First a spoiler alert. After buying diamonds from two web sites, my girlfriend decided that she would rather have me pay for summer trip to Europe than have the diamond ring of her dreams. I love that she is like that, but in the process of getting to that decision I spent about two weeks researching mined and lab-created diamonds, comparing multiple sites using RareCaret and BlueNile (mined) to CleanOrigin, Brillant Earth, Diamond Foundry, 1215 Diamonds, and MiaDonna (lab diamonds). Below is what I learned.

You can save over 50% on lab-created diamonds and it is the exact same thing chemically and probably better ethically - it was a no brainer for me and my girlfriend agreed. Clean Origin and Brilliant Earth had the best pricing ($3,300 to $4,000 per carat in the H / VS2 - VVS2 / ideal cut quality range at 1.25 to 1.7 carats). We bought diamonds from CleanOrigin and Brilliant Earth and found the process and customer service with CleanOrigin to be far superior. We bought two diamonds from Clean Origin and got them next day from. The stones from Clean Origin were perfect (a 1.7 carat H quality VVS2 stone and a 1.4 carat H quality VS1 stone). My girlfriend loved them both and they were visually flawless, same as anything we saw in stores (IDC, Tiffany, etc.). As I noted above, we decided to return both of them and that process was super simple. We were sent a return label, I took it to FedEx with the diamonds, popped them in a new box, and off they went at no cost to me.

I tried to get two stones from Brilliant Earth and they said they would not send me two stones claiming it was better for the environment. That is kind of BS. It is more likely because they don't want to take the inventory risk and/or pay for the shipping costs, both of which I don't mind but think it is silly that they are lying about it. After not having their stone shipped for a week, I just cancelled the order. My guess is that their diamonds are the same quality, but I was just turned off by the customer service experience.

Hope this helps you in your process. My girlfriend loved that I involved her in the process and that we got to learn together about such an interesting industry. It really helped in our decision making process to do it together.