De Beers To Retail Lab-Grown Diamonds

The company will offer new high-quality coloured – blush pink, powder blue and icy white – fashion earring and necklace jewellery designs for consumers at affordable prices, the company said.

“Our extensive research tells us this is how consumers regard lab-grown diamonds – as a fun, pretty product that shouldn’t cost that much – so we see an opportunity here that’s been missed by lab-grown diamond producers,” said De Beers Group CEO, Bruce Cleaver. Therefore, “Lightbox will transform the lab-grown diamond sector by offering consumers a lab-grown product. After decades of R&D investment, we’re able to offer consumers a better price today, which we think the Lightbox brand will resonate with consumers and provide a new, complementary commercial opportunity for De Beers Group,” he stated.

According to Lightbox Jewelry’s GM, Steve Coe, the company will introduce more “designs and colours as the range evolves, and the technological efficiency of our proprietary production process means we will always offer Lightbox at accessible prices”.

Lightbox will initially be available to the US-based consumer market with a retail price ranging from $200 a quarter-carat stone to $800 for a one-carat stone.

The company explained that “any Lightbox lab-grown diamonds of 0.2 carats or above will carry a permanent Lightbox logo inside the stone. Invisible to the naked eye but easily identified under magnification, the logo will clearly identify the stone as lab-grown and also serve as a mark of quality and assurance that it was produced by Element Six”, a leader in lab-grown diamond technology for over 50 years.

To support Lightbox, De Beers Group is investing $94m over four years in a new Element Six production facility near Portland, Oregon. Once fully operational, the plant will be capable of producing 500,000 and more rough carats of lab-grown diamonds a year, said the company.