AKSHITA SINGH, A DELHI-BASED interior designer, loves diamonds. “They are a girl’s best friend,” she laughs. Her latest purchase is a diamond pendant with matching earrings and she has her eyes set on a bracelet. But her purchases haven’t depleted her bank balance significantly. Instead of natural mined diamonds, she has bought jewellery with lab-grown diamonds that are nearly 40-50 per cent cheaper.
Also known as synthetic, cultured or man-made diamonds, these stones are optically, chemically and physically identical to natural, mined diamonds, but with one key difference: they are manufactured in a lab in a few days as