Editor’s Note
This article highlights a significant shift in the global diamond industry, where synthetic production is rapidly gaining market share. It contrasts international momentum with a perceived delay in French industrial strategy, framing it as a critical moment for technological and economic positioning.
The synthetic diamond market is already worth more than 21 billion euros, American engagement rings are coming out of laboratories, and Beijing is locking down its machines. France, meanwhile, is still fine-tuning its call for projects in this promising sector. Not everyone shines in the same way.
If the earth takes over a billion years to shape a diamond, machines can create them, in a laboratory, in a chain, and in seven days. This cultivation of diamonds now represents an industrial challenge for France: with a global market estimated at $22.79 billion in 2023 (€19.39 billion) and projected to reach $74.45 billion (€63.34 billion) by 2032, these gems, chemically and physically identical to so-called “lab-grown” or synthetic diamonds, are disrupting a sector long entrenched in its certainties: prestige, slowness, and watchmaking labor under a bell jar. This revolution is frankly worrying the historical giants, starting with De Beers, a South African company whose revenues were halved between 2022 and 2024. To such an extent that the group is putting its diamond division up for sale for $5 billion, an ambitious price that the market might re-evaluate with less enthusiasm.
France, present in all debates on industrial sovereignty, shines in this field, essentially by its absence. At every stage of the value chain, its technological capabilities are non-existent. France indeed possesses no HPHT (High Pressure High Temperature) machines, essential for manufacturing synthetic diamonds. These are classified as “dual-use technologies” and therefore banned from export by Beijing. While China protects its patents, France continues to study the subject. And its delay seems difficult to make up.
declares Charlotte Daehn, co-founder of a diamond office dedicated to lab-grown diamonds.
she says.
Even the polishing of diamonds, a key step, is done in Surat, India, for $12 per carat. In China, it rises to $56. In France, it would cost so much that no one seriously considers doing it on site… However, to avoid a total eclipse, a handful of young French companies are trying to position themselves on the industrial uses of synthetic diamonds: laser, optics, electronics, defense, and medical applications. This niche orientation, still poorly structured, stems more from individual initiative than from an industrial policy that lacks consensus, but relates to a sovereignty issue, publicly acknowledged by experts.
Indeed, if it is completely devoid of national production capacities, France will depend on foreign suppliers in these sensitive sectors. However, Charlotte Daehn predicts a bright future downstream of the diamond industry:
It notably encompasses batteries, quantum computers, medical implants:
assures the professional.
Public funding, meanwhile, is scattered. Calls for projects exist, but often drowned in large frameworks such as chemistry or nanotechnology. Nothing specific, nor massive; only a strategy in its infancy. The production of industrial diamonds requiring a lot of energy, the fight is even tougher: indeed, in China, industrial electricity costs about €0.06 per kilowatt-hour, partly thanks to subsidies and solar power. In France, this cost is around €0.4. A discouraging chasm… Furthermore,
reminds Céline Varnier, a professional diamond dealer.
On the market side, French jewelers are not resisting synthetic diamonds. Many of them continue to bet on the image of “traditional luxury.” This defensive position dodges the subject rather than anticipating it.
explains Charlotte Daehn.
Meanwhile, demand is evolving. In the United States, 17% of diamonds sold in 2023 were synthetic. More than half of engagement rings now feature a lab-grown stone. More than a trend, it’s a normalization.