Pune’s jewellery counters are telling a two-part story this season, and Mirror Now’s reporting from the city’s showrooms captures both halves. The wedding season has begun alongside the festivals, footfall is strong, and shoppers are being unusually strategic about where each rupee goes.
The headline shift is toward lab-grown diamonds. Mirror Now found Pune buyers treating lab-grown stones as jewellery to wear every day rather than a treasure to lock away, helped by prices that start far below natural stones: a one-carat lab-grown stone can be found for as little as Rs 10,000, as Undri resident Sneha Mathews noted while planning new diamond studs and repurposing gold she already owns. Retailers are feeling it. Zen Diamond India reported Dussehra sales up 30% on last year, Limelight Lab Grown Diamonds said its sales had tripled year on year, and Aura Jewels reported plain gold sales more than tripling over the previous year. Those are the retailers’ own reported figures, carried here as the trade’s mood rather than audited fact.
Gold itself is being bought on the dips. Fatima Nagar shopper Nalini Dave told Mirror Now she had begun securing wedding jewellery because the recent decline in gold prices made it a strategic time to buy. PNG Jewellers’ CMD Saurabh Gadgil pointed to festive and wedding buying running together with bullion interest still high, and jewellers broadly projected season growth of 20 to 25%.
One honest word from Suwarna: a lab-grown diamond is chemically a real diamond, but it is a different purchase from a natural stone, with a different price and a different resale story, so compare it on those terms.
Buyer takeaway: If lab-grown tempts you, ask for the per-carat price and the buyback terms in writing before you pay, and if it is gold you are after, do what Pune’s wedding shoppers are doing and use the price dips rather than the festival rush. Today’s Pune rate is on our Pune page.
Source: Mirror Now (Pune News), 26 Oct 2026
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