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FTC Warns LGD Manufacturers, DPA welcomes! The DPA welcomes the FTC’s warning to synthetic diamond manufacturers (LGD) against misleading consumers with their marketing tactics. This warning is an important step toward transparency and consumer protection. It is now crystal clear that synthetic diamond manufacturers cannot use the word diamond without qualifying it with an unambiguous descriptor about the manufactured origin immediately before the word diamond.  It is also clear that the FTC will not tolerate unsubstantiated claims about the environmental impact of synthetic diamonds that violate the FTC’s Green Guides. This FTC clarification comes after several months of DPA expressing serious concerns about the deceptive marketing practices by synthetic diamond manufacturers, especially as the market value gap between natural diamonds and synthetic diamonds keeps growing.  We are hopeful that it will create more discipline and transparency in the...

Changed GIA LGD report to fall into US FTC line! The World Federation of Diamond Bourses (WFDB) has welcomed overall the changes by the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) to its reports for lab-grown diamonds. The GIA said its reports will be changed to come into line with revisions to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Jewelry Guides announced last year. As of July 1, the GIA will discontinue the GIA Synthetic Diamond Grading Report and introduce, instead, the GIA Laboratory-Grown Diamond Report. WFDB President Ernie Blom said he was pleased that although the reports will include the standard GIA color, clarity and cut grading scales for reference purposes, they will continue to use Colorless, Near Colorless, Faint, Very Faint and Faint to report the color grades for laboratory-grown diamonds, rather than the letters used to report the color grades used for diamonds. "In addition, we are happy to see that the reports will continue to use Flawless, In...

CIBJO releases Ethics Commission Special Report, Focuses on impact and implications of revised FTC Guides With fewer than five weeks to go to the opening of the 2018 CIBJO Congress in Bogotá, Colombia, on October 15, 2018, the fifth of the CIBJO commissions' Special Reports has been released. Prepared by the CIBJO Ethics Commission, headed by Tiffany C. Stevens, the report focuses exclusively on the newly revised Guides for the Jewelry, Precious Metals, and Pewter Industries, released in July by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. The report is co-authored by Ms. Stevens and Sara E. Yood. Addressing comments that had been heard in the jewellery industry that the FTC Guides seem to disregard harmonisation efforts made by the international trade, Ms. Stevens and Ms. Yood note that the primary focus of the American agency is somewhat different. "The FTC tries to harmonise its guidance with international standards when possible, but it must base its guidance on ...