Inside Antwerp's battle to save the natural diamond trade

ANTWERP— In 1947, De Beers convinced the world that a diamond meant forever — and that an engagement ring should cost the equivalent of at least two months’ salary.

Nearly 70 years later, the diamond industry is betting it can pull off the same trick to persuade buyers that lab-grown diamonds, no matter how identical they appear, are worthless merch.

Getting that message across is crucial for Antwerp, home to the one of the world’s largest diamond trading hubs, and the only market fiercely resisting the rise of laboratory-grown stones.

“We are the only diamond center in the world that is not embracing lab-grown diamonds,” said Ine Tassignon, who heads up the communications department of the Antwerp World Diamond Centre (AWDC), a trade union representing the nearly 1,500 Belgian firms that make up the backbone of the city’s diamond district, located just across from the central station.

Antwerp has been at the heart of the diamond trade since the 15th century. Though most of the gem cutting and polishing shifted to India in the 2010s, an astonishing 84% of the world’s rough diamonds are estimated to pass through the Belgian district.

But that growth engine for the European economy is now at risk, threatened by the parallel rise of lab-grown diamonds, Russian sanctions, steep US tariffs, and a general slump in global appetite for the rare stones, especially in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. Together, these factors have combined to produce the worst contraction in the global diamond industry’s history, with Belgium shedding roughly €6.5 billion in global trade between 2014 and 2023, according to the National Bank of Belgium.

A natural diamond marketing campaign 

Now, in an effort to turn a new page, Antwerp — and the global natural diamond industry — are banking on marketing to keep it alive.

Last June, AWDC partnered with diamond-producing nations and South African diamond mining firm De Beers to direct 1% of the revenue from rough diamond sales into a global marketing campaign led by the Natural Diamond Council, an industry advocacy group. The aim is to pool resources for a campaign reminiscent of the 1990s “Got Milk?” effort, which sought to restore the dairy industry’s image amid falling consumption.

Tassignon stressed that the initiative isn’t about dictating to customers what to buy, but rather “to inform [them] about the huge differences between these two products.”

Natural and artificial diamonds “look identical and are chemically the same, but in other respects couldn’t be more different,” she said.

As part of the same push against synthetic diamonds, HRD Antwerp, the city’s diamond laboratory, announced in June that it will stop certifying lab-grown diamonds, just as the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) prepares to halt grading them next month. Grading is typically a way to assess the desirability of a diamond based on its colour, clarity, cut and carat weight.

Meanwhile, in early September, Dutch retailer Zeeman announced it would start selling lab-grown diamonds for just €29.99, a business decision meant to make diamonds more accessible to the general public. And that’s a move the natural diamond industry has welcomed as a way to further differentiate between luxury products and cheap man-made rocks.

Natural vs lab-grown diamonds

But convincing buyers to return to rough diamonds is a hard sell. To the naked eye, gems manufactured in a lab are virtually indistinguishable from those mined deep within the earth — an irresistible proposition for budget-minded customers and jewelers eager for higher profit margins.

“Lab-grown diamonds are offering an alternative to tick the same box of bridal gifts and occasions…with a product that looks better…and costs less,” admitted Boaz Lev, managing partner at HB Antwerp, a diamond company that uses blockchain technology for tracking the lifecycle of a diamond.

Unlike Dubai and New York, the Belgian city has refused to climb aboard the lab-grown diamond bandwagon. Over the past five years, only 0.6% of the overall diamonds traded in Antwerpt were lab-grown.

Experts say that decisions should pay off in the long run.

“Antwerp has been pretty consistent in only dealing in natural diamonds,” said Paul Zimnisky, a New York-based diamond analyst, calling it the “right move.”

Lev echoed that view, arguing that Antwerp had made “the right choice,” as competing on price only heralds a race to the bottom.

“The proposition that a center like Dubai [offers] is something that is not sustainable,” he said of the district's decision to sell both lab-grown and natural diamonds. "When you are mixing everything, the choices for whatever is cheaper.”

The difference between man-made diamonds — offering a price point as much as 90% lower than their natural counterparts — comes down to the one key feature: rarity.  Natural diamonds consist of pure carbon that takes millions of years, at at least 120 kilometers beneath the surface of the earth, to be formed. What’s more, just a handful of nations have the right geological conditions for diamonds to form, meaning the entire global supply is confined to only 20 countries worldwide.

With lab-grown diamonds, affordability is the main selling point, according to Zimnisky, who argued that, whenever he runs a correlation analysis, demand increases at a similar rate that prices fall.

Given Antwerp’s stubborn resistance to artificial diamonds, that’s meant a plunge in trade for its diamond market — falling by 25% annually in 2024, to $32.5 billion, according to the AWCD. Dubai’s diamond trade reached $40 billion in 2024, with as much as $3.7 billion stemming from trade in lab-grown diamonds, according to the government of Dubai.

Dark times for a shiny industry

Antwerp isn’t battling only against the rise of cheaper synthetic diamonds.

If the Covid-19 pandemic delivered an equally severe blow to a global industry inherently dependent on travel — diamond traders generally insist on seeing stones in person — the Belgian hub has been hurt like no other by the European Union’s 12th sanctions package against Russia in December 2023 in response to its ongoing war in Ukraine. Since 2024, EU-based traders can no longer import and trade Russian diamonds — a move that Tassignon described as morally sound but financially challenging for a hub that used to source up to one third of its overall supply from Moscow.

“It had a huge impact,” she said. “We lost a critical mass of rough imported goods.”

The same restrictions apply to G7 nations, but the ban in the US and other countries hasn't been as strictly enfroced as in Europe, Tassignon said, arguing that this has put Antwerp’s traders at a disadvantage with their international competitors. Moreover, Russian diamonds once bound for the EU have been rerouted to trading hubs like Dubai, India and China.

Then, just when the market seemed ready to rebound earlier this year, the US imposed tariffs on nearly all its trading partners, including the EU. In particular, US President Donald Trump’s recent move to slap 50% tariffs on India has “created a lot of uncertainty in our industry,” said Philip Hoyman, a managing director at Bonas-Couzyn, a tender house specialised in rough diamonds.

Hoyman argued that the very rationale of imposing tariffs falls short when it comes to diamonds, since the US has no domestic diamond industry to shield it from foreign competition. And with India doing most of the gem polishing work and roughly 50% of the world’s diamonds sold in US, levies are unlikely to remain an Indian problem.

The result is that Antwerp-based traders won’t be spared by its knock-on effects.

“Our industry is a global industry,” he said. “If my Indian buyers are not in a mood to buy, then I will be affected [here] in Antwerp in spite of the fact that my tariff is only 15% compared to 50%.” Indian diamantaires travel to Antwerp and other trading hubs to inspect rough stones, which they then purchase to polish them and resell them at a higher price.

Of ‘selling a dream’ and the Taylor Swift effect

Still, Antwerp’s diamond traders are confident that better days lie ahead.

If the industry has been battered by a flurry of storms, Hoyman, head of the tender house, admitted many of its problems are of its own making, a result of years of underinvestment in marketing.

“What we do in the diamond industry is that we sell a dream,” he told The Parliament. But, he said, “one of the problems that we have in our industry is that we haven't told our story for 15 years.”

He added that one reason to be optimistic is that the major European luxury conglomerates, from Richemond to LVMH, have all recently invested in premium jewelry to diversify their portfolios.

Meanwhile, natural diamonds received an unexpected PR boost over the summer when world-renowned popstar Taylor Swift received a giant eight-carat engagement ring, instantly lifting the stock value of American jeweler Signet.

For Tassignon, positive media coverage like that is simply “the best thing that can happen for the international diamond industry.”

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