Every stone starts the same way an emerald, sapphire, or ruby always has: as a set of geological conditions replicated in a controlled environment instead of being waited out over millions of years underground.

Lapidelle partners with an independent lab-grown gemstone manufacturer out of Wenzhou, China. For emeralds, they use hydrothermal growth. The process mimics exactly what happens in the earth when emeralds form: beryllium, aluminum, and silica dissolve in a mineral-rich solution under intense heat and pressure, then slowly crystallize around a seed of natural or lab-grown beryl over the course of weeks to months. What comes out the other end is chemically identical to a mined emerald. a technical level, it’s the same beryl structure, same refractive index, same hardness, just grown in a lab instead of pulled from rock.

Lapidelle’s sapphires and rubies go through a slightly different process called flux growth, which uses a molten flux instead of water to dissolve the raw corundum materials before they crystallize. It's slower and more expensive than some of the faster lab-growing methods on the market, but it produces stones with better color saturation and fewer of the (sometimes “telltale”) growth lines that cheaper methods leave behind. The ones that make it get faceted by hand, then sent out for independent certification through IGS, GRC, or AGL, depending on the stone.

Another benefit of building with lab-grown is that it gives you the same stone without the parts of mining that are hard to verify (labor conditions, land impact, etc.) You're getting the identical mineral at a price that best reflects what it costs to grow it.