Selling Lab-Grown Diamonds: What You Must Say

A laboratory-grown diamond is a diamond. Same carbon, same lattice, same hardness, and on most retail equipment the same reading. That is the reason the disclosure rules are strict rather than the reason they should be relaxed.

The word diamond is now a reserved word

BIS has notified IS 19469:2025, a modified adoption of ISO 18323:2015, Jewellery: Consumer confidence in the diamond industry. It was developed through BIS committee MTD 10 after a GJEPC initiative and launched to the trade in Mumbai in January 2026. Its scope covers natural, laboratory-grown, treated, composite and imitation stones, and the disclosure of treatments.

The operating rule is short. The word diamond, used alone, means a natural diamond. A grown stone must be described in full as a laboratory-grown diamond or a laboratory-created diamond, with the qualifier present every time. The abbreviations the trade actually speaks, LGD, lab grown, lab created, lab diamond, are not acceptable disclosures. Neither are fake, artificial or cultured. Neither are the virtue words: pure, nature’s, earth-friendly, conflict-free.

Two things to be honest about. Trade coverage disagrees on the effective date, with 1 January, 15 January and 27 January 2026 all reported, so take the date from the standard itself. Coverage also disagrees on whether it is compulsory. An Indian Standard carries legal force when the Central Government notifies a Quality Control Order under section 16 of the Bureau of Indian Standards Act, 2016, and we could not confirm one for diamonds. It changes little in practice. A description that misleads is already a misleading advertisement under section 2(28) of the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, and the CCPA can impose a penalty of up to Rs 10 lakh under section 21, rising to Rs 50 lakh for a repeat.

A grading report is an opinion, not a government certificate

No arm of the Indian state grades your stone. A grading report is the issuing laboratory’s documented opinion, and the laboratory is the only party standing behind it. Indian gem labs can hold NABL accreditation to ISO/IEC 17025, which speaks to the competence and impartiality of the testing, not to the worth of the stone. A report identifies. It does not price. Sell it as an identity document and you are accurate. Sell it as a valuation and you have made a claim the laboratory never made.

The reports themselves are moving. GIA stopped applying the natural-diamond colour and clarity nomenclature to grown stones and replaced it with two descriptive categories, Premium and Standard, on updated laboratory-grown services launched on 1 October 2025. A stone that misses the minimum receives no designation at all. If your product pages quote a colour and clarity grade from a GIA report, check which generation you are quoting.

Inscriptions moved too. GIA laser inscribes the girdle with the words Laboratory-Grown alongside the report number. IGI inscribed LAB GROWN with its report number until early February 2023 and now inscribes its logo with an LG prefix on the number, so those two letters are the only origin marker on the stone. A customer told to look for the words on the girdle will not find them on a recent IGI stone, and that is your training problem at the counter, not theirs.

Hallmarking is the metal, and only the metal

Nothing in the hallmarking regime touches the stone. The Hallmarking of Gold Jewellery and Gold Artefacts Order, 2020 covers gold to IS 1417:2016 and certifies the fineness of the precious metal in the article. Our guide to hallmarking and selling jewellery online covers district-wise applicability, the HUID, the invoice line and the exemptions, and all of it applies here unchanged. A grown solitaire in an 18K band is a hallmarking question about the band and a disclosure question about the stone. Keep the two apart in your copy and on your invoice.

What the listing says, and what the invoice says

On the listing, put the full qualifier immediately next to the word diamond, in the title and in the first bullet, at the same prominence as the rest of the product name. Not in a footnote, not behind a tab, not only in the specification table. State the growth method if you state it at all, and state any treatment. Give the stone weight separately from the gross weight of the article, because one blended gross figure is the most common origin of a purity complaint.

On the invoice, the BIS requirements for a hallmarked article still govern the metal: separate description, net precious metal weight, purity in carat and fineness. Add the stone, its weight and its grading report number. The tax lines reward reading rather than assuming. Under Notification No. 9/2025-Central Tax (Rate) dated 17 September 2025, effective 22 September 2025, heading 7104 appears in Schedule V at 0.125 per cent central tax for synthetic or reconstructed diamonds only when unworked or simply sawn or roughly shaped. A polished grown stone therefore falls to Schedule VI at 0.75 per cent central tax. Articles of jewellery of precious metal, heading 7113, sit in Schedule IV at 1.5 per cent central tax. The loose stone and the finished ring are not the same rate, and the figure repeated across vendor blogs, 0.25 per cent GST on loose lab-grown diamonds, is true only of rough.

What a marketplace asks before the listing goes live

Fine jewellery is a gated category on the large platforms, cleared by application and a physical quality review rather than by a catalogue upload. Expect to produce a brand certificate of authenticity stating metal weight and purity, an original grading report from a recognised laboratory, and your BIS registration for the gold. Expect the listing declarations as well, the same ones every packaged product carries; our note on legal metrology labelling for e-commerce has that list.

One caution, because it trips up Indian sellers reading global forums. The thresholds quoted there, including the rule that a white diamond of 0.75 carat or larger needs an original grading report, come from Amazon’s United States jewellery quality assurance standards. Read the India category policy for the India requirement.

One line for exporters

If you ship to the United States, the FTC Jewelry Guides at 16 CFR Part 23, revised in 2018, removed natural from the definition of diamond and require the qualifier immediately before or after the word diamond in equal or greater prominence. Laboratory-grown, laboratory-created, a maker-created form and synthetic are acceptable there. Cultured is not. It is close enough to IS 19469:2025 that one disciplined disclosure line serves both markets, and different enough that you should read both.