Lab-made diamonds are in every way atomically identical to diamonds that are created by geological forces and mined from the ground.
Today, although mining technology has advanced over time, harvesting rough diamonds is still more costly than it once was because all of the large fields with stones close to the surface have long since been exploited for their gems. At the same time, the science of artificially growing diamonds, first developed in the 1950s, has advanced over the decades.
As a result, it is now cheaper to manufacture a diamond in a lab than to extract it from a mine. This is especially true grading colored diamonds, which are especially rare to find in nature.
For this very reason, the production ofdiamond in laboratory conditions causes unease among those that profit from diamond industry mining activity, who fear that the market for their product will shrivel if consumer demand migrates to synthetics. Therefore, they ascribed authenticity to natural diamonds and encourage vigilance among jewelers, to ensure that less expensive lab-made diamonds are not passed off to the consumer as mined diamonds.
