These enormous, conventional diamond mines have been extremely controversial.

It’s hardly a searing expose to say that the diamond industry is one of the most highly controlled in the world. The reigning king of crystallized carbon is the diamond giant De Beers, which has been subject to price fixing scandals and huge fines paid for business malpractice, but the market for natural, mined diamonds remains strong.

This comes after several decades of worry within the diamond industry that man-made or “synthetic” diamonds were about to completely destroy the market. What happened to the impending death of the natural diamond market, and the controversial mining practices that support them? More to the point, will synthetic diamonds ever again threaten the powers that be?

On a long enough time-line, the answer is certainly “Yes.” Techniques in diamond production have been getting better and better over time — and more importantly, cheaper. Lobbying by the natural diamond industry has led to explicit labeling of man-made diamonds, implying that their quality is somehow lower. On the contrary, the diamond industry had to actually invent a spectrometer specifically for distinguishing between Earth- and man-made varieties of diamond; the world’s best diamond experts had trouble doing so reliably by eye.

For all the increases in the quality of man-made diamonds, though, they remain quite expensive. Methods of diamond production use one of a few basic techniques, but use proprietary details that obscure the exact price-per-carat for production of gem-quality diamonds. It’s very possible that man-made, jewelry-quality diamonds are much more expensive than they need to be. We do know that the margins are incredibly high, just as with natural diamonds. Additionally, once grown or mined, all diamonds need to be cleaned, cut, rated, labeled, and more — a process that has nothing to do with the diamond’s source and which can still cost hundreds of dollars per carat.

Right now Moissanite, the leading and by far the most accurate non-diamond diamond substitute, goes for about $500 per carat. Though it varies greatly, good quality, naturally mined diamond should cost roughly $7000 per carat. Lab-made diamonds vary even more widely in the middle of that range, but real, pure-carbon synthetic diamond can run as high as $5-6000 per carat. As a result, man-made diamonds don’t stand out as being dramatically more economical than their mined counterparts, and unfortunately campaigns against mining practices have met with limited success.

Synthetic, gem-quality diamonds are still spurned by the most lucrative gem-buying demographics, and remain too expensive to entice the more budget-minded people who currently opt for bargain diamond simulates like Cubic Zirconia. In the long-term, chemistry will certainly come up with a way of producing cheap gem-stone diamonds, but right now the major advantage remains an ethical one.

It’s important to separate the issue of gem-stones from industrial diamonds, which have much more relaxed standards for size, clarity, etc. Hardness and conductivity are by far the most important industrial qualities, and in this science has been very effective at muscling out the traditional diamond industry. With numerous techniques like explosive compression and laser deposition, they can make work-quality diamonds extremely efficiently. Parts-buyers and engineers tend to be far less sentimental about the diamonds they buy, and thus largely abandoned mined diamonds at the first possible opportunity.

Science is not about to topple the diamond industry. This is because the technology still struggles to make diamond more cheaply than mining can produce them, because the public still mistrusts the quality of the diamonds it makes, and because the wealthy diamond industry lobbies effectively against its wide-spread introduction.

The quality of synthetic diamonds is undeniably on par with natural ones, but it has yet to provide a sufficient cost incentive to gem-buyers.