Rio Tinto transferred ownership of the Argyle Pink Diamonds brand and its remaining inventory to British luxury jeweller Boodles in October. The East Kimberley mine, once responsible for more than 90 per cent of the world’s pink diamonds, ceased production in November 2020, leaving a finite stock whose colour and Western Australian origin collectors still prize.
The handover sits against a sharp reversal in manufactured stones. Five years ago a one-carat lab-grown diamond sold for about $4000; a comparable stone now costs about $400. A June report from De Beers said wholesale prices of synthetic diamonds have fallen 93 per cent since 2020.
Janelle Sapienza, managing director of Solid Gold Diamonds, links the boom to price. In the early 2020s, she says, a one-carat natural diamond sold for $9000 while synthetics were offered at $3000 to $4000 even though they cost only $300 to $400. She says Indian and Chinese manufacturers then produced so much that the price per block dropped and the market faced massive oversupply. Solid Gold stayed overwhelmingly with natural stones: synthetics were under one per cent of the business at their peak, are not held in stock, and are sourced only on request. Sapienza says fewer customers now ask for them because they know the real price.
She also disputes the green marketing. Synthetic diamonds were promoted as the green version of a mined diamond, she says, but with more transparency that claim does not hold. Both mining and laboratory production have impacts that depend on how and where the stones are made. In September the World Jewellery Confederation, CIBJO, recommended “synthetic” as the preferred international term rather than “laboratory-grown” or “laboratory-created”.
Solid Gold has been tied to the Argyle pink programme for more than three decades. Sapienza says its loose stones and finished jewellery now run into the millions of dollars, and that buyers who acquired a piece hold heirlooms they can pass on. She describes the stones as extremely rare, with colours found nowhere else, and says West Australians are patriotic about gems recovered from home soil by people they live and work among.
Perth jeweller Justin Linney, creative director of Linneys, says the house refused synthetics because a stone formed by nature over a billion years is nature’s art, and because he did not want to tell a client years later that a revaluation had gone backwards. He still says buyers can choose either provenance. Sapienza adds that Solid Gold’s focus is design and craftsmanship whether the client picks a natural or a synthetic stone.