Lightbox, De Beers’ lab-grown jewellery brand, will close, as the Gemological Institute of America will no longer use 4Cs grading for artificial stones
In the rarefied world of jewellery, the brightest light apparently comes from the deepest origins. This year, the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) – the foremost arbiter of diamond standards for more than 90 years – has drawn an unmistakable line between the treasures of the Earth and their laboratory-made counterparts.
On June 2, the institute announced that by year’s end, its famed 4Cs grading system – cut, colour, clarity, carat – will no longer apply to lab-grown diamonds. Instead, man-made stones will receive simplified descriptors such as “premium” or “standard”, or no grade at all if they fall short.
For the GIA, this is no cosmetic change but a definitive separation of categories. More than 95 per cent of lab-grown diamonds fall within a narrow band of colour and clarity, making the precision of the 4Cs – developed to express the nuances of natural stones – irrelevant in the synthetic realm. From now on, the full vocabulary of rarity is reserved for gems formed over billions of years, under the unrepeatable pressures of the Earth’s mantle.
