Lab-Grown Diamonds From India: Why Nearly Every Stone Comes From Here, and How to Check Yours

In April 2024 a buyer on a lab-diamond forum wrote a short complaint about an Indian seller. The stones looked fine. The report looked fine. But "they don't share the growth process. I want to know if it's HPHT or CVD grown" (r/LabDiamonds, April 2024 (opens in a new tab)). It's a small sentence and it's the right instinct. With a mined diamond, the question is where it came from. With a grown one, the question is how it was made and what was done to it afterwards, and the answer sits with a supplier, usually in Surat.

This page is for a jeweller, brand or wholesaler outside India buying loose lab-grown stones. We cover why India is the default origin, what to ask so you know what you're buying, what your own market says about selling it, and what the border charges. Two caveats. We publish no prices, because they move fast and the forums are full of numbers that were true for a month. And our trade figures cover cut stones by customs code, so they can't separate a 0.3 ct melee parcel from a 3 ct centre stone.

1. Why India, In One Paragraph And One Number

Surat has cut the world's small diamonds for decades, and growing is the step that came before cutting. A grower with a reactor needs exactly what Surat already has: cutters, polishers, planners, graders and dealers who know the trade. So the grown-stone business settled where the cutting was. Our Surat cluster page tells that story and carries the industry's own export figures, which show lab-grown stones overtaking natural ones by carats.

The import data shows the outcome from the buyer's side. Here are the 2025 shares for cut lab-grown diamonds (HS 7104.91), from each market's own customs records.

For Australia we pulled the wider heading, HS 7104, and India held 80.5% in 2025. When a single country has shares like these, two things follow for a buyer. You're almost certainly buying Indian stones already, even through a dealer in New York, Antwerp or Hatton Garden. And the competition among Indian sellers is fierce, which is why the price talk on forums moves so fast and why you should date any quote you're given.

2. The Three Questions That Tell You What You're Buying

A grown diamond is real carbon with a diamond's crystal. What separates a good parcel from a weak one is the way it was grown and what happened afterwards. So three questions do most of the work.

How was it grown? Two methods dominate. CVD grows the stone layer by layer from a gas, and HPHT grows it under heavy pressure and heat. Buyers on the forums describe each method's weak spots plainly. CVD stones "can be brown or hazy", and "cheapest is usually CVD with post growth treatment" (r/LabDiamonds, March 2023 (opens in a new tab)). HPHT stones can carry a blue tint, and one buyer warned that "Hpht will sometimes test as moissanite on most diamond testers" (r/LabDiamonds, March 2023 (opens in a new tab)). Neither method is bad. You just need to know which one you hold, because your incoming checks differ.

Was it treated after growth? Many CVD stones are treated after growing to improve the colour. It's legal and common, and it must be on the paper. Ask for it in writing for every parcel, not once per supplier.

Who graded it? Most Indian growers ship with IGI reports. One US buyer said "the best supplier we've found for labs is Indian and uses IGI certs" (r/labdiamond, May 2024 (opens in a new tab)), and a US retailer put the trade view this way: "You can get a D color from IGI and maybe GIA will grade it E color but it's still colorless" (r/LabDiamonds, March 2024 (opens in a new tab)). Others disagree sharply. Our view is simple. Use the lab your own customers recognise, and make sure the report states the growth method and any treatment. A report that leaves those out answers the wrong question.

3. What Your Market Says About Selling It

The rules on what you call the stone are where a buyer abroad carries the real risk, because the supplier's paperwork stops at your border.

In the United States the Federal Trade Commission's Jewelry Guides are explicit. The unqualified word "diamond" describes a mined stone. A grown stone must carry "laboratory-grown", "laboratory-created", "[manufacturer name]-created" or a phrase of like meaning, and "cultured" is allowed only with one of those qualifiers attached (16 CFR 23.12(c)(3) (opens in a new tab)). The same section treats "faux" as an inadequate disclosure for a lab-created stone (16 CFR 23.25 (opens in a new tab)). This applies to your product page, your invoice to a retailer and your packaging, so build it into the listing template before the first stone lands.

In the UK, the EU and Australia we found no single equivalent rulebook that we could read at source in this pass. The trade's ISO standard on diamond nomenclature, ISO 18323, sets out the same principle that a grown stone must be named as one. Check the exact wording with your trading-standards adviser or industry body before you print anything.

For your own records, keep each parcel's report numbers against the invoice. If a customer or a regulator ever asks whether a stone was grown, that link is your answer.

4. Codes and Duty

Since the 2022 edition of the Harmonized System, grown diamonds have their own customs lines inside heading 7104: 7104.21 for unworked stones and 7104.91 for cut ones. Natural diamonds sit under 7102. Make sure the Indian invoice and your entry use 7104. A grown stone declared under 7102 is a misdeclaration, whatever the seller meant.

Sources: USITC HTS (opens in a new tab), 91 FR 47318 (opens in a new tab), UK Trade Tariff (opens in a new tab), DFAT FTA Portal (opens in a new tab), all read 7 October 2026.

The US row is the one to settle before you price a range. Whether the extra 10% applies to cut lab-grown stones changes your landed cost more than any freight choice, so check this with your customs broker before you book. Our US page sets out the rest of the US stack.

5. Getting To A Grower

The forums are blunt about access. A US buyer with a registered company approached two wholesalers and "still quoted the higher prices", because the Surat trade sells to people it knows (r/labdiamond, April 2024 (opens in a new tab)). We set out that problem, and the dealer route around it, on gems and jewellery. The short version is that a trade fair is the usual first door, and the India International Jewellery Show is where most foreign buyers meet Indian diamond firms.

There's one supplier-risk point worth knowing. In 2023 a forum post claimed "a ton of CVD growers" were "underwater on loans", and a Surat local replied there "isn't any news about this here in the local market. Business as usual" (r/Diamonds, July 2023 (opens in a new tab)). We don't know who was right, and it's not a reason to avoid growers. It is a reason to run the normal company checks on how to verify Indian suppliers before you pay a deposit for a large parcel. If you'd rather someone check the firm, attend the parcel inspection and handle the paperwork for you, that's execution and it's what SourcingSync (opens in a new tab) does.

Questions Buyers Ask

Back To The Growth Process

The buyer who wanted to know "HPHT or CVD" didn't get an answer from that seller, and the forum didn't say whether they bought anyway. You don't need to be in that position. India supplies eight or nine in every ten cut grown stones your market imports, so the supply is there and the sellers compete hard for good buyers. Ask the three questions, get the answers on paper, and name the stone properly when you sell it. Then the only thing left to settle is the duty line, and that takes one call to your broker.