What’s in this blog
A lab-grown diamond is a real diamond: carbon crystallised in the same structure as a mined stone, with identical hardness, fire, and chemistry. It's grown above ground using Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) instead of forming underground over billions of years, which is why it costs meaningfully less without being any less of a diamond. At Goutham Jewellers, our CVD collection is IGI-certified to VVS2 clarity, and it's our best-selling diamond category, in rings, earrings, and pendants alike.
Table Of Contents
| Feature | Details |
|---|---|
| Diamond type | Real diamond |
| Growth method | CVD (Chemical Vapour Deposition) |
| Formation time | A few weeks |
| Certification | IGI Certified |
| Clarity | VVS2 |
| Hardness | 10 Mohs |
| Appearance | Same fire & brilliance as natural |
The rest of this comes down to three things worth actually understanding before you buy: how the stone is grown, how it's graded, and what a VVS2 certificate does and doesn't tell you.
How CVD Grows a Diamond, and Why It Costs Less
Goutham Jewellers works exclusively with Chemical Vapour Deposition, one of two commercial methods for growing diamonds. The other, High Pressure High Temperature (HPHT), recreates the heat and pressure of natural formation inside a metal press. CVD works differently, and it's the reason we chose it.
A thin slice of diamond seed goes into a sealed chamber filled with carbon-rich gas, usually methane and hydrogen. The chamber is heated to roughly 800°C and the gas is ionised into plasma, which breaks the gas molecules apart. Free carbon atoms then settle onto the seed one atomic layer at a time, and over several weeks those layers build into a rough diamond crystal, cut and polished exactly like a mined stone. That layer-by-layer growth is what gives CVD a reputation for exceptionally pure crystals with fewer internal strain lines than HPHT, which is why it's become the preferred method for fine jewellery rather than industrial-grade stones.
The lower price that comes with this isn't a discount or a marketing device, it's a different supply chain. A mined diamond carries the cost of exploration and excavating, sometimes literally tonnes of rock, to recover a few carats. A CVD diamond carries the cost of a growth chamber, gas, electricity, and a few weeks of time. No mining, no ore processing, no land disturbance, and as more growers scale up production, that cost keeps falling further. It's a manufacturing cost curve, not a discount that reverses, which is worth knowing before you assume a lab-grown stone will hold its price the way a mined one might.
The 4 Cs and What VVS2 Clarity Actually Means
Lab-grown diamonds are graded on the same 4 Cs as natural ones, Carat, Cut, Colour, Clarity, and nothing about being lab-grown changes the scale. Clarity runs from Flawless down through Included, based on how visible internal inclusions are under 10x magnification:
| Grade | What it means |
|---|---|
| FL / IF | No inclusions visible under magnification |
| VVS1 / VVS2 | Very, very slight inclusions, extremely difficult to see even under magnification |
| VS1 / VS2 | Minor inclusions, visible under magnification but not to the naked eye |
| SI1 / SI2 | Inclusions may be visible to a trained eye without magnification |
Goutham Jewellers' CVD collection is graded VVS2 by IGI, meaning any inclusions are extremely minor and effectively invisible without magnification. It reads eye-clean while sitting a notch below the flawless grades that carry a steep premium for no visible difference, which is why most jewellers treat VVS2 as the sweet spot between genuinely clean and paying for a grade nobody can actually see.
Clarity is only one input though. Cut decides how much of that clarity actually turns into fire and brilliance on your finger, a well-cut VVS2 will outshine a poorly cut VS1 every time, and colour grade matters just as much, since a warm-toned stone can look duller than its clarity grade suggests. Two stones can carry an identical VVS2 certificate and still look noticeably different once set. That's exactly why every stone in our lab-grown diamond rings collection is cut and set in-house rather than sourced pre-mounted, so cut quality isn't a variable you're taking on faith from a supplier we've never seen. Before you buy anywhere, ask to see the report number laser-inscribed on the girdle and match it against the paperwork.
Durability and Care
A CVD diamond scratches, clouds, and fades exactly as much as a mined one does, which is to say, it doesn't. It's still a 10 on the Mohs hardness scale, the hardest naturally occurring material there is, so it resists scratching indefinitely under normal wear, and its colour comes from crystal structure rather than pigment, so there's nothing to fade. What does change over years of daily wear is the setting, not the stone: prongs loosen, metal wears thin. Get the mount checked periodically and the diamond will outlast the ring around it.
Cleaning follows the same routine as any fine diamond piece: warm water, a mild soap, a soft brush for the underside where the setting traps oil and skin residue, and no harsh chemical cleaners if the metal is a softer gold karat.
What the Marketing Usually Leaves Out
Most lab-grown diamond marketing sells the upside and skips the trade-offs, so here's the fuller picture. The resale market for lab-grown stones is still developing. Mined diamonds carry a rarity-based resale floor built over a century of trade, lab-grown diamonds don't have that history yet, and as global production scales up, retail prices keep drifting down. That works against you if you're treating a lab-grown diamond as an appreciating asset rather than a jewellery purchase, so buy it for what it actually is: a genuine diamond at a lower entry point, not a financial instrument.
It's also worth knowing that not every CVD stone is grown to the same standard. Growth speed, gas purity, and chamber consistency all affect the final crystal, which is why the certificate and cut grade matter more than the fact that a stone says "CVD" on paper. Two CVD diamonds sharing a production method aren't automatically interchangeable in quality.
Our CVD Collection
We hold our lab-grown collection to a VVS2 clarity standard, certified by IGI, on every stone we set, and it's become our best-selling diamond category for the reasons above: the same fire and durability as a mined stone, at a price that makes sense. If you want the mined-versus-lab-grown comparison in more depth, cost, appearance, and certification side by side, that's covered in our lab-grown vs natural diamonds guide.
You're welcome to visit our Saidapet showroom to see the certificates and the stones together, or reach us on WhatsApp for a look at the current collection.
