Taylor Swift’s vintage ring: diamond market stress and supply notes for miners
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell
First reported on MINING.com
30 Second Briefing
Taylor Swift’s engagement ring, featuring an estimated 7–10 carat antique Old Mine Cut natural diamond in hand‑engraved yellow gold by New York jeweller Kindred Lubeck, has triggered a surge of interest in vintage and fancy‑cut stones just as the natural diamond sector faces deep structural stress. Lab‑grown diamonds now make up over half of US engagement rings, with one‑carat solitaires retailing for about $150 at Walmart and price gaps to natural stones reaching 90%, driving Debswana output cuts of up to 40% and leaving De Beers with roughly $2 billion in unsold inventory. Producers and governments, including Botswana and Angola via the Luanda Accord’s 1% revenue marketing pledge, are pivoting messaging toward rarity, provenance and heritage cuts as a differentiator from mass‑produced lab‑grown supply.
Technical Brief
- Debswana’s production in Botswana was slashed by an estimated 40% during 2025 to manage oversupply.
- De Beers is holding about $2 billion in unsold rough, after >10% price cuts in 2023.
- Anglo American is actively divesting De Beers while pursuing a merger with Teck Resources in Canada.
- Russia’s Alrosa recorded profit falls of nearly 80%, temporarily suspending operations at key mining sites.
- Several smaller diamond miners have entered administration or fully closed mines as revenues collapsed.
- Under the Luanda Accord, producer states including Botswana and Angola must allocate 1% of diamond revenues to marketing.
Our Take
Lab-grown diamonds feature in only a small subset of the 579 Mining stories in our database, signalling that the kind of retail price compression seen at Walmart’s $150 one‑carat level is still relatively new territory for upstream miners such as De Beers and Debswana to navigate.
With lab-grown stones now taking more than 50% of the US engagement ring market and price gaps to natural diamonds reportedly reaching 90%, high-cost producers in Botswana, Russia and Angola are likely to feel sharper pressure to rationalise output or differentiate on provenance and branding rather than volume.
The Luanda Accord’s plan to devote 1% of annual diamond revenues to global marketing suggests African producers are moving towards a coordinated response similar to historic De Beers campaigns, but this time with a stronger focus on countering lab-grown competition and reinforcing natural-diamond narratives in key markets like the USA, China and Europe.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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