A single round brilliant-cut diamond resting on a swatch of dark chestnut English bridle leather

Lab-Grown Diamonds Already Had This Argument. Leather Is Next.

ByPeter Joeseph 'Briefcase Maker' Kalafatis

Carbon, arranged in a cubic crystal. That describes a diamond cut from rock in the Northwest Territories, and it describes a diamond grown in a reactor. In 2018 the U.S. Federal Trade Commission wrote that sameness into its Jewelry Guides by removing the word natural from the definition of a diamond. The agency reasoned that lab-created stones share the optical, physical and chemical properties of mined ones, and its own conclusion ran to four words: “Thus, they are diamonds.”

Eight years on, the argument that ruling started is still running. Three pieces of news from the first week of October 2026 show where it has landed, and one of them suggests where leather is headed next.

What the 2018 ruling did and did not settle

The FTC did not make the two kinds of stone interchangeable in the shop window. A lab-grown stone still cannot be sold as natural, real or genuine, and the word cultured is permitted only next to a qualifier such as laboratory-grown. A representative of the Jewelers Vigilance Committee noted at the time that an unqualified diamond still implies a natural one, according to the same National Jeweler report.

The vocabulary fight has not ended either. On September 9, 2026, the trade body CIBJO revised its Blue Books so that synthetic is the sole descriptor for created stones. That was CIBJO’s decision, not the FTC’s, and it pulls against the American rule.

Writer Virginia Postrel made the physical case in 2021. Lab-grown stones, she wrote, are “chemically, structurally and optically identical to the natural variety.” Her larger argument was about ethics and price: the stones appeal to buyers who care where a product comes from, and they take less energy per carat than mining does.

A rough uncut diamond and a polished stone side by side on a worn leather jeweler's tray

What happened to the price

Identical goods tend to drift toward the same price, and the cheaper source usually sets it. WWD reported early in 2026 that diamond prices had fallen by as much as 40 percent since 2021. It put the drop down to cheaper lab-grown gems, concerns about traceability, sanctions on Russian supply and a slowdown in spending by Chinese consumers.

The recovery now underway is small. Rapaport’s September report, released October 6, shows all four tracked sizes rising: the 0.30-carat index by 3.2 percent, the 0.50-carat by 2.5 percent, the 3-carat by 1.5 percent and the 1-carat by 0.3 percent, its second straight monthly gain. The 0.30-carat index is up 15.1 percent for the year.

Rapaport also noted that smaller, lower-quality stones stayed under pressure from lab-grown competition. The copy competes hardest where the original is worth the least.

A mine that will not outlast 2027

On October 5, National Jeweler reported that De Beers Canada will take full ownership of the Gahcho Kué mine in the Northwest Territories. It held 51 percent. Mountain Province Diamonds, which held the other 49, is restructuring its finances, and its noteholders and lender have agreed to a six-month pause on interest and principal payments. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Gahcho Kué is Canada’s last operating diamond mine, after the closures of Ekati and Diavik. It is expected to shut at the end of 2027, because De Beers paused the expansion that would have extended its life to 2030. Mountain Province’s chief executive, Jonathan Comerford, tied the deal to a “material decline in diamond prices” over the past year.

A mine is a deposit that runs down. A reactor keeps producing for as long as it has power. That difference in supply, more than any marketing campaign, is what the price chart is recording.

Leather is now standing where diamonds stood

A Raleigh, North Carolina company called Cultivated Biomaterials has made leather without a slaughtered animal. Its first product line, Angelry, is cultivated leather jewelry. The cells are dermal fibroblasts, skin cells, taken from a cow named Angel who lives at the Sweet Farm sanctuary in New York. According to Green Queen’s coverage, the material is grown on plant-based scaffolds, tanned with vegetable-based methods and made by hand at bench scale.

No diamonds are involved. The link comes from the founder, George Engelmayr, who described the leather as “almost like the biological equivalent of a gemstone.”

The company ran a 60-day Kickstarter campaign that closed on November 8, 2025. The project page shows $21,821 pledged against a $20,000 goal, from 78 backers. Engelmayr said the target was a novel material, not price parity with conventional leather, which is the opposite of the path diamonds took. Production figures after the campaign did not turn up in the research for this post.

The shape of the argument is familiar, though. Same tissue, no extraction, a creator who says the origin is gentler. The question the diamond trade spent eight years on is arriving at the hide.

A pale cultivated leather sample in a petri dish beside a strip of oak-tanned bridle leather

What a hide has that a stone does not

A diamond’s identity sits in its lattice. Two stones of the same carbon, cut to the same grade, are the same object for most purposes, which is exactly why they compete on price.

A hide does not work that way. English bridle leather, the kind Marcellino NY cuts its briefcases from, is oak bark tanned, a slow process in which the tannins work through the whole thickness of the skin. Its character comes from that process, from the animal’s own variation, and from years of carry. The difference between vegetable and chrome tanning is a difference in how the material behaves under use, not only in how it begins.

Use is where the market already puts a value. A recent Marcellino NY post covered an auction in which an unrestored car with worn leather seats outsold a restored twin by $495,000. Buyers paid for the record of wear. A stone has no equivalent of that.

There is a plainer test too. A motorcycle-gear channel, FortNine, built a video around the question of why leather holds up when a rider slides on pavement:

A leatherworker's hands drawing a knife across a bridle leather hide beside a steel ruler
FortNine, “Why Leather is Unbeatable – Motorcyclist Review while Sliding” (YouTube)

Abrasion is a property a lab-grown sample will eventually have to prove, one slide at a time.

What stays scarce

Diamonds taught buyers that two stones can be identical in every measurable way and still be priced like different things, because what people were paying for was never the carbon alone. The trade has spent eight years working out what the rest of the price consisted of. Rarity, origin and story were all candidates, and the answer is still arriving, one monthly index at a time.

Leather will be asked the same question. If a hide can be grown from a few cells, then its cost to produce stops being what protects its value, and something else has to. For a bag that is carried for decades, that something is easy to name and hard to manufacture: how the surface takes a scratch and keeps it, how the edges darken, how a break-in period turns into a shape no one else owns.

Whether a hide grown from cells can do that is a question nobody can answer yet. Nobody has carried one for twenty years.

A well-worn English bridle leather briefcase with deep patina on an oak desk

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