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By James Roberts
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Luxury has a trust problem. The diamond industry, in particular, is confronting consumers who can research almost anything before spending thousands of dollars, yet many still struggle to understand what they are actually paying for. In 2025, Rapaport, the diamond trading platform, reported that the average price of a natural diamond engagement ring in the US reached $7,364, rising 9 percent year over year.
The appetite for diamonds has hardly disappeared. Jewelers De Beers’ latest US study found that natural diamonds remain the most desired luxury jewelry product, while average spending on natural diamond jewelry rose 25 percent to $4,063. Gen Z now accounts for more than three-quarters of natural diamond demand by value, suggesting that younger buyers are entering the category with considerable spending power.
Yet the market is also being forced to explain itself. Lab-grown diamonds have disrupted traditional assumptions about scarcity and price, while consumers have gained unprecedented access to information online. For the first time, more than half of couples reported their engagement ring featured a lab-grown stone, according to Fortune. This number says less about diamonds and more about the buyers choosing them. Shoppers who once accepted a jeweler’s word on value now expect proof, and they head toward whichever seller gives it to them.
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The market around diamonds has long rewarded ambiguity, with a grading system understood mainly by insiders, layered onto pricing that shifts from dealer to dealer, with little a shopper can do to verify what they have been told. A certificate can tell a buyer a stone’s grading characteristics, but it cannot necessarily tell them whether the diamond has the visual impact they want.
The gap between how luxury jewelry is marketed and how confident a buyer feels at the counter has, for decades, been the industry’s silent liability.
Stephanie Vilheym found that opening almost by accident. She joined TD Diamonds, the family jewelry company her husband, Liron, had already built in New York’s Diamond District, in 2015. She initially intended to grow the wholesale side of the business through Instagram. Retail customers found her instead. “The idea of selling to a retail customer, not seeing a stone in person, was just unheard of,” Stephanie says.
What changed the business’s trajectory, she adds, was a decision roughly a year later, which was to start posting diamond prices alongside full stone details, a practice she found almost no one in the trade then did publicly.
“People were not doing that. It wasn’t a common practice. That was really when things just took off,” she explains. The old model, she says, ran on inflated first offers meant to be negotiated down, so a buyer may feel they’d won a discount. Posting real prices eliminated that ritual, and customers noticed immediately.
Liron ties the response to something more basic than marketing. “Once you post the price, customers can feel like they know more or less about the product than walking in completely blind. You don’t need to call just to understand where you are,” he says. Stephanie believes publishing the price makes luxury more democratic, even for someone who cannot afford the particular stone on screen.
Education becomes more important as buyers encounter increasingly technical information. Liron argues that grading characteristics should be understood as traits instead of automatic measures of whether one diamond is “better.” The stone still has to perform visually. “The main thing you have to look at is the diamond,” Liron says.
Stephanie takes the same principle into the customer relationship. For her, the perfect stone is inherently personal, which means guiding a customer through the decision can matter as much as presenting specifications.
Social media has made that guidance possible at a distance. Stephanie recalls the first time that a customer bought diamond studs remotely, sending a wire while TD Diamonds shipped the stones. Liron recalls being stunned. The transaction seemed almost impossible at the time. Today, wires have become a common form of purchase, and buyers increasingly purchase significant pieces through a phone because the relationship behind the screen has become part of the luxury experience.
The definition of a desirable stone is shifting, too. Stephanie has watched shifting interest in diamonds further down the traditional color and inclusion scale, with warmer tones and heavily included salt-and-pepper stones. She also sees authenticity becoming increasingly important as lab-grown diamonds become more attainable. However, Liron insists that authenticity still carries weight that no technology has replicated. “People still want the real thing,” he adds.
Luxury has spent decades gatekeeping the allure and mystique of diamonds. The new consumer is challenging that formula. As more information and more ways to compare prices become democratized, there’s a growing impatience for being kept in the dark about a purchase that can carry significant emotional and financial weight.
Stephanie and Liron Vilheym’s experience points to a more paradigm-shifting truth for the industry. Expertise has more value when it is shared, and luxury feels more credible when the customer understands what they are paying for. The diamond itself remains the object of desire, while the real shift is in the transaction surrounding it. Trust is no longer something a jeweler can simply ask for; it has to be earned before the sale is made.
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