You probably already know this in your heart, but diamonds and diamond engagement rings are bullsh*t. You might not know why, and you might not be able to explain it to someone who is desperately begging you to give them one, but you know it.

Or maybe you’re on the other side of the spectrum and you think the tradition of giving diamond engagement rings is something hallowed, historical, and healthy. Dead f*cking wrong, my friend.

It’s a modern development, a dirty one, and one invented not by our venerable ancestors, but by a devilishly clever marketing firm, and not to symbolize your everlasting love, but to make a quick buck on a worthless resource.

And in case it gets lost in the shuffle, I want to introduce the villains right off the bat: De Beers.

aka De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd., aka The De Beers Group of Companies, aka The Syndicate, aka Diamond Trading Company, it’s all the same thing. It’s the cabal that, until recently, controlled the entirety of the diamond trade from mine to market to aftermarket.

So let’s start by examining the age of the tradition, and this riddle:

How did the lower classes of previous generations and agrarian cultures (who pretty much lived hand-to-mouth) ever scrounge up the discretionary cash to buy diamond rings? Well, they didn’t.

The diamond engagement ring as a unilateral phenomenon started in the late 1930s, but it really took hold in the 1950s when we were already entranced by baseball, bikinis, and the boob tube. We invented manned flight, atom bombs, and duct tape before we fell for the diamond scam.

F*cking slinkies were popular before diamond engagement rings.

It’s a thoroughly modern and thoroughly recent idea. It is not the way it’s always been.

Which brings me to another misconception: scarcity.

Let’s get cosmic for a minute.There is a star in the constellation Centaurus that has gone White Dwarf and crystallized itself. It’s a floating space diamond that weighs 10 billion, trillion, trillion carats. There’s more diamond floating out there than there is moon.

But when it comes to Earthbound rock, we’ll need some Earthbound history to understand.

See, diamonds weren’t widely available and before the 1880s, they were truly rare and precious stones reserved for millionaires and monarchs. That all changed when a buttload of diamonds was found around Kimberley, South Africa. A man named Cecil Rhodes had the foresight to realize that putting that many rocks on the market would crash the price of diamonds, which he suddenly owned the vast majority of.

He began to consolidate interests and regulate the supply, and so, De Beers Consolidated Mines was born. There may have been some murders and kidnappings, but whatever.

By releasing only small amounts at a time, they were able to create (or rather maintain) the illusion of scarcity and preserve pricing, but based on mining estimates and geological projections, diamonds are probably the most common gem on Earth.

So diamonds aren’t actually rare. They’re hoarded.

So why should anyone care? In the late 1930s, the diamond industry was in very real danger of petering out. The diamond engagement fad had very little traction, and diamonds were considered a nice-but-not-all-that-precious-gem. And that’s where the truly Machiavellian genius of these motherf*ckers kicks in.

Or, more precisely, the motherf*ckers at a marketing firm called N.W. Ayer.

They were hired in 1938 because De Beers had just found yet another sh*tload of diamonds in South Africa and needed to guilt, trick, cajole, and finagle someone, anyone into buying their rapidly depreciating stash of crystallized carbon.
Enter the most successful marketing campaign since organized religion. You’ve probably heard this campaign’s greatest hit: “Diamonds Are Forever.” Let’s just ignore the fact that they’re not and focus on what N.W. Ayer was trying to say with that motto.
This is from a 1947 strategy plan for a De Beers marketing campaign:

“We are dealing with a problem in mass psychology. We seek to … strengthen the tradition of the diamond ring -- to make it a psychological necessity."

They sold the idea that any man who loved a woman owed her a diamond ring to symbolize and solemnify that love. The bigger the ring, the bigger the love. The bigger the commitment of cash, the bigger the commitment of the heart. They would have you believe the union would last as long as the life of the diamond (ostensibly forever) even though diamonds can be shattered or incinerated. Above all, they’d have you believe that this is all born out of tradition, but it’s not tradition. It’s just marketing.

And frighteningly effective marketing at that. De Beers didn’t want to exclude the couples who, financially speaking, had no business buying expensive jewelry, so they created a sliding scale. The “tradition” of spending one month’s salary on an engagement ring isn’t really a “tradition” at all; it’s the arbitrary minimum De Beers set for masculine respectability.

You might not think they make dicks that small, but 1950s America took the bait so thoroughly that De Beers bumped it up to two months’ salary. That went so well, they tried to make it three. And can you blame them? Whether out of guilt, insecurity, or ego, American men were paying whatever devastating percentage of their income De Beers demanded, because well, now American women were demanding it.

At the heart of De Beers’ campaign was the need to convince women from low and middle income situations that upper class women were doing the diamond ring thing. They weren’t until De Beers paid them to.

From a 1947 strategy brief:

“We spread the word of diamonds worn by stars of stage and screen, by wives and daughters of political leaders, by any woman who can make the grocer's wife and the mechanic's sweetheart say ‘I wish I had what she has.’”

And did they ever. They planted news stories about the “trend towards diamonds” on radio even though there was no trend. They created a service that distributed photos of celebrity engagement rings (bribed onto celebrity fingers) for newspapers to print so that the common woman could have something to aspire to. They sold lectures to schools teaching young girls the virtues of diamond ownership.

F*cking schools.

So the middle class saw staged images of the upper class embracing what was actually a completely overpriced and useless product and bought said product to emulate wealth. In other words, diamonds were the Beats Headphones of the 1940s.

So have you ever seen a commercial where the poor, clueless guy is happy to find the helpful diamond retailer that's going to save the day?

That’s like asking Cookie Monster where you should hide your cookies. Of course you’re gonna get f*cked.

And De Beers wants men carrying out this solo mission. It’s divide and conquer. Listen to this observation from a 1978 marketing analysis:

“Women are in unanimous agreement that they want to be surprised with gifts.... They want, of course, to be surprised for the thrill of it. However, a deeper, more important reason lies behind this desire.... ‘freedom from guilt.’"

The marketing zeitgeist has women craving this thing that they intrinsically know is stupid. Needless to say, this marketing agency retained their client, and it’s a good thing, because cut to the 1970s, and De Beers needed N.W. Ayer more than ever.

See, up until the 1960s, De Beers had sold the idea that bigger diamonds were better symbols of love. The more mass they moved, the more they made.

That all changed when a massive sh*tload of itty-bitty diamonds was discovered in Siberia in the late 1960s. De Beers moved quickly to align with America’s least favorite country at the time, the Soviet Union, to hush up the discovery and find a strategy to distribute rocks that were, when considered within the reigning paradigm, sh*tty.

They invented a new marketing campaign and grading system that emphasized concepts that no one had previously cared about: quality, color, clarity, and cut. By applying their made up standards to their new find, they could sell sh*tty Soviet diamonds for the same amount as their bigger (but still sh*tty) African diamonds.

Speaking of new finds, South Africa isn’t the only country that produces diamonds anymore.

De Beers was unable to control new deposits found in Australia in the 1980s, which shrunk their share, but your chances of finding a new ring that didn’t go through one cartel or the other are pretty slim,: about 4% and shrinking. And if you find that 4%, chances are you just found yourself a blood diamond.

Also known as conflict diamonds, this small supply came mostly from other parts of Africa. See, when you are a rebel army, in say, Sierra Leone, it’s hard to get a credit card to buy weapons and fund your war machine. This is where transparent chunks of carbon come in very handy.

The diamond funded Civil War in Sierra Leone killed 75,000, displaced millions, and devastated the country to the point where it is still almost entirely dependent on foreign aid.

As political pressures shined a light on the violence surrounding conflict diamonds, De Beers capitalized by characterizing all competing diamonds as being conflict diamonds. This allowed them to charge premiums on their “Conflict-Free” diamonds. Now controlling only 66% of the supply, De Beers positioned itself as controlling 100% of the “Conflict-Free” diamonds.

And oh yeah, in 2014, the U.S. Department of Labor accused 74 countries including war-torn hellholes like Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guinea, Liberia, and of course, Sierra Leone of using a significant amount of child and forced labor in pursuit of diamonds.

One more thought for pragmatists:
Diamonds are expensive as hell but (with the exception of some extremely rare finds) have practically no investment value.

Diamond retailers including Tiffany refuse to buy back rings because they’d have to offer so little that it reveals the pricing scam. Since most diamonds are sold at double their retail value but bought back for half of their wholesale value, buying a ring-quality diamond is one of the worst investments you can make.

And then there’s Dustin Diamond.

The appeal of diamonds is that they're nearly impervious to degradation, but this Diamond has been degrading himself ever since he peaked as Screech on Saved By The Bell.

So what can you do if you still want to get married? I’m glad you asked.

In the 1970s, Russian scientists were trying to find a way to make cheap synthetic rubies for use in lasers. They accidentally made something nearly indistinguishable from a diamond. It’s called cubic zirconia. It costs five or ten bucks per carat, and it’s made in a lab with microwaves just like Bagel Bites.

There’s also a superior (as in harder and maybe classier) alternative called synthetic moissanite. And get this: though the vast majority of cubic zirconia and moissanite stones are created in labs, they both can occur in nature at extremely rare rates. That's right! They're both much more rare than diamonds.

Also, moissanite (which costs a couple hundred bucks per carat) was first discovered in a meteorite crater (which is a lot cooler than being plucked off the corpse of some psychopathic warlord).

Before the diamond invention, gemless gold and silver bands were popular but would now be mistaken for wedding rings. So, those are out. If your gal has a favorite color, rubies, sapphires, opals, emeralds, and amethysts are all in play, or for the indecisive lady, moissanite can give off a rainbow sheen.

In one antiquated custom, men would give their chosen lady a thimble to wear on their thumbs until the wedding. If you like it but value even the slightest feeling of being a free-thinking individual, put a thimble on it.

At least it’s unique.

And there’s the bizarre dissonance of the diamond invention. De Beers is telling us diamonds are rare, precious, and valuable, but at the same time, they think everyone should have one. That’s the exact opposite ownership ratio of something you’d call rare, precious, and valuable. When everyone gets a diamond ring, no one is special.

Before diamonds, the practice of giving engagement gifts was a varied and colorful one. Isn’t it a little sad that everyone is supposed to want the same thing now?

And one last question, and it comes in a format your mom may have used to shed light on the fallacies of groupthink:

“If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump too?”

Only here, it’s:
“If all your friends made a very stupid, financially irresponsible, irreversible, and purely symbolic purchase at the expense of more rational and satisfying purchases to appease cultural expectations and impress someone who already loves them, would you jump too?”

Diamonds are for suckers.
Diamonds are for idiots.
Diamonds are for psychopaths.
Diamonds are for narcissists.
Diamonds are just a natural phenomenon that happens when you squeeze carbon really hard.
Diamonds are for morons.