It’s kind of surprising that diamonds still have appeal as jewelry at all given the rise of lab-grown. I always assumed that people liked them because they were rare and expensive.

Try somewhere like Blue Nile [1]. The price of natural diamonds increases exponential once you go over 1ct and the size becomes rarer.

Here's a quick comparison on just size, clarity and the visibility of inclusions.

A 1ct very good quality stone, E-F, VVS2 or better, no fluorescence - you're looking at a 88% reduction in cost ($700 vs $6,000).

Jump to 2ct and it's $2,300 vs $32,000.

At 3ct, the lab grown is still only $4,200 where the natural at that size starts at $82,000.

[1] https://www.bluenile.com/diamonds

How large do you want them?

> https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=828627288905&skuId=55567...

This ring goes up to 5ct, and some other listings are at 7ct.

A 3ct example at the link, which would easily be a >$20k ring under other circumstances and isn't too comically large, will run you about $1500.

There are many, many others.

Synthetic gem-quality diamonds are old news by now. Since the 2010s, you have been able to make essentially flawless diamonds by vacuum deposition, of higher quality than anything found in nature, weighing up to a hundred karats or so.

They’re also vastly more ethically produced than most natural diamonds, and don’t have prices inflated by the artificial scarcity imposed by the De Beers monopoly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_diamond

James Allen, Brilliant Earth, Jared, Blue Nile, all of these vendors sell lab created diamonds openly and let you compare side by side. A diamond that’s $10k natural can be had for $1500 lab created without any scarcity.