Lab-Grown Round Diamonds

A lab-grown round brilliant is the same material as a mined one — carbon in the same crystal structure, cut on the same wheels, graded against the same scale. What changes is what your budget reaches. In this shape, moving from mined to grown typically buys you a full carat more, not a fraction.

That shifts how the decision should be made. On a natural round, most of the conversation is about what to give up: a colour grade here, a clarity grade there, to keep the size. On a grown round, colour and clarity are inexpensive enough that there is no reason to buy below F or below VS1. Spend the saving on cut instead, and on the size you actually wanted.

Almost every lab-grown round is graded by IGI, which is a practical advantage: the reports are consistent with one another, so comparing two stones here is genuinely like-for-like rather than an exercise in translating between laboratories. Growth method — CVD or HPHT — makes no difference to how a finished, well-cut stone looks.

The one thing worth checking with your own eyes is the 360° video. A report will not show you a stone that has been cut deep to hold weight.