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Random diamond story! As a freshman in college, I took a geology class and our teacher asked all of the women in our class to raise their hand if they would rather have natural or human-made diamonds. Most of the women (over 80%) raised their hands for natural. The reasons they gave all seemed to tie back to branding and natural diamonds being “real.”

Then our teacher gave another analogy. He asked if people would rather have natural ice or human-made ice in their water. He broke down that the human-made ice could be frozen in a freezer to a custom size/shape, be a lot cleaner, consistent in how you make it, and chemically no different than H20 than naturally occurring frozen water. As you looked around the lecture hall, you started to see people’s brains unlock. He went on to explain cost efficiencies, ethics, challenges with conflict diamonds, and how you could make a perfect diamond at a fraction of the coast.

After a 30 minute lecture, he asked the question again. Surprisingly, the majority of the women still wanted natural diamonds although the number was less than the original amount that raised their hand. That was the point where I realized the strength of diamonds product branding.

39 comments

I went through this not that many years ago buying a ring for my SO. My biggest mistake was including her in the decision.

She described what she wanted exactly– nothing gaudy or ostentatious, just a singular, tasteful stone on a plain band. Couldn't be simpler, could it?

Finding stones that met her criteria was easy. Some were natural diamonds, some lab grown, many moissanite. From the outset, she said the meaning of the ring was what was most important and that she didn't want to pick it out herself (after effectively picking it out herself). We'd talked about moissanite a lot over the years, and she'd approved of the idea, and the same with lab grown diamonds. We're college educated adults with backgrounds in the sciences, so we weren't on uneven footing with comprehension.

When I showed her what I'd picked out, it quickly devolved into a lot of uncharacteristic tears and shouting. It took a few more tries, and then she explained. Apparently a lab grown diamond meant my love for her was also artificial, a budgeted ersatz stand-in for the real thing, and me saying we could spend more on a larger stone or matching set further belied my ignorance. No, she wanted me to have picked out an allegory for our love: a "perfect" diamond. She then sent me the details of the stone she actually wanted.

After a little "wait, where's this coming from and why did you let me spend weeks searching if there was only one right answer", I ended up spending twice our decided budget on a "natural" diamond with the same characteristics as the lab grown (except the diamond's clarity was lower, because lab grown clarity is always perfect), which wasn't any object, but now the ring is marred by the memories of arguments, and she doesn't really love it. Lesson learned.

I don't know what kind of spell the diamond people cast on otherwise reasonable women to make them able to reduce the totality of a life and experiences shared together into a single crystalline bet, but they need to package it and sell it to the military.

>I don't know what kind of spell the diamond people cast on otherwise reasonable women to make them able to reduce the totality of a life and experiences shared together into a single crystalline bet, but they need to package it and sell it to the military.

The militaries of the world invented it, it's business that bought it. Much of this diamond/marriage symbolism stems back to the late 1940s post WWII with DaBeer's engagement ring ad campaigns.

WWII involved a lot of R&D in psyops and effects of propoganda. Sure, these strategies always existed but it became part of scientific research, was refined and weaponized to manipulate perceptions of people using non-kinetic approaches to try and avoid or minimize kinetic warfare. After the war in the mid 40s ended, where do you think all that expertise in propoganda from military went? Business marketing and advertising sprouted from much of this expertise. Marketing and advertising always existed before then but there was a dramatic shift in how things were sold creating armies of refined snake oil salesmen.

In the late 40s, DaBeers ran a massive ad campaign employing such propoganda that shifted culture into associating diamond rings with marriage. There had been dowries and other exchanges of wealth and power in marriages before (it's often been a basis for marriage) that but DaBeers managed to shift that in culture in the west to the diamond ring. It's now so deeply ingrained in culture and people's perceptions that it can make otherwise rational people irrational.

Do not ever underestimate the power of propoganda in its various forms. Pyschogical manipulation runs rampant in business marketing and these are the effects. We've culturally accepted it for a variety of reasons. I question if we should continue to accept these practices in business.

I brought my now-spouse along for ring shopping, on her own theory that she'd be wearing the thing and should therefore have some input. She was actually more opposed to mined diamonds than I was at the time. We talked about this extensively, and considered both lab gems and corundum gems (ruby/sapphire).

We went through over a dozen jewelry stores, each of them pushing mined diamonds so hard that it angered us. The eventual solution wasn't even that we found an amenable jewelry store. We ended up obtaining a ring via a private transfer from a family member. While the ring contains a mined diamond, it has quite a bit of sentimental value and didn't really put price pressure on the public market. It was a good solution for us, but obviously not scalable!

I would have immediately ended it right there, but that's probably why I'm single. Every time I was in a relationship long enough to discuss marriage, I made it clear that there is no way I would ever buy a diamond. Only one was actively on board with it, because she liked the idea of picking out an alternative gem.

Look at it as a proof of work. What matters is you burned a certain chunk of your life for her.

The spell is called herd mentality. People don't like to be losers, so women wear shiny stones and men drive cool cars. Both want to send the message "I'm not a loser". Appeal to science has no bearing on the herd opinion. Your gf was basically terrified that her friends would laugh at her lab grown diamond and her weak scientific arguments won't raise her ingroup status. Edit: I'd add a snarky observation that a diamond is essentially a notarized letter of "love" where the shop gets paid as the notary and your gf gets the proof of your deposit. The stone itself isn't worth much.

IMHO that she is looking really hard for allegories, symbols, representations, of your love is a really good sign for a successful marriage, one that will hopefully really, without doubt or question, last "for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, forsaking all others, 'tell death do you part". So when the two of you get old and wrinkled, not see or hear so well, have joint pains, the children have moved away and you don't see the grandchildren often enough, you will still have your love for each other that you celebrate with the diamond, the accomplishments of your lifetime together, the stability of your marriage, your home, big times at Thanksgiving, the Holidays, your wedding anniversary, your birthdays, the birthdays of the kids and their graduations, accomplishments, marriages, births and children, the friends you have made all along, the memories in your home, etc.

Again, IMHO, one of the biggest problems in life is solving the problem of being alone, and for nearly everyone the best solution is a really good marriage.

Here is a secret scorecard:

You give knowledge of yourselves to each other, that is, keep your spouse well informed on your thoughts and feelings.

You really care about each other.

You respect and respond to each other.

Neither of you tries to manipulate, fool, or exploit your spouse.

You can trust each other.

IMHO, it is good to do well on this scorecard.

I avoided this by discussing the size of the diamonds in dead slaves rather than carets. Once I realized it didn't bother her to consider the dead slaves, I knew the "natural" diamond was what she wanted, so that's what she got. She may have genuinely believed it when she said the size of the stones didn't matter, but you can't deny how good she felt when other women fawned over it and were jealous that her stones were bigger/shinier.

It's all about status signaling. The whole concept of the ring is a literal status symbol, signaling you're off the market. We can get upset about this particular status signal all we want, but it's not as if it's any less moral than any other status signal we participate in. That new phone was made by slaves. The car was built by raw materials mined in awful ways, possibly with slave labor. We can't go down this rabbit hole with everything in our life. I recommend making small nudges when we can in our own lives, but try not to get too worked up over any of them, it's not good for your mental health.

Married about 12 years (together 16). I bought my then future-wife a ring for $200. She didn't care it was small or that it was a tiny fraction of my salary - we both wore our rings for everyone else for a year or so... My personal do-over would be to have purchased an even cheaper ring (or none at all) so we could buy more useful things, and she would agree.

In any case, the spell doesn't work on everyone.

Depending on how long ago this happened, you may either already know this or have since worked through it but this was probably not really just about the ring.

I think the comments attacking your partner may be assuming that this "uncharacteristic tears and shouting" was some sort of irrational hysteria rather than the boiling-over of simmering problems.

Maybe I'm the one reading too far into it though.

It's mostly about the emotional attachment. If you find two identical pens, and one of them was used by a famous writer, you would expect a price difference.

There is no difference in the quality of those pens. They both work the same, and using the writer's pen will not make you a better writer by itself.

I personally would not buy a natural diamond because of the ethical issues, but I do understand the students who feel there is a difference.

I think the question might be a bit misleading. "Would you rather have X?" isn't the same as "Would you rather your spouse buys you X?". I'd prefer having a natural diamond too, for the same reason I'd prefer having a piece of ember with an insect that was trapped there naturally millions of years ago as opposed to a man-made one that was produced last month. By no means would I buy a natural diamond or support the mining system behind it, but there's no denying that I'd find it more interesting and somehow awe-inspiring.

I find it helps to remember that diamonds are a status symbol and a form of conspicuous consumption. People often want as much of that expensive, visible status and commitment signal as they can get.

Part of the significance of the gesture is the level of painful expense involved. So making the item much cheaper also cheapens the gesture.

The economics behind diamonds are better explained by an sociologist, not a geologist- the high cost and useless-ness of the gift are a feature not a bug! The burning of significant amount of wealth is a costly signal of commitment to the receiver. I heard from a friend who worked at a diamond company (and as such could purchase stones with significant discount to market price) that his fiancée had specifically rejected the idea of receiving a stone from his company on the grounds that it being 'discounted' devalued the gesture.

This might have been the wrong way to run this experiment.

The fact that the participants publicly shared their opinion, and then they would also publicly had to signal that they were wrong could simply be such a big psychological factor, that the topic at hand did not matter.

It would’ve been better to vote anonymously, or even better ask one class at the beginning and a different class at the end of the lecture, then share the statistics with both classes at the next lecture.

> That was the point where I realized the strength of diamonds product branding.

Here's another interesting twist that further shows how powerful branding and marketing really are: Spence Diamonds is a diamond retailer in Canada that advertises extremely aggressively via radio ads. A few years ago, it started a huge campaign for lab grown diamonds, portraying them with adjectives such as "artisan-made" (going as far as comparing them to Michelangelo art). And what do you know:

> While still offering mined diamonds, Spence has found that when its customers are given a choice, 80% of them choose lab-growns over mined diamonds[0]

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/pamdanziger/2019/05/12/spence-d...

Diamond branding taps into a much more fundamental obsession with scarcity, which manufactured objects cannot provide. Scott Galloway explores this really well in a recent post comparing NFTs to long-standing art world practices: "Scarcity has always been a function of bits, not atoms." [1]

I wonder if synthetic diamonds that were organized into specifically limited editions would hold more value...

[1] https://www.profgalloway.com/scarcity-cred/

Reminds me of when Jamie Oliver tried to convince kids that chicken nuggets were bad by showing them how nuggets are made. Even after showing disgust at the whole process, all of the kids still wanted to eat chicken nuggets at the end.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKwL5G5HbGA

I think it takes a lot more than logic to convince most people to change opinions - especially on matters of preference or taste.

> at a fraction of the cost

That might also be the reason. If something is cheaper, it feels inferior.

Also with diamonds it's probably a factor that the fiancé is expected to present serious intents with a deeper monetary investment. "Look honey, it's an ethical, clean diamond and only cost 1/20th of a dirty one" sad, but feels wrong.

Edit: I also remember a guy at dinner party bragging about buying a 5000EUR ring, it goes both ways.

Would you rather buy a Banksy NFT Or JPG of a Banksy they are the same image at a fraction of the cost?

This is great, I want to go back a decade and relive an argument I had about this with a co-worker who was ring shopping for his now wife.

I was trying to explain to him that diamonds are worthless, they have little resale value because they're not fungible, the rarity is being manipulated, and man made diamonds are indistinguishable without a special tool.

His position was that he can't get his fiance a "fake diamond" and I said just because it's man made doesn't mean that it isn't real. We went back and forth a bit, and started to get heated, and eventually I said "If I make a sandwich it doesn't mean it's not a real sandwich!" which made our other co-workers laugh hysterically and repeat for years. Ice would have made the point much better than a sandwich, but I suspect I wouldn't remember the story.

He should have explained about DeBeers. That would have brought the number of raised hands down.

The ice analogy is a bit faulty because no one is eating their diamonds and the impurities are technically advantageous (though most people want the shiny "perfect" diamond which are much easier to come about artificially).

You could make the same analogy with CGI vs. human-drawn imagery. Yes, you can draw much more precisely, and generates millions of copies of that precision, etc. with CGI. But, does a CGI rendering really have the same 'value' as seeing something drawn entirely by hand? I guess some would say 'yes' -- and I'd direct them to the factory-made diamond counter. Others, though, would value the _human_ involvement (not to discount the programmers who wrote the CGI software) -- even if that includes people toiling in mines.

It's not surprising that the 30 minute lecture didn't sway too many minds -- I think the professor didn't 'get it' in his/her own way. People aren't just buying collections of atoms (though they actually are).

As an alternative, let me share an observation.

People don't often change their minds right away. Specifically, there is a huge amount of neural reconfiguration which happens when we sleep, which is why we "sleep on it".

The interesting question, which is impossible to answer, is how those women felt about lab-grown diamonds by the time it was important. I'd guess that nearly all of them became more open to the idea, and that more changed their minds later than had revised their opinion immediately after the lecture.

Or that some people are small minded without insight of how their decision shape the world around them.

Be it diamonds, sports cars, etc doesnt matter.

> The reasons they gave all seemed to tie back to branding and natural diamonds being “real.”

Forced child labour used to extract natural diamonds in some parts of the world is also real.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_labour_in_the_diamond_in...

Aside:

Go to gem and mineral shows for jewelry.

They are very close to wholesale prices and as such can be up to 10x less expensive than a store, and cash purchases typically even less.

Jewelry diamonds at such event aren't the main item that people are there for though. It's the truly rare items that you find. Things like non-standard colored sapphires, gargantuan amethysts, gem rhodochrosite, fossils of dubious pedigree, meteorites, fordite, etc. Working diamonds, ones that are perfectly made and the size of your palm, can be bought and then cut down for relatively cheap. Many research labs and universities get samples at these events in 'legal' deals.

Especially near the end of the shows when vendors need to make a sale, things get pretty wild as the liquor comes out as well as the cash.

Check your local listings, ads, and billboards. It's a great Saturday activity even for the nephews and nieces.

The root of it, I think, is that mined diamonds are the standard for engagement rings. Culturally, having a mined diamond is (for many/most Americans) table stakes for what an engagement ring should be.

Getting a lab grown diamond or an alternative stone for your girlfriend can feel like you chose saving money or your personal views on diamond ethics over getting her something that meets those table stakes. It doesn't matter if it's technically superior (I rarely hear people discuss the quality of their diamonds anyway, beyond weight occasionally). What does matter is that you chose to give her something different than the standard, and the ring will always feel like it has a little asterisk on it marking this.

Diamonds are a prestige thing, like fancy watches. It doesn't make sense to lecture a fancy-watch-wearer about how cheap electric watches can actually tell time better. They know, and that's not the axis that matters to them.

The teacher was fighting another principle of consistency. where people want to be consistent with a previous decision. There probably would have been more hands raised for human made if the professor never did the first voting.

You heard a different question to the one the women heard.

You heard "Do you want this man-made item that is functionally identical to a naturally occurring item".

The women heard "Do you want the jewelry that symbolises your love to be real or fake?"

Functionally, there is almost no difference in an item containing a diamond and an identical one containing worthless rock.

But, you know, jewelry derives almost all of its value from being expensive and rare. Jewelry that is neither expensive nor rare stops being jewelry.

Equivalent is not as good when what matters is what other people think.

Even if the person displaying a luxury artifact agrees that some other artifact is equivalent, if the people they're displaying it to don't also agree, then there is a difference that's relevant to the purpose of the artifact, which is to advertise your wealth.

Though the topic at hand is diamonds, which are strongly associated with wedding proposals, this principle applies equally to sports cars, guitars, etc.

“Do you want natural diamonds or man-made diamonds?”

The correct answer is: no.

Random ice story! My mother in law buys “good ice” that is clear despite having a purified water source on her ice maker. She even has frozen bottled water and says it’s cloudy and tastes bad. I’ve explained to her numerous times that her clear ice is clear because they freeze it quickly. That’s it. It doesn’t taste better. She refuses to believe me and it’s basically a joke we tease her about now.

NFTs suggest that there will never be an end to the appetite for making things 'special'.

I has nothing to do with branding. It is entirely about price and false scarcity.

traditionally it was an important gesture that the man was investing a large sum of money into his soon to be wife

Thanks for the story, that was a very good analogy by your prof.

Didn't ice cubes made from icebergs command a premium price once? Don't know if it was deserved.

Its all about marketing. Look close around you and look at the money spend on bottled water.

> I realized the strength of diamonds product branding

No, that's not it.

Diamonds are conspicuous status signaling. It's a very human, even animal drive. DeBeers gets a lot of hate, and much of it deservedly so, but they tapped into and exploited our nature - they didn't create it.

everyone would prefer natural diamonds to artificial ones.

Why? Because natural ones are more expensive. It's literally like asking someone whether they prefer to have $20 or $40.

A natural diamond is nature's NFT.

Branding and artificial scarcity

That doesn't bode well for your marriage. I would ditch her now before it's too late .. later.

Thats the point you should've realised that people aren't most of the time rational but emotional.

Diamonds are precious partly because they're rare. If you find a way of 'making' a diamond it loses some of that value. It's interesting to me that someone would even try making a comparison between a precious stone and something like water/ice which is mostly desired for utility and not any sentimental reason.

While I personally don’t think natural diamonds are any more valuable than synthetic. I understand the scarcity and way it’s used to show status (similar to cars, we don’t need great ones).

That being said, what I actually took away from that comment... was that the teacher in geology class was presenting effectively political argument as opposed to teaching. Explaining the process of fine, but given what you described — I bet no one changed their mind about synthetic vs real. Most knew what the “correct” answer was. I think everyone kinda knows about synthetic diamonds, they just don’t care. Same way plastic bottles are better for the environment, yet are still used widely.

> our teacher asked all of the women

Sounds like a pretty sexist thing to do. The same question can be asked without putting women on the spot. "If you were to buy a diamond, what would you rather choose?"