Just a little over a half-century ago, if you wanted diamonds for your engagement rings and shiny diamond pendants, you had to go to their single producer: Mother Nature. Diamonds have been a significant part of human culture for over 2,000 years, since they were first mined in India. Later discoveries in Brazil and Africa, and finally in Russia and Canada, made them less scarce, but no less valuable. Not only did their value as integral elements of fine jewelry increase, it wasn’t long before scientists realized that diamonds were the hardest material on Earth. That being the case, even flawed diamonds soon saw use as raw material for cutting, slicing, drilling, and polishing. Whether a piece of diamond was as large as a human fist or as small as a speck of dust, flawless or full of grit, it had a use, and it was valuable.

It took most of those 2,000 years to figure out how to create artificial diamonds, simply because it was almost impossible to mimic the necessary conditions on the surface of the Earth. Natural diamonds are created when carbon-rich minerals are drawn deep underground to the semi-liquid mantle, where they’re baked and crushed until the carbon rearranges itself into diamonds. Locked dozens of miles underground, a few are eventually forced back to the surface as part of a volcanic flow, where they’re entombed as crystals in a material called kimberlite. It’s up to humans to find the kimberlite lodes, crush them, and extract the treasure for later refinement as diamond gemstones or industrial bort. The bad news is that only about 15% of kimberlite “pipes” contain diamonds; the rest contain garnets, if anything.

In 1955, the first artificial diamonds were forged. They were no threat to the diamond gemstone industry, because they were so small; an artificial diamond of more than a fraction of a carat was rare indeed. In recent years, however, clever people have taken to creating synthetic or cultured diamonds, in a manner reminiscent to the way cultured pearls are created — but much quicker in the creation. One such manufacturer, Ideal Cultured Diamonds of South Africa, can produce a vivid yellow one-carat diamond in just 48 hours, for just a fifth of the price of a mined diamond of the same color and clarity. What really has producers of mined diamonds running scared is the fact that these synthetic diamonds are virtually identical to Mother Nature’s, and in fact it’s just as easy to produce exotically colored diamonds synthetically as it is to produce the blue-white kind. This will no doubt eventually knock down the market price of these exotic diamonds, which can bring as much as $1,000,000 per carat for the rarest red hues.

Of course there’s an uproar among the mined diamond industry, which wants it made clear that the diamonds are synthetic, since the term “cultured” suggests they’re made via a natural process — when in fact they’re created in a laboratory. Diamond synthesizers argue that they’re doing nothing that nature doesn’t; they’re just speeding up the process. Spokesmen for the diamond miners and retailers stick to the party line that natural diamonds possess an allure that synthesized ones do not, and that consumers will always prefer the natural versions in their diamond jewelry; but it is clear that they are concerned, and they should be. Industry insiders point out that with their significant cost benefits, synthetic diamonds may soon capture as much as 10 percent of the $68 billion global diamond market.

At this point, synthetic diamonds make up only a few thousand carats of the more than 150 million produced annually. However, as technology continues to advance, it seems likely that the synthetic yield will grow for both jewelry-grade and industrial diamonds, even as global production hits a 25-year low. Before long, it may be as likely that the diamond you’re wearing on your finger was produced not a hundred miles underground 3.5 billion years ago, but in a laboratory in Dubai last Tuesday.