I proposed to Popular Science assistant editor Sarah Fecht last year, and I was lucky enough that she said yes! The experience of buying her engagement ring revealed to me just how high-tech jewelry has become in the past decade.

The diamond in her ring is a lab-grown jewel, and virtually identical to its natural counterparts. "Even a trained jeweler cannot tell them apart with the naked eye or jeweler's loupe," says jeweler Ariel Baruch at American Grown Diamonds, the New York company that I bought Sarah's ring from.

The companies that make synthetic diamonds pitch them as an ethical, conflict-free, and frequently cheaper alternative to diamonds produced the old-fashioned way—letting the Earth's mantle provide the pressure and temperature over time, and mining the results. But some jewelry experts have pushed back against these points, arguing ethical diamond mining can boost local economies and that synthetic diamonds are not that much cheaper. Regardless, the production of synthetic diamonds is a major scientific feat that's only become available in the past 60-some years.