Yes. A lab grown diamond is chemically, physically and optically identical to a mined diamond. It is carbon crystallised in the same structure, with the same hardness, the same fire and the same grading scale. The only difference is where it formed: one in the earth over a billion years, one in a growing chamber over weeks. Gemmological institutes grade them on the same scale because they are the same material.

Not by eye. Telling them apart requires specialised equipment that detects subtle differences in how the stone grew, which is why certified stones are laser inscribed on the girdle. Whichever you choose, the stone on your hand simply reads as a diamond, because it is one.

For most diamonds available to the general public, the honest answer is no.

A small collection of genuinely rare diamonds do appreciate. Pink diamonds from the Argyle mine in Western Australia, which closed in 2020, have climbed in value because the supply is finite and the colour cannot be replicated at that quality anywhere else on earth. Diamonds with famous provenance appreciate too. Pieces owned by Elizabeth Taylor sold for many multiples of their estimates, not because of the stones alone, but because of whose hands they had passed through.

There’s a piece of history worth knowing here, told without judgement, because it explains so much. For most of the twentieth century, the number of diamonds reaching the market each year was carefully managed by a single company, and the most famous line in advertising history, a diamond is forever, did its job so well that very few diamonds ever came back to market. The thin second-hand market we see today isn’t an accident. It was, in a sense, designed. None of this makes anyone’s ring less precious. It just means the diamond in a typical engagement ring, natural or lab grown, was never really a financial investment, and we’d rather you buy it for what it truly is: something made to be worn and loved.

In resale terms, yes, and so do most natural stones, because there is very little demand for second hand jewellery and engagement rings least of all. We don’t say that to take the shine off anything. We say it because once you set the investment question aside, a better question appears: is this piece priced fairly, and was it made by people who will stand behind it? That’s the question we try to help every customer answer.

The short answer is supply. Availability determines price on both sides.

Rarity operates within the lab grown world too. A D colour, internally flawless or flawless lab grown diamond is expensive, because stones grown to that standard are scarce. A highly graded mined diamond is expensive for the same reason. Lab grown diamonds are more affordable as a category because more of them can exist, not because they are lesser stones. Compared to many coloured stones, diamonds, mined or lab-grown aren’t rare.

Here’s a small thing that explains a lot. Gold has a public price. You can look up what a gram of gold is worth this morning, anywhere in the world. Diamonds have no equivalent, because no two stones are identical and there’s no public exchange where they trade. So every diamond’s price is, in the end, a judgement: the cost of the stone, plus the way each business values its own work.

And every jeweller approaches that differently, for genuine reasons. When a single component in a piece carries a significant cost, pricing becomes complex. If a jeweller is selling a $500,000 sapphire sourced from a specialist supplier, what is a fair margin? How much value sits in the make of the ring around it, the design, the years of expertise, the brand, the warranty, the insurance of the stone while it waits in the safe? These are hard questions and different businesses answer them differently. None of that is wrong. It’s simply worth understanding as a customer, because part of what you pay anywhere is the experience, the craft and the relationship that comes with the piece.

I can only tell you how we do it. When we price a piece at Kate & Kole, we add up the cost of every component: the diamond, the recycled metal, the hours at the bench, the quality findings we don’t make by hand such as earring butterflies. Then we apply a multiplier. Knowing there’s no resale market beneath any of this, it felt like the fairest way to make jewellery in Australia, to the standards we hold ourselves to.

Yes it has. In 1893, a Japanese entrepreneur named Kokichi Mikimoto cultured the world’s first pearls, coaxing oysters to do what they had only ever done by chance. The industry’s reaction was furious. A London newspaper accused him of selling imitations, the dispute ended up in a French court, and Mikimoto won, with scientists testifying that there was no fundamental difference between a cultured pearl and a natural one. When Thomas Edison met him years later, he marvelled that pearls and diamonds were the two things his own laboratory could never make. Mikimoto had managed one of them.

A century on, cultured pearls aren’t the budget option. They are pearls. Mikimoto sits at the very top of luxury jewellery, and nobody admiring a strand of pearls asks whether an oyster was helped along. The pearl’s meaning survived the change in how it came to be, completely intact. I think about that often. We don’t grow pearls and the processes aren’t the same, but as a story about what happens when human ingenuity learns to make something nature once kept rare, it’s the closest precedent we have. And it ended not with the death of the pearl, but with more people wearing them.

I’m hesitant to make that claim for the whole industry, because there are mined stones with traceable origins and people working hard to do that well. I can only share why we made the choice we did.

We make our jewellery in Newcastle, on the edge of the Hunter, where the marks mining leaves on a landscape aren’t abstract to us. We see them. That doesn’t make us anti-mining, but it has made us thoughtful about our own footprint, and it shaped what we wanted our workshop to stand for: a gentle manufacturing footprint, limited mining where we can manage it, recycled metals, and making everything here in Australia to the highest standard we’re capable of.

When Maddy and I started in 2015, we also didn’t feel confident we could trace mined stones with the certainty we wanted. A mined stone is often bought and sold several times before it reaches the final jeweller, and we couldn’t account for every hand a stone had passed through. The lab grown pipeline was shorter, with fewer steps between origin and our bench. It was a decision about what we could personally stand behind, not a judgement on anyone who chooses differently, and ten years on it still fits who we are.

We’ve never believed regret lives in the origin of the stone. In our experience it lives in choosing a design to please someone else, or in not knowing who to call when a claw needs attention years down the track.

So this is how we guide people. Choose the design that genuinely feels like you, not the one you think you should want. Then choose a jeweller who will know your ring for its whole life: who made it, who can repair it, resize it, check it over, and who will pick up the phone in year seven the same way they did in week one. We design for generation after generation, and that only works if the care lasts as long as the piece does.

Start with the design, because that’s what you’ll see every day. Then look at the company behind it. Ask where the piece is made and by whom. Ask what happens if something goes wrong in year five. Choose people whose values feel like your own, whoever they turn out to be.

Because here’s what we’ve come to believe after ten years of making jewellery and listening to the people who wear it. The pieces that get passed down are never passed down as specifications. No one tells the story of a certificate. They tell the story of the night, the person, the moment the box was opened.

At Kate & Kole we don’t believe you inherit a mined, G VS2, diamond, you inherit the pair of diamond slipper earrings your grandmother was gifted the night before her wedding. You inherit stories.