Gloucestershire entrepreneur Dale Vince and Skydiamond embroiled in ad storm

The founder of Gloucestershire-based renewable energy firm Ecotricity Dale Vince and his Sky Mining Company, trading as Skydiamond, is now at the centre of a controversy over descriptions about the manufactured gem stones.

Adverts for the firm's diamonds in the press and Instagram, as well as on the company website, have been banned for misleading consumers by not making it clear they are synthetic.

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Vince however, via a string of X (formerly Twitter) posts, is seemingly fighting back.

A ruling from the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) stated that the ads "must not appear again in the form complained about" after it looked into the complaint from the Natural Diamond Council.

The latter (Natural Diamond Council) understood the products were lab-created diamonds and challenged whether the claims 'Skydiamonds', 'diamonds', 'real diamonds' and 'diamonds made entirely from the sky' in the ads were misleading.

But Skydiamond told the ASA that it believed that the ads made clear that their diamonds were not mined from the earth and as such were "not naturally occurring diamonds, referred to as natural diamonds".

Entrepreneur Vince turned to making diamonds 'out of the sky' several years ago and he says relentless research and development has culminated in the creation of scientifically proven carbon-negative diamonds.

The company's patented technology, according to the website, fuses carbon captured from the atmosphere with harvested rainwater.

This is then heated and pressurised in a process powered by solar and wind power provided by sister company, Ecotricity – fully measurable negative emissions achieved by design, instead of unreliable offsetting.

According to Vince, other manufacturers of lab-grown diamonds use gasses taken from industrial processes – ultimately from fossil fuels, while his company takes something we have too much of, atmospheric carbon, and turns it into something nice to have – diamonds.

Skydiamond said that if it was accepted that consumers would understand from their ads that Skydiamonds were produced or sourced in a different way from those minded from the earth then it must therefore be the case that they would understand that Skydiamonds were manufactured.

This was because there were only two categories of diamond which existed - land-mined diamonds and manufactured diamonds.

On a social media post on X, Vince said on Wednesday (April 10): "We’re challenging the use of the word ‘natural’ to describe diamonds mined from the earth - we think it’s misleading. The word suggests harmless and in harmony with nature - it’s anything but that."

He also posted about De Beers, describing them as "guys that mine the Earth for diamonds" and who "like to call their stones 'natural'."

"They never talk about the process, the way they produce their stones. It’s not just social harm (blood diamonds) but environmental harm. And it’s big," he wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

The ASA said it considered that ads for synthetic diamonds "needed to make clear the nature of the product in order to avoid misleading consumers".

"We understood that Skydiamond’s production process, which involved using carbon captured from the atmosphere, was different from other synthetic diamonds.

"Nonetheless, because their diamonds were synthetic, we considered that this was material information consumers needed before making a transactional decision.

It said it told the company not to misleadingly use the terms “diamonds”, “diamonds made entirely from the sky” and “Skydiamond” to describe their synthetic diamonds in isolation without a clear and prominent qualifier, such as “synthetic”, “laboratory-grown” or “laboratory-created”, or another way of clearly and prominently conveying the same meaning to consumers.

"We also told them not to use the claim “real diamonds” to describe synthetic diamonds."