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In 1948<\/a>, diamond company De Beers launched a marketing campaign with the slogan “A diamond is forever<\/a>.” Fifty years later, the company created another campaign<\/a> justifying the price of diamonds <\/b>with the slogan, “Isn’t two months’ salary a small price to pay for something that lasts forever?”<\/p>\n Now, De Beers is aggressively cutting prices<\/a> to bring sales up, and you can buy a diamond-making device<\/a> for $200,000 on Alibaba.<\/p>\n It’s a sign that diamond production is democratizing, reports Ars Technica<\/a>.<\/p>\n In the past five years, lab-grown gem sales have burgeoned and made the price of mined stones less appealing, <\/b>according to diamond expert Paul Zimnisky<\/a>. The lab-grown diamond market was $13 billion last year and is expected to reach about $22 billion by 2031.<\/p>\n Ankur Daga, CEO of the fine jewelry company Angara, estimated that half of all engagement rings sold this year will have lab-grown stones, a significant jump from 2% in 2018.<\/p>\n “The diamond industry is in trouble,” Daga told CNBC in June<\/a>.<\/p>\n As of press time, natural 1-carat diamonds<\/a> cost around $4,000 while lab-grown diamonds<\/a> of the same weight go for around $620.<\/p>\n The 44-ton device uses high-pressure high temperature<\/a> (HPHT) technology to take a diamond seed, or a tiny diamond particle that starts the whole process, and transform it into a lab-grown diamond. Alibaba focuses more on business-to-business products<\/a>, so the machine they have for sale would likely be bought and used by a company with specialized knowledge.<\/p>\n Related: <\/b>She Started a Business With $2,000 of Personal Savings \u2014 Then Grew It to More Than $100 Million Revenue<\/a><\/p>\n Lab-grown diamonds are up to 90%<\/a> less expensive than natural diamonds and look exactly the same<\/a> to the human eye. They can only be told apart with special equipment in a professional gemological lab<\/a>.<\/p>\n They also don’t carry the same environmental and social concerns<\/a> as naturally found diamonds, which have to be mined in unsafe conditions.<\/p>\n Even with this kind of growth, and machines like the one sold through Alibaba, Zimnisky says that naturally-found diamonds will still have a place in the future.<\/p>\n “Human desire for rare and valuable objects runs pretty deep within us,” Zimnisky told NPR<\/a>. “I don’t think that’s going to, all of a sudden, change.”<\/p>\nHow a lab-grown diamond machine works<\/h2>\n