国内英语资讯:Xinhua Headlines: Made-in-China diamonds poised to shape global market_时事

国内英语资讯:Xinhua Headlines: Made-in-China diamonds poised to shape global market

A major boost to man-made diamonds, Chinese manufacturers said, came from De Beers, the dominant giant that popularized the saying, "a diamond is forever."

Reversing its previous position of shunning the man-made sector, De Beers took a U-turn in 2018 by selling man-made diamonds through its Lightbox Jewelry brand.

"Since De Beers embraced man-made diamonds, the market has been developing rapidly," said Liu, citing expanding sales in Japan and recent visits to his company from major jewelry brands.

Man-made diamonds' growing prospects are their increasing quality at decreasing cost. It is now impossible to tell a man-made diamond from a mined one with the naked eye, despite the latter's exorbitant price.

Experts with professional equipments can distinguish the two, but that distinction is so irrelevant to the Federal Trade Commission of the United States, that the previously specified "natural" origin within the FTC's definition of a diamond was removed in 2018.

In its Guides for the Jewelry, Precious Metals, and Pewter Industries, the FTC ruled "based on changes in the market, the final Guides eliminate the word 'natural' from the definition of diamond...because lab-created products that have essentially the same optical, physical and chemical properties as mined diamonds are also diamonds."

Zang Chuangyi, a scholar at Henan Polytechnic University, believes a diamond is a diamond no matter how it was formed -- grown in a lab or mined out of the ground.