Lab-grown vs natural: what the price gap really looks like
Live market medians by carat — updated from tracked listings.
Read guides →Four specs decide what a diamond costs. Tap a point on the stone for each one — in plain English, with live numbers from the listings we track.
Tap a numbered point on the stone.
Every lab-grown stone we track, grouped by cut — tap a shape to see its live listings and cross-store prices.
Earth-mined stones we track, grouped by cut — tap a shape to see its live listings and cross-store prices.
— price gap on the same specs
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See the cheaper listing See the pricey one
Matched on identical shape, color and clarity, carat within 0.10 — not the same physical stone. The gap is real either way: same specs, two stores, very different prices.
The widest price spreads in the latest tracked data — identical specs, different stores. Tap a point on the stone for each gap.
Tap a numbered point on the stone.
Identical specs at different stores — same specs, not the same stone.
Real retailer listings with cert badges. Prices refresh on every scrape — stale listings are excluded automatically.
Showing all live listings
No estimates, no sponsored order — just observed listings and their history.
Every sweep records retailer, URL, price and the full 4Cs plus cert lab and number — never overwritten, always appended to price history.
Listings collapse to one canonical diamond by (lab, cert number), so the same stone at four stores shows side-by-side with a best-price badge.
Drops over 5% get a price-drop badge; first-seen dates prove who carried a stone first. Stale listings age out of every best-price computation.
Freshness rule: a price counts toward best-price only while its listing is freshly seen (hourly retailers < 2h, daily < 30h). Older rows stay visible with a "last seen" note.
Data-backed explainers from real market observations.
Live market medians by carat — updated from tracked listings.
Read guides →GIA vs IGI, and which fields actually move the price.
Read guides →What 25 live Blue Nile listings tell us this week.
Read guides →From nightly tracking to the alert on this page — tap the points to see how a listing becomes a price gap.
Tap a numbered point on the stone.
How Facet Wire tracks, matches and compares diamond prices.
Facet Wire is a diamond price intelligence service. We track live diamond listings across major retailers — Ritani, Blue Nile, With Clarity, Frank Darling and Ada Diamonds — and line up stones with identical specs side by side, so you can see what the same diamond costs from store to store.
No. Facet Wire doesn't sell diamonds, hold inventory, or take payment for stones. We compare prices and link out to the retailer, where you buy directly. Prices shown here are the prices we tracked — always confirm the final price on the retailer's page before you buy.
We match on the specs that define a stone: shape, color and clarity must be identical, and carat weight must be within 0.10 carats. Lab-grown is only ever compared with lab-grown, and natural with natural. We only call two listings the same stone when the certificate number matches at both stores.
Chemically they are the same material — crystallized carbon with the same physical properties. A natural diamond formed underground over billions of years; a lab-grown diamond is created in a laboratory in a matter of weeks. That difference in origin drives a large difference in price, which is why Facet Wire tracks lab-grown and natural stones in separate sections and never mixes them in one comparison.
Listings are refreshed nightly, and the homepage shows when the tracked data was last updated. Retailers can change their prices at any time, so treat Facet Wire as the radar, not the register — the price at the retailer's checkout is always the final one.
When identical specs are priced far apart at different stores — for example a 2.79ct pear listed at $1,668 at one retailer and $6,025 at another — that spread is a price gap. The Price Gap Alert on the homepage flags the biggest gap found in the latest tracked data, with links to both listings so you can check them yourself.