British LGD company Skydiamond has been instructed to stop using misleading terms in its descriptions of lab-grown diamonds following a ruling by Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in response to a complaint from the Natural Diamond Council (NDC), IDEX Online reports.
The ASA states that Skydiamond must stop using terms like “diamonds”, “diamonds made entirely from the sky”, and “Skydiamond” to refer to their lab-grown diamonds without a clear and prominent qualifier such as “synthetic”, “laboratory-grown”, or “laboratory-created”, or any other method that conveys the same meaning to consumers effectively. Moreover, they are forbidden from employing the term “real diamonds”.
In February 2023, Skydiamond took out double-page newspaper ads headlined: “Say hello to the world’s first and only diamond made entirely from the sky”. The text underneath said: “We make diamonds using four natural ingredients, the sun, the wind, rain and something we have too much of, atmospheric carbon. In doing so, our technology turns a negative into a positive. Now that we can mine the sky, we never need to mine the earth again.”
Skydiamond, founded by Dale Vince, a former hippy turned windfarm millionaire who also owns Britain’s first vegan football team, expressed intentions in November 2020 to produce 200 carats of carbon-negative diamonds monthly, with plans to increase to 1,000 carats per month, or 12,000 annually.
Alan Cohen, co-president of the London Diamond Bourse said: “We have seen this misleading marketing and terminology for many years and hope the ASA ruling puts an end to this and for the future, we also hope the eco-friendliness claims are scrutinized too”.
