Every moissanite in every piece of jewellery on earth was grown in a laboratory. Not most of them. All of them.
That sounds like a confession and it is not. There is simply no other source, and understanding why makes the rest of it clear.
Why there is no mined moissanite
Henri Moissan found the mineral in 1893, in a meteorite crater in Arizona. He thought at first he had found diamonds. It took him eleven years to establish that the crystals were silicon carbide.
Natural moissanite does exist. It turns up in some meteorites and in a few rare rock formations. But it occurs as grains, generally smaller than a grain of sand, and nowhere near the size or quality needed to cut a gemstone. Nobody is mining moissanite, because there is nothing to mine.
So when a listing says lab grown moissanite, it is not distinguishing that stone from a mined alternative. There is no mined alternative. It is simply describing what moissanite is.
How the crystal is grown
Silicon carbide is grown by sublimation, usually a method called physical vapour transport.
Silicon carbide powder is placed at the bottom of a sealed graphite crucible with a small seed crystal at the top. The crucible is heated past 2,000 degrees Celsius in an inert atmosphere, usually argon. At that temperature the powder does not melt into a liquid. It passes straight from solid to vapour.
The top of the crucible is held slightly cooler than the bottom. The vapour travels up that temperature gradient and deposits onto the seed, layer by layer, rebuilding the same crystal structure. A usable boule takes days to weeks to grow.
It is slow and it is energy-hungry, which is a large part of why moissanite is not as cheap as glass or cubic zirconia. It is also why quality varies: growth faults, strain and faint colour all trace back to how carefully the boule was grown.
From boule to stone
The grown crystal is cut into slices, then into pieces, then faceted. This is where a great deal of the final quality is decided.
Moissanite is hard, 9.25 on the Mohs scale, which makes it slow and expensive to cut well. It is also doubly refractive, so the cutter has to orient the stone correctly against the optic axis or the finished gem looks blurred at the edges.
A well cut moissanite returns light evenly across the face. A poorly cut one has dead patches, or throws so much colour that it reads as glassy rather than bright. Two stones of identical size and identical grade can look quite different, and the difference is almost always the cutting.
Does lab grown mean lower quality?
No, and the question usually carries an assumption worth naming.
Lab grown diamond is chemically identical to mined diamond, and the distinction there is about origin. Moissanite is a different case entirely: it is not an imitation of anything and it has no mined counterpart to be compared against. It is its own stone, made the only way it can be made.
On the measurements it does well. Hardness 9.25, second only to diamond among stones used in jewellery. Refractive index 2.65 to 2.69 against diamond at 2.42, so it returns more light. Dispersion 0.104 against 0.044, so it throws two and a half times the fire.
What this means when you buy
Since all moissanite is grown, the useful questions are not about origin. They are about the stone in front of you and the metal holding it.
- Ask for the size in millimetres. Moissanite is lighter than diamond, so carat weight quietly misleads
- Ask what the setting metal is. That is what tarnishes and wears, not the stone
- Treat colour and clarity grades as the seller's own description, since no recognised laboratory grades moissanite
- Look at the stone in daylight if you can. Cut quality shows there and nowhere else
What we sell
Our moissanite necklaces and pendants are set in 925 sterling silver beneath a gold-tone finish. The stones are lab grown, because all moissanite is. What our supplier states about materials we pass on exactly as given, and what we have not tested ourselves we do not present as proven.