De Beers Shutting Down Lightbox, Its Lab-Grown Diamond Business

By Rob Bates | May 08, 2025

Seven years after its introduction sent shock waves through the industry, De Beers is closing the Lightbox lab-grown diamond business.

As part of the closure process, De Beers will sell certain assets, including inventory.

At press time, Lightbox’s site was still up, but De Beers CEO Al Cook tells JCK it will cease functioning within the coming months.

At JCK Las Vegas last year, Cook announced that De Beers would no longer produce diamonds for Lightbox and that its Portland, Ore., factory—originally meant for Lightbox—would instead grow industrial stones for De Beers’ tech-oriented subsidiary, Element Six.

At the time, Cook was noncommittal about Lightbox’s future. But a few months later, De Beers relaunched the brand, after dropping its entry-level price point to $500 a carat.

Cook says De Beers ultimately decided it made no sense to continue.

“Over the last year, the price of lab-grown has continued to fall sharply,” he says. “We have now gotten to the point where you can buy lab-grown in supermarkets for $200. Our decision was to proactively simplify the business rather than hang on to parts of the business that were no longer core.”

He says that by turning over the Portland plant to Element Six, “we ended up with the world’s best facility for creating technology diamonds, in the right place and the right country.”

A company statement said that Lightbox’s “closure will enable De Beers Group to reallocate investment to initiatives focused on reinvigorating desire for natural diamonds through category marketing.”

According to its most recent financial statements, Lightbox lost $101.3 million in 2023, up from a $22.3 million loss in 2022. Cook says the increase was likely related to the factory’s construction.

He views De Beers’ foray into lab-grown as largely successful.

“If you look at the effect Lightbox had on lab-grown diamond prices, I would argue it was the first successful attempt to demonstrate the difference between lab-grown and natural,” says Cook. “Up to that point, lab-grown was priced off of natural. In that time, LGD prices have fallen over 90%. If you went back to 2018 and you asked my predecessors what they hoped to achieve, I think they would say it achieved what they thought it would.”

Cook adds, “There is still a really important role for De Beers to play in pointing out the differences between lab-grown and natural,” noting its release of the DiamondProof detection device last year.

When Lightbox was established in 2018, at a then-shocking $800-a-carat price point, De Beers was one of the few companies capable of producing lab-grown at scale.

Executives said they wanted to create a consumer brand that would position lab-grown as a fashion (rather than engagement) product. But critics were concerned it “legitimized” a product still in its infancy, and De Beers never seemed sure whether it wanted Lightbox to be a true business or simply a way to disrupt a newcomer that had disrupted it.

Over the years, Lightbox seemed to attract more interest from the trade than consumers, as the lab-grown business veered toward unbranded bridal product.

In 2023, it briefly tested engagement rings, but quickly retreated after an industry uproar.

One person involved in Lightbox planning tells JCK they weren’t shocked at the closure.

“With talk of De Beers being sold, this makes perfect sense,” this person says. “You may ultimately see Element Six breaking away from De Beers, because a true diamond player interested in De Beers doesn’t necessarily want Element Six and someone interested in the industrial capabilities of E6 may not want to get into the jewelry business.”

Top: a Lightbox pop-up store (photo courtesy of Lightbox)