CIBJO is sometimes treated as though it were an independent international regulator of diamonds. It is not. CIBJO describes itself as the organization representing the jewellery industry from “mine to marketplace,” and its standards are voluntary industry standards.
That distinction matters in the debate over laboratory-grown diamonds.
The Natural Diamond Council—today The Diamond Collective—is itself a voting CIBJO member. De Beers executives have also occupied important positions inside CIBJO dealing with issues directly affecting the competition between mined and laboratory-grown diamonds.
A De Beers Consumer & Brands executive chaired CIBJO's Laboratory-Grown Diamond Committee. A senior De Beers executive chaired CIBJO's committee developing responsible-sourcing and sustainability terminology, while another De Beers sustainability executive served as committee lead. De Beers has also sponsored CIBJO's annual Congress.
CIBJO has simultaneously provided a forum for the natural-diamond industry to discuss how to stimulate consumer demand. It organized a session explicitly titled “Cultivating Demand for Natural Diamonds: How to Do It & Who Should Pay,” featuring senior representatives of De Beers and the Natural Diamond Council. More recently, CIBJO has hosted discussions about industry-wide strategies for strengthening natural diamonds.
This context is particularly important following CIBJO's 2026 decision to recommend that “synthetic” become the sole international descriptor for laboratory-grown diamonds—even though laboratory-grown diamonds have the same chemical composition, physical properties and crystal structure as mined diamonds and even though terms such as “laboratory-grown” remain legally accepted in markets including the United States.
CIBJO's Diamond Commission has gone further, advocating removal of “laboratory-grown” and “laboratory-created” from its preferred terminology and proposing that CIBJO explore restricting use of the familiar 4Cs grading framework to natural diamonds.
CIBJO is an industry organization whose membership, committees and policy discussions include—and in important instances have been led by—companies and organizations with substantial commercial interests in natural diamonds.
Its pronouncements concerning the terminology that competitors to natural diamonds should be permitted to use should therefore be understood for what they are: industry standards developed within an industry organization, not regulations issued by an independent government authority.