How our pricing works: why the same diamond costs less here

The same stone, priced without four sets of hands on it

A diamond on a high-street counter has usually been owned four times before you see it. A grower or a miner sells to a wholesaler. The wholesaler sells to a distributor. The distributor sells to a retail group. The retail group puts it in a window on a street where the rent is a five-figure monthly line item.

Every one of those transfers is a business that has to make money, and every one of them adds a margin to the same unchanged stone. By the time it reaches you it has done nothing but change hands, and it costs several times what it cost at the start.

We buy certified stones directly, cut and set them in Hatton Garden, and sell them to you. That is the whole model. The everyday price is what is left when you take most of the middle out — and when we run a sale, it is on top of that, not instead of it.

What that looks like on a real piece

Here is a specification we sell regularly, priced against the high street. Two carat oval, E colour, VS1 clarity, set in platinum. Identical grades on the report in every column.

Look at the lab-grown row for a moment. The high street sells the same grown stone for nearly three times what we do, and it is the same stone — grown in the same kind of reactor, graded by the same laboratories, indistinguishable to a gemologist without machine testing. Nothing about that £3,200 gap is quality. All of it is who else got paid.

Natural or grown — the honest version

A lab-grown diamond is a diamond. Same carbon lattice, same hardness of 10 on the Mohs scale, same refractive index, same fire. A trained gemologist cannot tell them apart by eye; it takes equipment that reads the growth pattern.

What differs is origin and scarcity. Natural stones took a billion years and have to be found. Grown stones take weeks and can be made to order. That is the entire basis of the price difference, and anyone who tells you a grown stone is "not a real diamond" is describing a business model, not a mineral. The longer version is in our guide to lab-grown versus natural diamonds.

What you are actually paying for

Three things, and nothing else.

1. The stone. Priced on its four grades, verifiable against the IGI or GIA report whose number is printed on the product page.
2. The metal. 18ct gold or 950 platinum, weighed, assayed and hallmarked by the Assay Office London.
3. The work. Casting, mounting, setting, finishing — the hours at the bench that decide whether the ring survives twenty years.

What is not in the price: a Regent Street lease, four intermediaries, a commission structure, or a marketing budget that needs recovering from you.

Buy it to be worn

The best reason to buy a diamond is the one people actually buy them for: someone is going to wear it every day for the next forty years, and look down at it several thousand times a year without ever really meaning to.

That is what the money is for. Spend it on the stone that gets looked at, the metal that survives being knocked against door handles, and the setting that holds it all together — and spend as little as possible on anything that is not one of those three things. That is the whole of our pricing philosophy, and it is why the numbers above look the way they do.

How to check us

Do not take the comparison above on faith. Take the certificate number off any product page, look the stone up on the laboratory's own database, then price those exact four grades at three other retailers. That is the only comparison that means anything — and if we are ever not the better answer on a like-for-like stone, we would rather you found out before you bought than after.

We will also do it with you. Send a screenshot of anything you have seen elsewhere and we will tell you what it is, what it should cost, and whether we can make it. Usually inside the hour on a weekday — contact us.

Sales, promotions, and the everyday price

We do run sales. A promotion is a promotion — it does not mean the everyday price was fake, and it does not mean the supply-chain point above stops applying. The useful check is still the same: match four grades on the certificate, then compare.

Prices also move when the diamond market moves. See what is ready to ship, or read how we hold over two thousand stones in London so the spec you want is usually already here.