Week 3, 2026

New listings dropped 25% week on week, from 752,000 to 561,760, the lowest weekly intake across the three weeks I've been tracking 2026. That alone would be notable. But pair it with off-market departures surging 33% to 432,612, and you have a week where the supply tap turned down and the exit door swung wider simultaneously. Active inventory still grew to a record 9.74 million stones, carried by the momentum of prior weeks, but the net flow is clearly tightening. Watch that gap between new arrivals and departures carefully.

The price-per-carat story is quietly interesting. The median hit $1,459.81, a record high across the three weeks of data, even as the median transaction price slipped to $1,230.63, its lowest point in the same window. Those two moving in opposite directions tells you the mix is shifting. More stones per carat are fetching more, but the stones actually changing hands are skewing toward smaller or lower-ticket inventory. Lab-grown share crept up again to 60.6%, its third consecutive weekly high, and the per-carat gap between natural ($2,270.59) and lab-grown ($910.71) widened considerably after lab-grown per-carat pricing fell 22% week on week. Natural stones saw their own per-carat median drop 10% despite a headline price rise, which suggests the mix of naturals being listed this week leaned toward larger, lower-colour stones rather than premium goods.

Shape pricing was volatile in a way that warrants a little caution before reading too much into it. The "other" category doubled in median price to $2,182.50, but with only 2,662 new listings, that's a thin sample and a handful of premium additions can move the number substantially. Marquise and radiant both posted solid gains of around 17%, to $1,195 and $1,330 respectively, on meaningful volumes. Asscher was the week's sharpest mover in the other direction, falling 47% to $1,407.16, which again looks like a compositional shift rather than a market collapse. One week of Asscher data rarely tells a clean story. Oval was softer too, down 9% to $1,183, on the week's second-highest new-listing volume of 123,041, so that reading carries more weight.

Rounds remain dominant by volume. 206,081 new round listings this week, 36.7% of all new supply, with a median price of $1,011. The concentration at the top of supply is notable too: the five most active retailers accounted for 69.5% of all new listings, which means the broader long tail of the market contributed very little fresh stock this week. Cross-retailer overlap edged up to 34.8%, a record for this young dataset, meaning slightly more of the market is the same stone listed in multiple places. The spread on those shared stones actually narrowed a fraction to 63.3%, its lowest point in three weeks, though "lowest" is relative when the gap between cheapest and dearest listing for the same stone still sits above 63%.

The most expensive stone listed this week was a 9.88ct D IF natural pear at $807,943. The largest was a 50.34ct lab-grown H VS2 round at $94,990, which works out to under $1,900 per carat and is a striking illustration of just how far lab-grown pricing has compressed at scale. Going into week four, the key question is whether new listings continue to fall or whether this week was simply the post-holiday exhale that follows a big restock period in week one. If off-market volumes stay elevated while supply stays constrained, the total active count could plateau or even dip. That would be the first genuinely meaningful supply signal of the year.

Lucy Market Index

Ten numbers I record every snapshot.

Versus Week 2, 2026

Biggest shape movers

Recent trends

How metrics are tracking across the recent window of snapshots.

How the Lucy Market Index has moved

By origin

Top shapes by new listings

Notable stones

Each stone links to its full Carat Hunter listing.