Lab-Grown Diamonds · Ethics & Sourcing

What Are Blood Diamonds? Definition, Facts and How to Avoid Them (2026)

By Tushar Leclerc · 9 min read

Last Updated: August 22, 2026

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Most articles on this subject follow the same arc. They define blood diamonds, describe a war that ended twenty years ago, mention the Kimberley Process, and conclude that the problem was solved. Then, if the site sells lab-grown diamonds, they tell you to buy lab-grown.

We do sell lab-grown diamonds, so take that last part with the scepticism it deserves. The middle is where the real answer sits, and it is less tidy than the usual version. Here is what the term means, what the certification scheme does and does not cover, where the issue stands in 2026, and the honest case against the choice we happen to profit from.

What are blood diamonds?

A blood diamond is a diamond mined and sold to fund armed conflict. The terms "blood diamond" and "conflict diamond" are used interchangeably, though "conflict diamond" is the one that appears in the formal definition.

That formal definition is the part worth reading closely. The Kimberley Process defines conflict diamonds as rough diamonds used by rebel movements to finance wars against legitimate governments. Every word in it is load-bearing:

• Rough. Once a stone is cut and polished, it falls outside the scheme entirely.
• Rebel movements. If a government is the one committing the violence, the stones are not conflict diamonds by this definition.
• Wars against legitimate governments. Forced labour, child labour, unsafe mines and smuggling are not covered, however severe.

So the phrase most shoppers have in their head, meaning a diamond connected to human suffering, is considerably broader than the phrase the industry certifies against. That mismatch is the whole story.

Where the term came from

The term entered public use during the civil wars of the 1990s in Sierra Leone, Angola and Liberia, where armed groups seized alluvial diamond fields and traded the stones for weapons. Diamonds are small, valuable and effectively untraceable once out of the ground, which made them close to ideal as a war currency.

International pressure produced the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, launched in 2003 with UN backing. It requires participating countries to certify shipments of rough diamonds as conflict-free and to trade only with other participants.

By its own measure it worked. The scheme reports that conflict diamonds, as it defines them, fell from around 15% of the rough trade to under 1%. That is a real achievement, and it deserves to be said plainly before the criticism starts.

The Kimberley Process, and what it leaves out

The gaps have been documented for two decades, mostly by the organisations that helped create the scheme in the first place.

Global Witness resigned as an official observer in 2011, having campaigned for the scheme's creation, on the grounds that it had failed to adapt to a broader range of human rights concerns. Four structural problems come up again and again:

The Marange fields in Zimbabwe are the case most often cited. Security forces killed large numbers of miners there in 2008, and the scheme continued to certify stones from the area, because what happened did not meet its definition of a conflict diamond.

Are blood diamonds still a problem in 2026?

Yes, though the shape of the problem has changed. The 1990s rebel-army version has largely receded. What replaced it is a governance question that the scheme has been unable to resolve.

At the annual plenary in Dubai in November 2025, a proposal to widen the definition of a conflict diamond failed. It would have extended coverage to militias, mercenaries, organised criminal networks and private military companies. According to trade press reporting from the meeting, the EU, Canada, the UK, Australia, Switzerland and Ukraine voted against it, arguing that any expansion must also cover violence by state actors. Because the scheme requires unanimity, the proposal died.

The European Union said afterwards that it regretted the lack of consensus, and separately that the scheme had been prevented from discussing Russian diamonds, which account for roughly a third of global supply.

India chairs the scheme through 2026. At the intersessional meeting in Mumbai in May 2026, the civil society coalition described the situation as another failed reform cycle, and raised a further concern: that the scheme is drifting from conflict prevention toward serving as a marketing credential for natural diamonds.

None of that means the diamond in front of you funded a war. It means the system built to answer that question cannot currently answer it.

Why "conflict-free" on a price tag means less than you think

Here is the part that rarely appears in jewellery marketing, including, until now, plenty of it in this industry.

"Conflict-free" is not a premium claim. Under the scheme, essentially every legally traded rough diamond qualifies, because the definition it certifies against is so narrow that under 1% of stones fail it. A label that almost nothing fails is not telling you much.

It also does not follow the stone to the shop. Certification applies to rough diamonds and ends at cutting. And where the mixed-origin practice applies, the paperwork may never name a country at all.

So when any retailer, us included, prints "conflict-free" on a page, the honest reading is that the stone is not among the small share the scheme catches. For a lab-grown diamond the claim means something different and considerably stronger, because there was no mine involved at any point. That distinction is worth making explicitly rather than letting one phrase cover both.

How lab-grown diamonds sidestep the question

A lab-grown diamond is chemically, optically and physically a diamond. It is grown in a reactor over a period of weeks rather than pulled from the ground, using the same two methods the industry has used for years, which we cover in our complete guide to lab-grown diamonds. It is not a simulant like cubic zirconia or moissanite, which are different materials that only resemble diamond, a distinction we explain in our guide to diamond simulants.

The relevant point for this article is narrow and factual: there is no mine in the supply chain, so the questions this article is about do not arise. You are not relying on a certificate to tell you that a stone avoided a conflict zone. There was no conflict zone to avoid.

Two honest qualifications, because a one-sided answer would be exactly the problem this post is complaining about.

First, growing diamonds uses significant energy, and how clean that energy is depends on the electricity grid where the reactor sits. That is why we do not publish a carbon-footprint percentage for our stones. We would have to verify the energy source behind every individual stone to stand behind a number, and we cannot, so we do not print one. Plenty of sellers do.

Second, certification proves identity, not ethics. Every Riona stone is IGI-certified, which tells you the stone's carat, colour, clarity and cut, and that it is lab-grown rather than mined. It says nothing about labour conditions in any factory. It is a gemmological document, not an ethical one. If you want to understand what those grades actually mean, our guide to the 4Cs covers it properly.

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The argument against lab-grown that we are not going to hide

We sell these. We benefit if you choose them. So here is the strongest case on the other side, stated properly rather than knocked down.

Diamond mining does real harm. It is also a source of income for people who have few alternatives. Artisanal and small-scale mining, across all minerals, supports tens of millions of people worldwide, and diamond communities in Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo and elsewhere depend on it directly. Botswana built much of its public spending on diamond revenue.

Nelson Mandela made this argument in 2006, warning that turning away from mined diamonds risked destabilising African producer countries and the people living in them. He was not defending the industry's record. He was pointing out that a boycott lands on the workers before it lands on anyone else.

That pressure is now measurable. As lab-grown diamonds have taken market share, natural diamond prices and export volumes in producer countries have fallen sharply, and trade coverage through 2026 has tracked steep declines in African diamond export earnings. The people most exposed to that are not the executives.

The counter-argument is that a supply chain nobody can audit is not a good way to support anyone, and that direct-trade and traceable-origin programmes are a more honest route to helping mining communities than buying a stone of unknown provenance and hoping. Both things can be true at once.

What we will not tell you is that buying lab-grown is straightforwardly the ethical choice with no trade-off attached. It removes one set of harms and it withdraws money from communities that rely on the alternative. You are entitled to weigh that yourself, which is difficult to do if the only pages discussing it are selling you something.

How to buy a diamond you can actually account for

Whichever way you go, these are the questions that separate a real answer from a slogan:

• If you are buying mined: ask for the country of origin, not just a conflict-free assurance. If the seller cannot name one, the paperwork behind the stone probably says mixed origin.
• Ask what the certificate covers. A grading report from IGI or GIA describes the stone. It is not a sourcing audit and does not claim to be.
• Treat unqualified environmental numbers with suspicion. Any seller quoting a precise carbon saving without naming the energy source behind it is quoting a marketing figure.
• If you are buying lab-grown: confirm it is certified as laboratory-grown and check that the grading lab is named on the report.
• Compare like with like on price. Our guide to lab-grown versus natural diamonds sets the two side by side without the sales pitch.

Every Riona stone is IGI-certified and lab-grown, set in solid 10K, 14K or 18K gold, and made to order. We do not sell mined diamonds, so we cannot offer you a traceable-origin mined stone. If that is what you want, a specialist in traceable mined diamonds is a better fit than we are.

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