Elizabeth Doerr On Lab-Grown Diamonds And Their Place in The Luxury Watch World

Bazaar Arabia’s timepiece columnist explores the heated debate that’s been taking the industry by storm

Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Zendaya, Emma Watson, Jennifer Hudson, Meghan Markle, Leonardo DiCaprio… these celebrities have proudly worn lab-grown diamonds in prominent places. They know this is a not insignificant trend in jewellery today. In fact, lab-grown diamonds are permeating the jewellery business with 15 to 20 per cent more jewellery containing lab grown diamonds sold every year.

First produced in the 1950s, with gem-quality examples beginning to trickle through in the 1980s, lab-grown diamonds have taken a while to become commercially viable. Today, they are chemically, physically, and visually identical to a naturally occurring diamond, the only differences being how and where they are made and the barely-there “LG” inscribed in the base of the stone.

Now, in an era of millennial and Gen Z consumers demanding that brands pay attention to sustainability, lab-grown diamonds are found in mainstream and branded jewellery even if they are still sold in lower numbers than their natural counterparts. While saving hard-earned cash is a seductive reason – lab-grown diamond jewellery is up to 30 per cent less expensive – for me the main reason to even entertain buying synthetic diamonds is the environmental impact.

Even though lab-grown diamonds need significant amounts of energy to produce, the total footprint created by mined diamonds is still higher. According to the International Gem Society, about 250 tonnes of earth is moved to find one single carat’s worth of diamond, releasing a reported 160kg of CO2 into the atmosphere. When the lab uses renewable energy, the carbon released is only a few grams for the same carat of flawless white diamond grown there. The key, of course, is using renewable energy.

And then there is the environmental damage done by the act of mining, mainly through pollution of water sources due to acid mine drainage, which takes place when the mined waste rocks’ minerals (called tailings) seep and/or are dumped into bodies of water. Not to mention the socio-economic damage to communities associated with human rights violations and economic exploitation, which can be considerable. As former Tiffany CEO Michael J. Kowalski wrote in a 2015 New York Times opinion piece, “Few industries in the world have a larger environmental and social footprint than mining.”

But what does any of this have to do with watches? Surely no luxury watch company would use lab-grown diamonds in a luxury watch? Even if no one can tell the difference between natural and lab-grown diamonds except a trained expert using more than 10x magnification?

Au contraire. This is where Breitling comes in with its brand-new Super Chronomat Automatic 38 Origins in red gold: powered by automatic Breitling Calibre 17, it features responsibly sourced gold and lab-grown diamonds with full supply-chain traceability – which brings me to the issue of traceability, yet another advantage of today’s lab-grown diamonds.

While in theory, natural diamonds should be traceable, the path of a natural diamond goes through at least 15 different sets of hands before it reaches the consumer, fogging the pathway – especially of smaller diamonds like the kind used to make wristwatch bezels shine. Lab-grown diamonds have a much shorter pathway from creator to owner, making tracing a much easier task – and one that Breitling has ensured for all of its stones, which are produced by Fenix Diamonds in India with headquarters in New York City – who will use only renewable energy by early 2023 – accredited by environmental auditor SCS Global Services, and set by Salanitro in Switzerland (who is also SGS accredited).

The Super Chronomat Automatic 38 Origins’ entire chain of custody has been traced and recorded in a blockchain-backed non-fungible token (NFT). Since 2020, every new Breitling timepiece has come with this unique digital proof of ownership; here the NFT also includes the supply chain from raw material to finished product, which is documented both in the NFT and publicly on an online source map. “The most important thing to back up any sustainability claim is traceability,” Aurelia Figueroa, Breitling’s global head of sustainability, emphasised as she presented the company’s new watch to me. “You can’t make a sustainability claim if you can’t talk about origin.”

“Until now there have been limits on how far you could trace precious materials,” Breitling explains in its press release. “Even when following industry best practices, tracking gold and the small melee diamonds used in watchmaking to their origins had been nearly impossible. By default, these raw materials tend to be combined from many different sources – meaning their provenance literally gets lost in the mix.”

Breitling has announced that it will change its production to include only lab-grown diamonds by the year 2024, gold from small-scale artisanal miners that meet criteria set by the Swiss Better Gold Association, and end-to-end traceability for every watch. As the first in the luxury watch space to change over to an improved but as-yet-unknown system, Breitling’s choices will undoubtedly be somewhat controversial in the short term, though I predict they will pay off in bottom-line numbers as well as increased customer appreciation in the long run. And with this, Breitling once again will set a historical trend.

Elizabeth Doerr is the editor-in-chief of QuillAndPad.com, a digital publication that keeps a watch on time.

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From Harper’s Bazaar Arabia’s January 2023 issue.