Earlier this summer, my colleague Eleanor Olcott traveled to a city in the central Chinese province of Hernan.

We're in one of the jewelry markets in Janzhou.

This is a building dedicated to jewelry sales.

This market's name in English translates to more gold, more silver.

But as Eleanor walks around this eight-story building, diamonds are the main thing catching her eye.

Stahl after stall glitters with them.

You can see here there's lots of women trying on the shiny diamond earrings, which to the

naked eye, they look exactly the same as their natural counterpart.

These earrings she's talking about here aren't made with natural diamonds, you know, the kind

dug out from the earth.

These are created in a lab, and recently their popularity has exploded.

We spoke into a couple of the shopkeepers who have been here for two to three years

and say that people are becoming more and more accustomed to the concept of library diamonds.

The shopkeepers telling Eleanor that there used to be a lot of natural diamond stores in this market.

But many had to close because of bad sales.

Or they had to switch to selling these synthetic lab grown stones instead.

It was so clear that there was just like an abundant supply of diamonds.

You know, you'd ask the sellers to have a look at the diamonds

and they just bring out this like tray after tray after tray

just all jiggling with glistening stones.

And it's a very different experience to going to these more traditional diamond retailers

where they're all, you know, each diamond is carefully packaged in a box, and they're

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