Are fancy pink, blue and yellow lab-grown diamonds worth it?

The short answer, expanded

A natural pink diamond of one carat is a six-figure purchase and has been climbing since the Argyle mine in Western Australia, the source of most of the world's pinks, closed in November 2020.⁴ A lab-grown pink of the same size is a four-figure one. If what you want is the colour on a hand, lab-grown is not a compromise; it is the only realistic route. What you are giving up is rarity, and the resale value that attaches to it, and you are taking on some things worth understanding about how the colour got there.

Disclosure: Lark & Berry, who publish this site, design with lab-grown fancies and sell them. We like them. Read this with that in mind.

How the colours are made

Diamond is carbon, and pure carbon is colourless. Colour comes from impurities or from defects in the crystal lattice, and both can be engineered.¹

Yellow. Nitrogen is the commonest impurity in diamond, natural or grown. Allow nitrogen into an HPHT press or a CVD chamber during growth and the result is yellow, from pale to vivid. No treatment afterwards is needed, which is why yellow is the most abundant and cheapest lab-grown fancy.

Blue. Boron is introduced during growth, most often in HPHT. A very small amount turns the crystal blue, and the same element is responsible for natural blues such as the Hope. Blue is grown, not treated, but it is harder to control than yellow and good saturated blues are scarcer.

Pink. Here the process is different and it matters. Lab-grown pinks are mostly not grown pink. A CVD stone grown with a little nitrogen is irradiated and then annealed, creating nitrogen-vacancy centres that absorb yellow and orange light and leave the stone looking pink to red.³ GIA's laboratory has documented pink CVD stones produced by low-pressure, high-temperature annealing since 2015,² and its broader research notes that most CVD diamonds submitted for grading since 2020 have had some form of post-growth processing. A lab-grown pink is therefore nearly always a treated stone, and an honest seller's certificate will say so.

Green, orange, purple, red. All achievable, all by combinations of the above, all less standardised. Treat these as specialist stones.

What they cost against natural

When De Beers launched Lightbox in 2018 it priced pink and blue lab-grown at the same flat $800 per carat as colourless, which was a deliberate statement that lab-grown colour has no rarity premium.⁵ Lightbox closed in 2025, but the pricing logic it set out has held: in 2026, lab-grown fancies cost a modest premium over colourless lab-grown of the same size, with pinks dearest and yellows cheapest. A one carat lab-grown fancy pink at UK retail is typically low to mid four figures; a natural Fancy Intense pink of the same weight is hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Put another way, the gap between lab-grown and natural is roughly 70 to 90% for colourless stones and well over 95% for pinks and blues. The colour is where lab-grown's price advantage is most extreme.

The trade-offs, plainly

Treatment. A lab-grown pink has usually been irradiated and annealed. That is disclosed, stable and perfectly normal, but it is a different thing from a stone that came out of the ground pink, and if the idea of a treated stone bothers you, it should be a yellow or a blue, which are grown to colour.

Grading is softer. Colour grading of fancies is more subjective than colourless grading even for natural stones, and for lab-grown it is mostly done by IGI. GIA has moved colourless lab-grown to a two-tier "Premium" or "Standard" assessment⁶ and does not offer the same depth of fancy-colour grading for lab-grown as for natural. Two "Fancy Intense Pink" certificates may describe noticeably different stones. Look at the stone.

Resale is effectively zero. Natural fancies have a genuine secondary market because they are scarce. Lab-grown fancies can be made to order, so they do not. Buy for wearing, not for holding.

Colour in small sizes. Saturation in a fancy is easier to read in a larger stone. Below about 0.3 carats, a pink or blue can look washed out unless it is genuinely Intense or Vivid, which is why lab-grown fancies work so well as accents around a colourless centre or in a cluster where the colour accumulates.

Where they genuinely earn their place

The strongest case for a fancy-coloured lab-grown is in design, not in imitation of a natural fancy. A row of matched lab-grown pinks in an eternity band, a blue centre with colourless shoulders, a yellow cushion in yellow gold: these are pieces that were not commercially possible before, because nobody could source twelve matched natural pinks at any sane price. Lab-grown makes matched colour routine; see the matching page for why.

That is the honest answer to "worth it". Worth it for the design and the colour, yes. Worth it as a substitute for the rarity of a natural pink, no, and nobody selling one should tell you otherwise.