If you have read this year that champagne diamonds are having a moment, the moment has a start date. In June 2025, National Jeweler reported that De Beers was launching a marketing programme built on cream, champagne and brown diamonds — its first "beacon" campaign in sixteen years, the last being Everlon in 2009. The stones got a new collective name, desert diamonds, and a year later that name is on engagement-ring counters across the United States.
This piece is about what a year of that campaign has and has not changed, because the two are different.
What De Beers is promoting
The pitch is a differentiation play against lab-grown stones. De Beers chief executive Al Cook told National Jeweler that such a diamond's "color will be unique, and its origin will be unique", set against what he described as commoditised lab-grown material.
By October 2025 the campaign had a US launch, and JCK's Rob Bates asked the obvious question — whether a warm-tone campaign was a way to move brown inventory. De Beers' answer was direct: "We're not asking them to buy a bunch of browns." JCK also reported the company preferring "soft whites" to "off-white", and research suggesting most consumers did not know coloured diamonds existed at all. That last finding is probably the most important line in the coverage: the campaign is mostly introducing the category to people who had never considered it.
In April 2026 the programme moved into bridal. National Jeweler reported a push De Beers estimated would reach 25 million American consumers, with a long list of participating designers and retailers.
What the results say, and what they measure
De Beers publishes its own case study on the campaign. It reports purchase intent "more than doubled, increasing from 9.4% to 20.8%", searches for coloured diamonds up 19% in the final quarter of 2025, and sales among participating independent retailers up 16% in value.
One reading note. The page describes the stones as "warm, earthy desert tones" and reports its figures for coloured diamonds as a category — which also covers yellows, pinks and blues. They are evidence that the category is getting attention. They are not brown-diamond numbers, and the page does not present them as such.
Rapaport Magazine, in December 2025, reported that some categories had "leapt by up to 40% in the past five years", quoting Lisa Levinson of the Natural Diamond Council, and a Scottish goldsmith describing roughly 75% increases on higher-quality champagne and cognac stones. Those are on-the-record estimates from people in the trade, and Rapaport presents them as estimates rather than a price series.
What the listings say
We cannot audit a five-year trend, because we have only been indexing these stones since 2026. What we can do is say what the market looks like today, across every listing we can verify against its GIA report.
What our index shows, 4 September 2026
Across 2,373 verified stones, the more visibly brown a diamond is, the less it costs per carat. Comparing like sizes: at 0.90–1.10 ct, Faint Brown stones run a median $1,551 per carat and Fancy Brown $1,052, a 32% discount. At 1.20–1.60 ct the gap is 46%. At 1.70–2.30 ct, 22%. At 2.40–3.50 ct, 34%. The discount holds in every size band we have enough stones to measure.
It is not a clarity artefact: median clarity is VS2 for both groups.
And both groups sit well below near-colourless. Across the index, a champagne stone is typically priced about 44% under a similar near-colourless (G–H) diamond, the lower-quartile champagne discount shown on every card and explained on our Prices page.
What that means if you are buying
For a buyer, this is the useful version of the story. The campaign has done what campaigns do: more people now know these stones exist, and more retailers stock them and talk about them. What it has not yet done is move the price. A Fancy Brown stone still sells at a discount to a barely-tinted one, and a barely-tinted one still sells at a discount to a white diamond.
If the programme keeps working, that gap may narrow — a category that 25 million people are being introduced to does not stay overlooked forever. Today it is open, and you can see exactly how open on the Fancy Brown and Faint Brown pages, with every stone's price at every retailer that lists it.