which term should govern international commerce. This sudden obsession raises two critical questions: Why has this debate erupted now, and who actually benefits from the ongoing division?
Over the past year, the market for manufactured diamonds reached a structural inflexion point, where exponential increases in production capacity, primarily across Asia, transformed these goods from high-margin, tech-forward components into low-cost, mass-produced consumer items. As wholesale prices fell, the commercial stakes escalated.
In a late-hour push, and with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) anticipated regulatory review in 2027 on the horizon, trade bodies, including the World Federation of Diamond Bourses (WFDB), the World Diamond Council (WDC), and The World Jewellery Confederation (CIBJO), appear to be gravitating towards a unified front. However, this push is exposing deep fault lines across the global trade. Major players representing the true backbone of global synthesis, trading, manufacturing, and consumer sales are sticking firmly to the established 2018 FTC ruling, causing significant friction with those driving the lobbying effort, leaving the global trade divided precisely when it needs alignment.
It is also bringing to the surface a deeper, uncomfortable shift for the legacy market. For the first time in over a century, the natural diamond establishment faces direct, scalable competition in the retail jewellery space. As stated on numerous occasions, the clear distinction in origin creates opportunities for both verticals, based on consumer demand; however, the natural diamond community must remember that fair competition is not a crime, nor is the jewellery sector a protected entitlement.
Aside from competition, this semantic battle also carries unexamined risks for the natural sector. If an industry-wide consensus mandates a strict qualifying prefix before the word “diamond” for manufactured goods, the natural community may inadvertently set a precedent that eventually pressures them to accept a qualifier of their own, such as “mined”, forever altering how natural gems are marketed to consumers.
Language shifts across global paradigms often reflect deeper commercial and structural narratives. Consider the recent global debate surrounding cartography, highlighted by the United Nations’ resolution urging institutions to abandon the 16th-century Mercator map projection. For centuries, the Mercator map was accepted as the visual norm despite fundamentally distorting reality, depicting Greenland as equal in size to the African continent, when Africa is fourteen times larger. The movement to adopt corrected, equal-area projections was not about taking political sides, but about establishing a standardised, objective framework so that global institutions could move past a centuries-old distortion and focus on real-world economic realities.
The diamond industry must apply that exact same pragmatism today. The primary issue facing the trade is not whether the market ultimately settles on “Lab-Grown” or “Synthetic,” but its catastrophic lack of unification. Operating with fractured, regional, or partisan terminology creates consumer confusion, regulatory friction, and unnecessary compliance costs for retailers operating across international borders.
Most importantly, this low-priority linguistic battle is consuming enormous institutional energy, time, and financial resources at the exact moment when both sectors face existential core priorities. Natural diamond bodies should be focusing their capital on revitalising marketing, ethical supply chain transparency, and supporting mining communities in the Global South, while producers of manufactured diamonds should focus on industrial applications, energy-efficient production, and sustainable business models in a low-margin environment. Instead, both camps are bogged down in semantic trench warfare.
The diamond trade cannot afford to remain gridlocked by terminology. Whether the consensus lands on “Lab-Grown,” “Synthetic,” or an internationally agreed hybrid, global trade bodies must urgently come together, establish a single unified standard, and draw a definitive line under this debate. Unification, not division, is the only way to protect consumer confidence and allow both natural and manufactured markets to focus on their real commercial futures.
(Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy or position of Jewellery Outlook.)
