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.
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.
This is partly a myth. More important was the non legal enforcement of engagements. Many couples in the past would start to have sex when engaged. If the engagement is not legally secure, the diamond basically serves as signal. That why 3-month salary make sense.
If I buy a 3-month salary worth diamond I'm probably not gone leave you after a month.
Its an easily portable high value item that also serves as signaling for the person wearing it. It makes more sense then livestock in the modern world.
Marketing had something to do with it, but its more complex then that.
To the incredulous: the argument is that expensive engagement rings helped fill the cultural gaps left by the repeal of Breach of Promise to Marry laws. The supporting evidence is an apparently strong geographic correlation between repeal of these laws and increases in high-value diamond engagement rings, the latter beginning after the start of the repeal movement yet before the infamous De Beers marketing campaigns.
The original research paper: Margaret F. Brinig,
Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization Vol. 6, No. 1 (Spring, 1990), pp. 203-215 (13 pages), https://www.jstor.org/stable/764797
> Its an easily portable high value item that also serves as signaling for the person wearing it. It makes more sense then livestock in the modern world.
Jewelry is not a great value store, unless you're fine with selling it at a significant loss. Diamonds specially, unless they're rare, seem to magically lose a lot of its value as soon as they print your receipt.
To be honest, I find the whole love-engagement-sex-wedding handling retrograde and inappropriate for the current times.
Correct story, but arguably the wrong war. The allies in WWI really invented much of modern propaganda, paving the way for Berneys, Lippmann et al. to refine those methods for marketing use. Hitler and Goebbels both wrote about the manipulative and underhanded use of propaganda by the allies as being the cause of Germany's defeat in WWI and seemingly carried a lot of resentment about it (while simultaneously trying to outdo them)
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!
>While the ring contains a mined diamond, it has quite a bit of sentimental value
If I said it once, I have said it a million times, if your SO insists on a diamond from the ground as opposed to a lab, say fine, but I am getting my shots flying to Africa and will mine it myself. It won't matter if you bring back a opaque brown rock, with 0 marketing your SO would wear it with pride and most others would be jealous when they hear the story behind it.
It goes hand in hand with your obtaining a stone from family and the sentiment of it. My Mom has 5 boys and my Dad gave her a ring with 5 diamonds, and she has made 1 available to each of us for an engagement ring, which she would replace with the birthstone of each son. As you say its not scalable, and no one ever marketed the idea, but the sentiment is extremely powerful.
I see where you are going, but honestly the generalizations are pretty sad.
You might be surprised of the acceptance of an outsider showing a willingness to roll up their sleeves and experience something real not just sip drinks on a beach resort, even if it is for a day or two. Similarly if you met a child laborer or former child soldier outside those conditions, odds are you would have no idea of their personal experience.
I have met many child refugees that have more Worldly experience than most adults, yet if I did not represent them in asylum proceedings and meet them while they were detained, they would have simply appeared as children in my eyes. I have been part of law clinics that represented torture victims from some of the regimes you have in mind. The child soldiers, much less the child laborers, are not mercing people for their cell phones.
If you are a reader, I might suggest two books: 1) The Evolution of Deadly Conflict in Liberia; and 2) Storming the Court.
> but I am getting my shots flying to Africa and will mine it myself. It won't matter if you bring back a opaque brown rock, with 0 marketing your SO would wear it with pride and most others would be jealous when they hear the story behind it.
That's a great idea, but I don't know of any place you could do that in real life. Diamonds can be very valuable depending on size, color, clarity etc. Diamond mines have heavy security around their miners to ensure a tiny little diamond doesn't go missing.
There is zero chance they'd let a tourist in.
Someone I know smuggled a diamond purchased in South Africa for their spouse and the diamond and story behind that were both well appreciated.
Impractical, sure. But the average cost of a 7 day trip to Freetown, Sierra Leone is less than 1/2 the average cost of an engagement ring. $2,500 compared to $5,500 on average.
I was fortunate in this regard. My wife inherited her mother's wedding ring. When it came time for us to get married, we took that ring to a jeweler who mounted the diamond in a setting that my wife picked out. The ring has great sentimental value for my wife at a modest cost. We never had to have the conversation about a mined diamond vs a synthetic diamond.
My experience was different. I ended up going to one of the Shane Company stores on the west coast and the salesperson didn't push diamonds at all. She showed me damn near every red/pink sapphire in the store until I found one I wanted to present. And when it turned out my wife didn't like the color as much as I thought they bought the old stone back at full-price and sold us a new one in a color she loves.
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.
Take the money and have a nice honeymoon, buy two $5 seashell necklace at the beach. There are so many ways to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars that are way better than investing them into small chunks of metal.
Take the money and have a nice honeymoon, buy two $5 seashell necklace at the beach. There are so many ways to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars that are way better than investing them into small chunks of metal.
Agreed, but I was OK with spending the money, what really bothers me is how worthless diamonds are. Metals have a relatively free market, many uses, and are fungible, so the pricing is more in line with reality.
The gold in a typical engagement ring is worth something like $50-100. Not sure what you spent, but the same people peddling mined diamonds are also massively up-charging on the band.
I have no problem paying for craftsmanship, artistry, and service. The piece should be worth significantly more than it's raw materials. My problem is when the price of the raw material is being artificially controlled. While I'm sure there are shenanigans going on with all valuable materials, I can't think of any that are as blatantly a scam as diamonds.
I went to a wedding and the two friends tied a knot as per middle-age European tradition.
The knot was then packaged inside of a chest, as a reminder of the promise they made on their Wedding Day. And as far as I know, they still have that chest with them, and the Knot is still tied.
It's proof of capability. Sort of like peacock feathers. "Look, I can carry around this obscene tail and still not get eaten! How's them genetics?"
For humans, it's, "I have excess resources I can afford to burn according to the socially-accepted ritual or test, so when you bear my offspring, you can be sure I will also have excess capacity to provide for both you and your offspring."
A female may have second thoughts about choosing you as a mate if you appear to cheat at the test or don't do the test right.
Not really. If that's what that person values and you want that person, that's what you're gonna have to do. Being a relationship means doing things you don't agree with sometimes.
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.
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.
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.
Apparently a lab grown diamond meant my love for her was also artificial [...]
Why then a ring [with a diamond] at all? It's nothing special at all, just what everyone does. Almost the definition of replaceability and arbitrariness. There is no connection between the relationship and a random ring with a stone you buy at some random jewelry store. Why not something individual, specific to the relationship? Every $1 toy ring used as a wedding ring is more personal and telling than any thousands of dollars ring with a diamond.
It is not a rational argument, result of some cultural indoctrination. Media, friends, peers... Everyone is susceptible to such influence to some degree but not aware. Still, must be sad to witness.
Yes, seeing an otherwise healthy, and free-thinking human being turn through their behaviour into almost a sub-sentient machine running pre-programmed scripts, would errode a bit of the soul in almost everyone. As some of their childhood naivete is forever extinguished. At least now they’ve gained through this experience a deeper perception of the true nature of reality.
Many women won't directly tell their partner "I want you to spend a couple months' salary on a beautiful diamond" because it's tasteless to request and it removes all the meaning behind the man doing so, but they'd also be disappointed if the man didn't do so unprompted. People and their emotions are complex like that.
I don't think there's any glaring issue with either party above, but it's like you expect all women in your life to be like many people on HN — hyper-rational, utilitarian devs who would never want a mined diamond because a cheaper artificial one with better clarity exists. It's not wrong, but it's not right - there is no right answer here. Traditional ideas of romance are a powerful force.
Did you miss the part where she gas-lit him? She agreed with all the points about moissanite/etc and then got bent out of shape when he took her at her word. Clearly all that was a "test" that he was supposed to "pass". I rarely see happy marriages with that kind of behavior as a baseline. God forbid he get her Carnations and a nice dinner for Valentine's day, she'll likely ignore the dinner and focus on why he didn't get her roses instead.
It's also a weird interpretation. My response would have been something like "moissanite has better visual properties, is free of all slave/conflict concerns, and saves us money for the honeymoon, so our love shines brighter, is built on a pure foundation, and will give us experiences we'll never forget".
More over it's extremely materialistic. Someone who loves you is pledging their life to you. Assuming the ring in question is fundamentally tasteful, is it too much to ask to focus on the life pledge instead of the $$ value of the symbol?
But I guess I lucked out. My wife rarely takes off her vintage ring with syntehtic rubies and a couple of tiny real accent diamonds on yellow gold (because that's what it came with). I knew her aesthetic tastes and got her something that matched those tastes, and it's unique enough that it stands out amongst her sisters/friends. And it certainly wasn't two months' salary, which she well knows. We didn't have that amount in savings at the time.
I didn't view it as gaslighting, I viewed it in the way I said it: she may have not wanted to demand a 'genuine' diamond, so she left it open-ended. What woman wants to demand that when asked for preference? Demanding it would remove the sincerity and meaningfulness of the man's gesture.
On the note of carnations for Valentine's Day, I'd view it in much the same way. Unless she's told you how much she adores and prefers carnations on Valentine's Day, roses are the best bet.
My partner and past partners have always fit that type, and I don't think either is lucky or better or right. I personally enjoy the tradition and the unspoken symbolism in the gifts, and striving to make her happy without it being spelled out for me.
I'm happy you have someone who makes you feel lucky, and who matches your preferences for communication and a relationship — finding that is possibly the greatest feeling in life. I simply aim to point out that either are valid, normal preferences and dynamics, as opposed to one being gaslighting.
A woman saying she doesn't mind carnations, and that she thinks carnations are fine, is not nearly the same as saying she adores them and prefers them for the occasion of Valentine's Day.
When the stakes are that high however, this is the definition of poor communication. No one's a mind reader, and how many other unspoken expectations are there?
This is basically obvious to the point of being a trope in our culture, so I'd argue it's actually not that hard. Sure, it's not perfect or well communicated, but it's not mindreader-level.
That's really kind of you and has made my day! I've been thinking about one but haven't found the time; this definitely nudges me towards that so thank you.
If you ever want to chat about something though, feel free to reach me at the email in my profile. Always great to meet new people, especially in these times. :)
there's nothing rational about HN's brand of rationalism - which is really just materialist reductionism. In this thread alone are dozens of people completely blind to the concept of social signals, thinking instead about price, clarity and the vague notion of distant moral dilemmas. Beyond basic survival requirements, social signals are one of the most important concepts in human society! To exclude them from your considerations is deeply irrational in the unique way that developers often are.
Yeah, I agree. I'd go even further and say that although the tech conversations on HN are substantive, the vast majority of non-tech conversations are devoid of social awareness (in the same way as a bunch of developers who don't get out much). For example, sometimes people here don't register deference as a prosocial aspect of cooperation. When you say "I'm no expert, but..." on HN, people take it literally.
If you want to get a ring for your significant other, the whole point is to buy something unnecessary as a symbol of the organic constance of your love. Nobody needs a diamond ring. If you tell a woman that her diamond came from a lab, you should accompany that fact with a better narrative than "this was the most economical rock available within your preference constraints."
She wants to love her ring, so give her a reason. Tell her that you wanted to buy her something big without feeling like it was an extravagant use of your shared nest egg. Explain why gem clarity is so important to you, because your vision of the future as a couple is unmarred by doubt. Talk about how lab-grown gems are a more ethical trade and symbolize a desire to avoid unnecessary conflict in your relationship. Remind her that even a diamond is not forever, so if she wants another ring next year you'd be happy to propose again with a superior gem.
> When you say "I'm no expert, but..." on HN, people take it literally.
I'm not understanding this. What other way to take this is there? "I'm no expert, but" is indicating that -- oh, I think I see what you mean by the non-literal meaning, maybe.
The literal meaning would be a disclaimer as to how much others should take one's perspective into account / how much others should trust/believe what one is saying,
whereas the non-literal meaning would be indicating that the situation is kind of sarcastic or something, either because one is well versed in the topic, and therefore should be considered credible, or because the thing being said is obvious and usually shouldn't even need to be said.
Is that right? Is this the distinction you meant?
edit : I'm sure I'm kind of serving as an example of your point by saying this, but, whatever, I don't regard that as a problem.
the non-literal form is showing humility. It's not sarcasm - even if you are a literal expert (as in SME) on the topic it's acknowledging that you are still aware of your own fallibility - as the parent said.
I don't think I've ever met anybody in real life that interacted the way HNers do. I always assumed it was a social affect where everybody pretends to be a robot because that's the culture of the site, in the same way people form pun chains on reddit. Is this an American thing, or maybe just a software engineer thing? I mean, I work in the software industry as a developer (granted, in the UK) so I figured I would've run into it by now if it were industry specific.
Thanks for the clarification. I don't know that I've seen experts in a topic say that they aren't experts in the topic as figurative speech for humility. That sounds like it would be confusing?
Well, I believe I've seen experts saying that they aren't an expect in the particular sub-topic in question, even if they are an expert in (another sub-topic of) the same general topic. Like, saying that there are people with more expertise than them in the specific sub-topic at hand. And maybe they might phrase this as "I'm not an expert" without specifying the specific subtopic, before commenting on a question of the specific sub-topic. This doesn't strike me as figurative though. Perhaps I've just been misinterpreting though, and they mean "I'm not an expert" figuratively, rather than literally meaning "I'm not an expert in this specific sub-topic"?
I think the "everyone pretends to be a robot" is, partially a software engineer thing? (Or, rather, correlated with the sort of person who would enjoy programming-ish stuff. ) Not literally pretending to be a robot. Rather, a combination of naturally acting in a certain way that could be described as analogous in some ways to a robot, and an imitation (and sometimes exaggeration) of behaviors which one has seen in oneself and in others who one kinda "identifies with",
or aspiring towards an ideal or idea which has been constructed around those kinda of behaviors (possibly with this idea including things that aren't really naturally part of the behaviors, but by accidents of chance and misunderstanding, became part of a cultural idea ).
I've previously told someone that I don't really ever "feel like a robot", but I do often "feel like the sort of person who would sometimes 'feel like a robot' " .
> In this thread alone are dozens of people completely blind to the concept of social signals, thinking instead about price, clarity and the vague notion of distant moral dilemmas.
> Yeah, I agree. I'd go even further and say that although the tech conversations on HN are substantive, the vast majority of non-tech conversations are devoid of social awareness
Social signaling and status symbols come up frequently on HN, and in this thread no less. Truly, in ordinary circles these concepts don’t come up and people aren’t even aware that what they’re doing is a concept that’s studied.
> Beyond basic survival requirements, social signals are one of the most important concepts in human society!
These social signals are a core human survival mechanisms since at least the birth of agriculture. When the climate turned for the worse or food was scarce, nomadic tribes just migrated to an environment with better conditions. In an agricultural society, clans had to develop a different mechanism that took advantage of agriculture's strength: large surpluses around harvest time that couldn't easily be stored through the winter. This is where the concept of banquets was born and there's archaeological evidence of hunter-gatherers and farmers participating in them together in the Early Neolithic, when agriculture just getting started.
Instead of moving to find food, humans adapted to create strong social bonds between clans by elaborate social signals. Banquets, parties, and feasts were fundamentally saying "we've got a surplus now and we'll share it with you with the understanding that you'll share your surplus when you have one." Dowries and marriages were just a formalization of that unspoken social contract. Today someone might throw a big wedding or party as a show of status but back then, they were grand events because all of the best food spoiled quickly and it served zero purpose to hoard it.
That said, what the diamond ring industry has evolved into is something quite new.
Good post which I don't mean to detract from, but this is certainly not true.
Even before sapiens, erectus and neanderthalensis were big game hunters. Sapiens in particular developed the tools for mass killings of migratory herds of large animals, and the ability to set fish traps for harvesting spawning runs.
Both of these left early hunter gatherers with abundant surpluses of meat at certain times of year, so much that preservation was the limiting factor in getting those calories into bodies. We know the response of the Tlingit people to this bounty from very recent history: they would throw huge banquets called potlatches.
Except this particular social signal was entirely made up by a corporation. Social signals that cost significant resources for something worthless are stupid.
> Except this particular social signal was entirely made up by a corporation.
They didn't make it up, they just made a display of wealth (and therefore social status) associated with their product. Brands do that all the time but the signal has always existed.
The advertising serves to put the association between the product and wealth into the common knowledge - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic). Or in other words, everybody knows that everybody knows that rings are expensive.
> Social signals that cost significant resources for something worthless are stupid.
No, you just don't understand social signals, which was my point. The "costing significant resources" part is the whole idea. Wedding rings and fresh kicks aren't expensive because they're valuable, they're valuable because they're expensive. If you want to understand the idea, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory#Honest_signa.... It makes perfect sense (ie, it's rational).
It's equivalent to saying, "I am willing to burn all of this valuable money to prove that I value you".
If we only bought things that were of purely-material value, we'd stop at food, weather-protective but un-aesthetic clothing, and basic shelter. Everything beyond those is social (or hyperreal).
>> Social signals that cost significant resources for something worthless are stupid.
> No, you just don't understand social signals, which was my point.
I don't think OP denies the utility of signaling, only that as an intelligent human being, one must not feel absolutely helpless in accepting and perpetuating all instances of signaling that their peers do.
There are many different cultures with strong means of signaling one's devotion to a partner, without having to essentially burn a small fortune to enrich an exploitative industry. It doesn't even have to be non-materialistic. Many cultures have the gold ring/necklace. It's a signal of a fortune spent, and a retained safety net because gold is tradable.
I can understand disagreeing with social signalling, but this comment tree is rife with people dismissing social signals as irrational, or completely missing the plot by pointing out that you could get a synthetic diamond for much less money. It just speaks to ignorance rather than disagreement.
I don't get disappointed. The best gift you can get me for my birthday is remove the obligation for me to get you one on yours. Saves so much mental energy and time.
After rationally agreeing not to get anything (because we were about to move overseas on a couple of luggages and didn't want extra stuff) my SO got me 3 (3!! usually it was one per event) gifts and I was empty handed.
And I had to resell / returns some of the items as we were moving anyway and we could just buy better quality stuff later on, without having to pay for the move.
I always liked the associated page for Gift Economy -- reading it is when I first realized there are multiple credit systems in play at any given moment, beyond raw currency.
I try to tell people I don't have a birthday anymore. Because if I tell people not to get me anything, sometimes they hear please get me something. Ugh.
I normally just tell them "it was a few weeks back". This gives a full year for them to forget about it and has a sufficiently vague period of time that they can't nail you next year should they remember.
> I try to tell people I don't have a birthday anymore.
Never thought of that. I'd imagine the ensuing conversation is even more problematic though? "What do you mean you don't have a birthday? That makes no sense!"
Is this an American thing? I'm polish and this whole discussion is just mind boggling. I don't know anybody who would had such high (monetary wise) demands
It seems it is, I'm Dutch and also don't recognise this at all (but not married yet, so who knows). It does remind me, again, how many HN and Reddit discussions so often are by default seem US-centric, until stated otherwise. I am very much willing to accept though that the fact that this annoys me a bit is my own problem.
In Sweden, it is more customary (at least for mixed-gender couples) to buy matching gold bands for the engagement, then a fancy wedding band for the female spouse (and optionally another plain gold band for the male). They typically have the names and dates of the engagement/wedding engraved on the inside, as well.
Both times I got engaged (only got married once, though), I brought my partner to the jewellery store to pick out rings we both liked, as it would be something we'd be wearing for a non-determined time and I'd say that being happy with that trumps the whole "propose with a ring out of nowhere in public".
Yes it is American. Getting down on your knees to propose, the engagement ring, the bachelor/ette party, the white wedding dress, the bridesmaids in matching outfits and flowers, the handwritten invitation cards, the tiered wedding cake, the wedding photographer, the reception dinner. It's the cultural script that little girls and boys learn to follow. .
It's more of a white people that watch movies thing I think. So yeah mostly American but you see pockets of it on different cultures, one of the common threads that I find is that people that like this also like their houses to look as if they were designed for the set of a romantic comedy.
Nah, there's rings from my ancestors that predates movies and we're from appalachia. It ain't much but an expensive valuable is a tradition that predates movies by a mile
Yep, to a large degree, at least. American thinking is thoroughly colonized by powerful corporations. In the absence of a real culture, you are left with consumerist zombies. So when Washington comes knocking at your door to "liberate you" and "spread freedom", just know that this is a large part of what they mean.
When looking for a mate, animals often engage in so called "irrational" behavior to signal to the other party of their readiness and seriousness for mating. This is how, for example, peacocks get their ridiculous plumage.
And thus, when somebody "irrationally" buys a "worthless" ring for a hefty amount, it signals to some extent that one is serious, committed and financially capable of the proposed marriage.
It's often not that the partner wants the expensive thing, but more that they want a proof that the marriage is worth more than that expensive and useless thing, which they want precisely because it's useless objectively and the purchase is "irrational".
It's basically a trolley problem of "do I value my partner more, or my hard earned $XXXX more?" The forced irrational choice makes the game rational on a meta level. I don't disagree that the game kind of sucks, and there are other ways to build trust and understanding regarding the level of commitment between partners, but I consider the ring thing to be the "easy" way to do it. (which is why it's de-facto standard in many cultures)
I think the hatred against capitalism and marketing is slightly off the mark here, since capitalism is merely supplying these expensive things to satisfy the somewhat "biological" demand in our mating rituals. Capitalists might be unscrupulous, but somebody had to do it.
(Disclaimer in case it matters - I'm male, happily married to my wife, and bought a non-diamond ring as an engagement ring. I don't think this necessarily applies to any gender in any specific case, but generally speaking so far as humans are animals, the biological aspect dominates)
If we’re talking about the animal kingdom POV, then an expensive diamond is physical proof of the male’s resourcefulness and ability to provide for young. I would argue that if the diamond was displaced as this proof then it would shift to another physical object that’s publicly displayed such as a house or car.
I agree, but at the same time, we're much more intelligent than penguins, so it's a shame that we also signal commitment with a fancy rock. Something like a work of art or rare book would serve the same purpose but would have more personal meaning.
I wanted to say you've committed the naturalistic fallacy, but actually, you've also misrepresented the meaning of mating behaviors in essential ways and made a few tacit and unwarranted jumps in between.
Humans are rational animals. Yes, obviously we have natural inclinations (they aren't irrational, btw; they have a purpose and only when the inclination is disordered, deficient, excessive, or we behave in ways opposed to the good when moved by the inclination can we speak of irrationality). However, we can make errors in judgement when interpreting signs and relating these signs to our inclinations. Marketing is often actively engaged in confusing people when it comes to what things mean. And when we get the meanings of signs wrong, we relate things erroneously to our natural inclinations. So this very recent practice of buying extravagant diamond rings beyond our means is the product of psychological manipulation and deceit that exploits vice and inclination by effectively lying about what an overpriced diamond ring signals.
It would be an error to assume that a woman from a culture that values thrift would react positively to such a gift, much less demand it. She might be left thinking that the man is financially irresponsible. Most cultures do not make spending obscene amounts of money on a ring a common practice. The engagement ring has historically been a symbolic gesture, not a demonstration of irresponsibility, immodesty, profligacy, and vanity.
In the case of peacocks, they ARE their plumage. Their plumage is not a sign of seriousness, but a sign of fitness and health and shaped by inherent traits and female selection (her interpretation or recognition that the better the plumage, the better the health), not male initiative. The peacock also isn't willing his plumage.
You can just as easily construe the ring as a test of your potential wife's character. If she refuses to marry you because you haven't spent a fourth or more of your salary on a ring, then good riddance. Who wants to be saddled with a fraudulent, vain, and vapid creature like that. She would make a terrible mother.
In many cultures, marriage was traditionally a more convoluted affair, involving both families and there's a strong preference to marriage with a family that your family knows and trusts. The socio-economic status of prospective mates and their families are considered. There's a solemn ritual in a religious setting where all members of the community are invited to witness an oath. And thus the expensive shiny thing isn't _as_ necessary, although often expensive gifts are exchanged anyway.
These days people get married with somebody they met on Tinder for a month because "true love". The weight of a promise from a person you met for a couple weeks and from a family you've known for decades is different, which accounts for the modern inventions you despise as compensation.
I mean, I'm not saying this expensive ring thing is a desirable game to play, and I don't disagree that there are vain people out there, but the ring serves a particular purpose in the mating game of modern society, not just to satisfy some people's vanity.
(btw, if you think about it, an engagement ring isn't inherently that great for showing off. Most people put it away in a little box and wear a less conspicuous ring anyway.)
Different cultures uses different displays to convey status. In cultures which do not place similar importance on a diamond ring, they may place equal importance on other displays, such as a large wedding banquet or purchase of a residence. Regardless of the specific expression of status in various cultures, I would think that they exist as a constant across all cultures.
I don’t see what’s so hard to understand. The entire point of buying a ring is that you’re showing her how much you care by spending a bunch of money on something special. Instead, you decided to save money and get something that’s not as special, and that hurt her feelings.
You conveniently left out the part where they discussed it and she said that it didn't need to be 'natural'.
There's nothing wrong with wanting a 'natural' diamond. But to mislead your partner as part of some sick test, and then make them feel like dirt for not having passed?
Just chiming in to say that you can in fact be up front with your SO about your opinions on pretty rocks as a symbol of your relationship, and continue to have a happy, healthy relationship.
>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
I'm wondering how, if you picked it out, she even knew the diamond was lab grown? Did she start grilling you immediately? Or did she get the microscope out? Maybe I'm a total moron but I can't tell the difference by just looking at it.
Funny you noticed. (Natural) diamonds have certificates of authenticity, ostensibly for appraisal and insurance. When I told her I could print one up with the specs is when the arguments started.
Well, if you ever want an example of advertising working... (I realise it plays enormously on preexisting traditional cultural notions of value, but still, as mentioned, de Beers did quite the job). I had similar conversations pre-engagement, but felt forced into a real diamond once the time actually came.
Natural, as in what would commonly be referred to as a real diamond (yes, I realise they're they're chemically and structurally the same).
Edit: As I said in another reply, there's nothing illogical about it. If value is placed culturally and socially on natural diamonds, then they are valuable, regardless of if that value is "artificially" created via advertising of whatever. Lots of stuff is quite stupid if you look at it objectively, out of context. Doesn't mean it isn't true in context.
I truly mean this to be thoughtful and not antagonistic, and your notion of value being subjective is accurate. But I think I can somewhat snarkily summarize a lot of the doubt some HNers are feeling (I'm not saying I agree or disagree): it's basically saying diamonds are like NFTs.
EDIT: Just did a ctrl-f for NFT and I guess I wasn't the first to say that, although those comments are much lower on the page.
Oh, sure, not to going to disagree! I don't think it's being sarky to compare the two (although NFTs have slightly different cultural precursors), no offence taken. I also think that in this case many commenters [being human] have equally subjective notions of value (edit: which are also correct in context, I'm not just having a pop) but would just like to pretend that they do not, that they are being "rational".
> 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.
If we can grow a perfect diamond, of seemingly any size, then finding a large, clear natural diamond is more special than buying a manufactured diamond. Then there’s the time involved, The natural process taking much more time. It’s hard for me to see why people think they are equivalent. Approaching an emotional subject with a logical mind won’t work. Yes they are the same but really they’re not.
> My biggest mistake was including her in the decision.
> When I showed her what I'd picked out, it quickly devolved into a lot of uncharacteristic tears and shouting.
I do not think you would have had a better experience if you did not include her.
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.
"Okay class, child labour, a few thousand poor people dead, terrorist groups starving hundreds of thousands, destroying schools and libraries. That is where diamonds come from. How many would still want a natural diamond because diamonds are forever?"
The elephant in that lecture hall was probably the hypocrisy.
I think if you still raise a hand after hearing all that, the issue isn't branding at all. It's narcissim, that people have to die so you can maintain the illusion of...of what?
I personally fully agree, but unfortunately not everyone thinks as logically as you or I.
I talked about this with my wife recently, and even though she had a vague idea of the horrors that mined diamonds bring, she'd still continue to buy/want mined diamonds. She sees mined diamonds as more "real", and finds it difficult to believe that her diamonds in particular would be part of the problem - as if it somehow would only affect diamonds purchased in dodgy, back-room deals. She seems to think it's OK because "everyone else does it". No amount of discussion of verifiable facts seems to change that view; indeed, she got quite annoyed with me, and didn't want to discuss it any further.
A large part of the problem is conditioning, through both advertising and tradition. In the west, we are conditioned from an early age to believe that "diamonds are a girl's best friend", that women should accept nothing less that a "real" diamond, and that men should spend some silly multiple of their salary when buying such a diamond. Diamonds are synonymous with luxury.
What we really need is a big, sustained campaign against mined diamonds, really putting the horrors in the faces of potential customers, so they have to accept the damage mined diamonds cause,and accept that they are part of the problem. Such a campaign probably needs to be fronted by celebrities - inspirational figures that people will listen to.
I whole-heartedly applaud Pandora for making the first move here - hopefully this will help to break the stalemate and be the start of a much bigger movement.
There's also a common line of reasoning that roughly goes "well this particular diamond has obviously already been mined, so no additional harm is caused by me wanting it."
Obviously you and I see that even that line of reasoning alone jacks up demand for an awful business, but not all people have the capacity to reason that abstractly about how their behaviour plays a part in a very big aggregate.
----
My wife did get this after some discussion, but we got stuck with a different problem: we asked virtually every local jeweller to create something with a lab-created diamond (or even a different shiny rock entirely) and all of them -- to our astonishment -- refused.
They only work with mined diamonds from the suppliers they have long-standing contracts with and can ensure are as ethical as they come. I'm sure they have their reasons but that was very frustrating.
That's interesting - when I bought an engagement ring for my wife the one and only jewelry store I went to was happy to order me a bare ring, give me the size range of diamonds that would fit it, and then install the 3 synthetic diamonds I ordered from Gemesis. It seemed like installing diamonds that folks already owned into new rings was something they did relatively often. Maybe you'd have better luck approaching it that way - "I already have a diamond, what rings can you sell me that would fit it?" rather than "source me a synthetic diamond and put it in a ring for me".
Although it looks like Gemesis, the company I bought the synthetic diamonds from, has pivoted and rebranded as Pure Grown Diamonds, and sells wholesale rather than retail now.
> we asked virtually every local jeweller to create something with a lab-created diamond (or even a different shiny rock entirely) and all of them -- to our astonishment -- refused.
ooooo now there is a signal. Putting in the time and effort to find/get a jeweller to make me a custom ring with a lab-created diamond when no one will. Unique, expensive. Not something he can just order from the internet.
Because lets just cut to the chase. The diamond is all about the story, the signal and what it represents, not what it is.
Not sure where you are located, but I was able to get a local sole-proprietor jeweler to custom design a ring based on my specs to fit the diamond I had. I am in Southern California.
My guess is that we need a sweeping, emotion-fill, romantic story toward something else, not just away from the current diamond-status quo. There certainly is a quiet satisfaction, and clear conscience, in avoidance of evil. But no joy in the act of NOT.
A normal person who repeatedly throws aside a full heart in favor of facts will not wake up singing for many years. There needs to be a new song to replace the old, something as emotionally filling as DeBeers shadow demons dancing to a swelling string section.
Dude.. people don’t think about who’s making their Nikes or Apple products or tshirts. They buy these incidental products with zero concern for the people producing them. How noble are we, talking about refusing to buy blood diamonds when the very MEMS mic in a household device probably vibrated to the scream of people watching a friend jumping out a factory window.
Getting people to care about who’s winning and losing in a production lifecycle seems like something that doesn’t get fixed initially with the diamond-buying crowd when the shoe-buying consumers don’t even care.
I think what I’m struggling to get at is that the diamond-buying population at least have these earnest “noble ideals” of love, unity, etc represented by this product for which at some low level the sacrifice and blood may _add_ value (god knows what unconscious calculus is at work in the mind of a grown princess). Compare this to a pair of crap tennis shoes that you’re going to throw away, where they are completely utilitarian, replaceable, and you have zero emotional investment in what they represent. The suffering represented by the product offers nothing other than the blatant profit of the consumer. And we can’t wrest the shoes from the consumer’s hands no matter what is said about the abysmal conditions that produced them.
All of these conditions in the production of these products are known. Nobody can claim ignorance in the first world. If the population at large hasn’t had a moment of moral clarity by now, I’m not sure I’d hold my breath any longer. Either systemically the culture needs to be more open to moral awakenings (a hard sell in a world defined by deconstructionism) or a new and acceptable critique of globalism at a policy level needs radical change.
Just my .02 but I’ve been hearing the same convo about diamonds since I was a kid and it’s as sad as hearing the rationalizing of any addict.
> How noble are we, talking about refusing to buy blood diamonds when the very MEMS mic in a household device probably vibrated to the scream of people watching a friend jumping out a factory window.
The suicide rate in those factories is greater than zero but is not high at all. You picked the wrong analogy.
It (as an example) is sufficient to remind you that the production environments for many goods _more accessible than diamonds_ are highly, highly exploitive. We don’t need to argue about specific frequency of people jumping out of windows (btw, enough for one building to install nets), to understand the broader point. We could talk about child labor. We could talk about labor camps. Again, nobody in the first world can claim to be surprised by these things. For people to walk around on sneakers cushioned by children’s tears and fret about the provenance of their diamonds seems a bit of a joke.
I understand the broader point, but you don't want to use incorrect information as part of making it. "forced labor, child labor, unreasonable overtime, people dying in mines, and a factory with a well-below-average suicide rate that got a lot of media attention for a cluster over a decade ago" One of these things is not like the others, and detracts from the actual point. It's a distraction from the real problems.
How about this: Industrially created diamonds represent science and human achievement. After many years of engineering, we can take carbon, crush it at super-high pressures and temperatures, and make a diamond out of it—one that is more crystal-clear and perfect than what you get when this process accidentally happens in places in the earth's mantle. Humans have wanted to do this for millennia, and now we can!
You can iterate on the above. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_diamond would be a starting point for getting more specifics. Hmm, it says: "A third method, known as detonation synthesis, entered the diamond market in the late 1990s. In this process, the detonation of carbon-containing explosives creates nanometer-sized diamond grains." Fuck yeah, my diamond was made with high explosives! Might prefer one of those because of the awesome factor.
This is quite insightful. I never thought of it this way but I think you are correct.
If I could rephrase it a bit more clinically, the signaling of fitness (wealth, social status, etc) is important to the human mating rituals. And diamonds are integral to that in a some cultures. That underlying need is probably innate will not change. Therefore, as you said, you can't just say "NO", it needs to be replaced with something else.
It's downvoted because it's not true. There are tons of traditions that men follow too. Gender norms just lead to men and women following different traditions.
More fundamentally: we're conditioned to privilege our ambitions (or maybe just grand ambitions in general) over things like concern for the horrific-yet-ultimately-banal suffering that enables them, or for building and maintaining a stable and sustainable "floor" for human existence. We pour funding into tech startups that promise to maybe change the world when we know that we can move the needle (often for a fraction of the cost) by spending on basic needs and not looking for a direct ROI. It doesn't matter that people are starving, homeless, wallowing in practical and spiritual squalor, because we're going to Mars, damn it.
In the end, we just can't seem to take our eyes and minds off the shiny things, even knowing that we're merely gazing at the glare of hubris.
> we know that we can move the needle (often for a fraction of the cost) by spending on basic needs and not looking for a direct ROI
Based on San Francisco's experience, I'd say spending other people's money isn't enough to do much about the homeless issue. Further, I suspect a startup that moves the economy upwards results in citizens with more disposable income to donate to good causes. Ideally, the competition for those funds leads to increased effectiveness from those good causes (because I'm not going to donate to someone who doesn't efficiently get food to the mouths of the hungry so to speak).
Also, the "shiny things" often bring tangible and less tangible benefits (e.g. technology advances, societal celebration of science & engineering), whereas quite a bit of our social programs seem like money pits with no real outcome other than feeling good about burning all that time and treasure (see above re: SF and the homeless). I'm reminded of people who protested going to the Moon, arguing instead that the funding should be spent on welfare programs. The difference is that going to the Moon is a quantifiable win and also brings interesting benefits to society, and there is an end state where the job is done. Welfare, as it is currently structured, does nothing to actually solve the problem of systemic poverty so its job is never done. It's not even clear if increasing or decreasing funding really does much about the problem.
"San Francisco's experience" proves my case. I suspect that if you poofed one or two of the larger tech companies or VC firms and took the delta in housing prices from reduced demand/speculative pressure and put it towards building, NIMBY laws notwithstanding, you'd solve homelessness in SF. That is the magnitude of money (that is, our past and future time, energy, and belief in our own produftive capacity, converted to fungible currency) that is being siphoned from society in order to prop up an industry with, frankly, a mixed record of public good ROI. That's just one case of many.
The anti-moon mission people were right, in the end. The advances solely attributable to it were few (to ask someone to name them is akin to asking a government official what assets and missions, exactly, Edward Snowden's leaks compromised), and NASA and the government abandoned the effort not when the possibility of further advances dried up, but when the prestige of beating the USSR wore off. This, of course, is the fundamental issue: that the shininess blinds and then dulls, leaving the problems that were ignored still unaddressed. The people protesting the moon missions were:
*Environmental advocates
*Anti-war protestors
*Black and PoC Civil Rights advocates
Consider then, in good faith, the troubles that continue to rock our society, some 40-50 years hence. Interesting parallels.
On the other hand, welfare works. Full stop.
Like I said, we've been conditioned. And by "we", I mean "you."
I had a similar conversation and I think you're spot on with "conditioning". I don't even think it is about luxury, necessarily. It's literally just how middle class+ white women grow up in the United States. I can't necessarily fault someone for making those kinds of emotional choices after being bombarded with that idea their entire lives.
Totally agree with your campaign idea too. I think a lot of it is social signaling and if there was enough of a big movement against them, diamonds would be "canceled" pretty quickly. Social pressure is one of the great guiding forces we have (for better and for worse).
Markets tend to abstract away responsibility. Just look at rhino horn, elephant tusk buyers in Asia, I am sure it's a similar story. Most people think that if they are buying from a reputable company that it must be okay, some companies even market that (Brilliant Earth) and even they get in trouble though since the diamond market in general is shady.
>In the west, we are conditioned from an early age to believe that "diamonds are a girl's best friend", that women should accept nothing less that a "real" diamond, and that men should spend some silly multiple of their salary when buying such a diamond.
In the west, the US or the anglosphere? Because I only know this from Hollywood movies.
The scope of their mass brain washing is indeed staggering. Heck I have a good friend in the jewelry business and we still get into heated discussions about how he feels there is nothing wrong and how he is providing value as an agent of Debears brainwashing. It is pretty disgusting.
The west. I'm from the UK, and this mindset is common here. I've discussed this topic with others from various other European countries, and it seems to be widespread.
> I personally fully agree, but unfortunately not everyone thinks as logically as you or I.
Yes they don't because of marketing.
If we want to really change this, the narrative, the media and marketing has to change from: Earth Diamonds = Status of eternity and "foreverness" to Earth Diamonds = Status of child abuse.
With massive campaigns from media and celebrities, people can be shamed into changing their behaviour.
We need to stop treating women as children and objects to be "bought out" with diamonds and gifts. The days of women needing men to "provide" for them are long gone.
But I digress.. more to your point, just because something is a tradition, it doesn't mean we should throw our hands up and accept the status quo.
Partial solution: change product labeling laws /consumer protection laws/trademark laws/etc to have an exception for diamonds that allows all diamonds regardless of origin to be labeled as natural and/or mined diamonds.
I'd rather toss 10k into a couple emergency fund then waste it on a ring. Most marriages collapse due to money. I recall in my younger days I was with a girl and she dragged me to Brooks Brothers. As a child of poverty and evictions I couldn't understand why anyone who need to spend this much money on a shirt.
Even making well into the 6 figures I shop at Old Navy. Hell, my favorite partner thus far was making 200k or so, and she still used an IPhone 6.
Maybe whenever I meet someone new I'll ask on the first date, would you rather have 10k saved in an emergency fund or a shinny conflict rock ? Her response will tell me everything I need to know.
>Maybe whenever I meet someone new I'll ask on the first date, would you rather have 10k saved in an emergency fund or a shinny conflict rock ? Her response will tell me everything I need to know.
I don't know about asking that on the very first date, but it is very reasonable (essential even) to make sure your priorities and your partner's priorities match up.
I hear your point. How we grow up is important on how we make decisions but we can't turn a blind eye on individual facualty. If killing koala bears to make purses or minks for fur coats puts people in their feelings, I don't get how a blood diamond escapes the conversation of morality.
I don't think it's a radical claim that most want blood diamonds precisely because lot's of people suffered and possibly died for it.
That's the elephant in the room.
The sadistic narcissism of which I speak.
> Maybe whenever I meet someone new I'll ask on the first date, would you rather have 10k saved in an emergency fund or a shinny conflict rock ? Her response will tell me everything I need to know.
Haha. I doubt her answer is going to deter you from the path you intended. You'll probably still be mesmerized so maybe this is 29th date, watching netflix after getting laid type of talk.
Is money the cause or symptom? Unrealistic expectations of overflowing love clouding rational judgement of lifelong partnerships? I feel money is too simple an explaination - as if the foundation of the marriage was money in which case it was dead before it even started.
Some studies on factors leading to divorce do put 'money' (and particularly attitudes regarding money) as the biggest single factor, but I'm not familiar with any study (let alone a consensus) that it's a leading factor in 'most' divorces.
People buy expensive clothes because it makes others think they have money. By wearing a brand she is mentally leaving the proviety behind.
I don't think you have mentally left that state of mind. Thinking you need $10,000 in cash and telling everyone on the first date tells them this guy will never save more than 10,000 and he is cheap with his money. Might work for some but perhaps you are putting out a negative signal.
That's a dangerous mindset. I know too many people who can't wait to get into more debt, then complain when they can't afford things. I'm thinking of specific people that have more expensive versions of everything I own, while making less money than me, then saying "it must be nice" when they see me go on vacation or go out to dinner without considering the cost.
Plus I think you're being a bit unfair about his first date comment. It seemed like it was more of a quip to explain his position, than an actual plan
Exactly, anyone I'm with needs to understand the difference between my money and their money. I've had no problem dating plenty of fantastic girls who have their own careers( real life only and I tend to date a few years older ). That's by far my number one priority when meeting someone, have your own life together first.
$10,000 was a random number, maybe the pre-marriage emergency fund needs to be $50,000, 100,000 ? In my mind having that money saved up says when life happens, and life will happen you'll be okay.
I agree it wouldn't be a good signal for most women early on.
I remember, a few months in a relationship, lightly making fun of some of her "cheap" behaviours (which I really appreciated) and her getting very offended. At that point I realised I never communicated I was a massive cheapskate and I asked her if she thought she was more frugal than me. It turns out she thought so!
I think I definitely proved I won the frugality contest, but I learnt over time to mask this to appear more interesting and charming.
Money is not the only resource that count and that's worthy of optimising for; time and reputation are important as well.
Don't apply logic to fashion choices. Why do some sneakers sell for thousands? It is all about the attached backstory. Two identical shoes, but one was owned by a celeb. The backstory, the notoriety of owning the embodiment of that backstory, is the value. Some people want to own something 'from the earth'. Some would even pay more for an object that people suffered to produce. Lots of people certainly pay more for objects that come from animals suffering. Blood diamonds are no different than ivory or tiger parts, the backstories of which are so valuable that we enact laws to destroy their market.
Fast fashion is literally harming the earth, screw everyone who says that and thinks about that, I absolutely reject it and we SHOULD apply logic to fashion choices that directly harm us and our planet.
You can say the same thing about fast technology. There are mountains of discarded gadgets from just last year filled with toxic materials that first had to be mined from the Earth, and now are polluting the Earth.
I totally would say the same thing. That’s why I support all steps that make it easier for devices to be repaired and re-used.
My hi-fi system is 30 years old. My Squeezeboxes (audio players) are 15 years old. Laptop (running LXDE) is 13 years old. TV is 10 years old (only 720p but free of “smart” aka tracking features). The mobile phone is about 7 years old; this one is due for replacement and while I usually buy second-hand, I am considering a Fairphone 3. The most recent device I bought (a year ago) was an Apple TV which I’d hope to be using for at least another 5 years.
> Why do some sneakers sell for thousands? It is all about the attached backstory. Two identical shoes, but one was owned by a celeb.
It's mostly artificial scarcity, even sneakers that weren't personally worn by a celebrity sell for thousands when they are of a limited run with particular high demand.
Throw in scamming as a service, the FOMO marketing that has become ever-present, and the result is brands being able to charge absurd prices for mundane items.
It is very difficult, and expensive, to completely avoid these products (clothes and a phone being necessities, more or less, in our society). Not saying it's justified, but it is understandable that even contentious people give up when it is nearly impossible to know for sure if something was made by slaves. Which is a terrible state of affairs... this information should be easy to find.
You could buy second hand clothes and electronics if you care that much, but you don't.
The author is outraged at the hypocrisy, without realising the value of diamonds is that they are scarce.
If you can produce them artificially, they are no longer in the same league with the scarce ones.
Unnecessary ad hominem aside, second hand items are just as likely to have been made by slaves as new ones. The point is that our marketplace is full of the products of slave labour and almost no reliable information about it.
Reminds me when they closed a china assembly factory because of online activism, and the chinese people there started starving, because they had no other income. They would gladly have their factory back.
Also most of the help for african countries does the following:
1) There are 1 Million people starving
2) a lot of food is sent there
3) There are now 2 million people starving
People value (perceived) scarcity. They are not willing to pay for a reprint of painting (that might have better quality compared to the original), but they are willing to bid on the original.
Does it make sense? No, but humans are emotional animals that seek for differentiation.
Among my friends I've been surprised to find out how many believe that diamonds are genuinely scarce and that mined diamond engagement rings qualify as an investment asset.
Your comment shows your understanding of the diamond industry comes from a few articles you read on the internet, like an anti-vaxx person crying foul about vaccines. The facts, about 50% of the diamonds in the world come from Western countries like Australia, Canada and Russia. Another very large percentage come from stable African countries like Botswana and South Africa. There's no child labor in any of these countries, no terrorists, not thousands of dead people, not the terrible working conditions you read 1 article about a few years ago by a writer in the Congo or the Blood Diamond movie with Leo.
Botswana has used the opportunity of being so diamond-rich to require that diamonds be cut/polished in the country, enabling hundreds of their citizens to learn a new high-paying trade. Many countries require the sale of their stones happen inside the country rather than having all the stones immediately shipped off to European trading floors.
The real hypocrisy is people complaining about an industry they really know nothing about.
You’re just proving my point further - you provided a link to an article more than a decade old that has links to articles even older than that. I would really like people to learn about the industry because it would cut down on the inane comments in HN stories like this. The fact that you still hold DeBeers accountable shows your lack of knowledge - they don’t advertise any more AND they don’t have a monopoly AND they’re not even the #1 diamond producer any more.
“Produce nothing but feelings” — that’s called advertising. Same as Coke, BMW and Tumi.
South Africa - a parliamentary republic with three-tier system of government and an independent judiciary, operating in a parliamentary system. All bodies of the South African government are subject to the rule of the Constitution, which is the Supreme law in South Africa.
That sounds more stable than many South American countries, even Russia.
"Okay class, a very small percentage of diamonds are made via child labour, a few poor people dead, terrorist groups etc while most are made via modern mining practice. That is where diamonds come from. On the other hand, a successful marketing campaign has occurred declaring that all natural diamonds are made by torturing children. It may well be that your iPhone's supply chain causes more misery. How many would still want a natural diamond because diamonds are forever?"
That's a good point, the difference doesn't have to be in the item itself, BUT -
Does anyone, other than geologists of course, really care about the back-story of the diamond, how it was created and how it was mined? Or are they just hanging on to an idea that some of them are "real" and some "not real" for the purposes of social signalling?
If the latter, I would consider this much more changeable over time.
Someone should pay celebrities to wear specific jewelry with lab created stones to galas and awards ceremonies. Then resell the pieces, or even just the stones, at a premium since they were worn by <insert story here>.
Then folks would be buying something ethical and more glamorous. Maybe philanthropic donations could be associated to revitalize areas hurt by the diamond industry to further tell a story for the celebrities and consumers.
I've never met anyone that talked about it at all. Maybe I don't have conversations about diamonds very often, but people only ever seemed concerned that they were 'real', and latterly that they were conflict-free.
> People want to believe that they’re buying something special.
Jewelers provide certifications when buying diamonds. They'd be a) on the hook if they sold counterfeit products, and b) they wouldn't be able to sell anymore because of a tarnished brand.
I don't think the suggestion is that they'd sell counterfeits. The suggestion is that even the real thing has no special differentiating properties. The authenticity certificate is just a tool to achieve better signaling, nobody cares what it says as long as it says "authentic".
A lot of economists have argued that the "value" of something is based on the labor cost of production. So given that viewpoint, mined diamonds would be worth more than lab ones, even if they were identical in every way (yes, I also think this is silly, but that's what the market's indicating even today).
I think the white collar internet kind of distorts the picture because it tends to heavily reward things that signal compliance with rule of law.
There are a lot of people who would consider a car, diamond, piece of art, etc that has "a decently long chain of people had to stick their neck out doing criminal things" in its provenance to be a more interesting than an equivalent "produced in a high tech factory".
I think even with synthetic diamonds being 100% on par in every way there will still be a market for ethically and legally gray diamonds because people want to know they're buying something that someone toiled and/or took risks for.
I'd say price will probably be the determining factor but luxury status symbol markets don't work that way.
The people in these stories don’t buy diamond for their mechanical properties or bore tunnels, so everything surrounding the diamond itself is what matters.
How it was mined, where it came from, which company sells it and how all of that is marketed to the world (not even really to the owner) is the value of all of this.
It’s like sending a unicef postcard, what matters the most would be the effect on the receiver and how the sender feels about it. The object itself isn’t on the front stage.
"Does anyone, other than geologists of course, really care about the back-story of the diamond, how it was created and how it was mined?"
Yes of course. Everybody can buy a ring with a diamond, but if they sell you a story with it you can tell, it is even better :)
I don't think your metaphor of a famous writer's pen is apt. For that to work, we'd have to be able to reproduce writer's pens in a lab for less money and less ethical violation. Probably a better analogy would be using some rare squid ink vs. using manufactured chemical ink.
That an emotional attachment exists explains why a difference can exist, but doesn't explain why the attachment points in the direction that it does. Lab-grown diamonds could just as easily be the ones with emotional attachment, perhaps emphasizing how much hard work, research, ingenuity, and dedication went into making that diamond as a symbol of the hard work and dedication one is willing to put into a relationship. That the emotional attachment is specifically toward mined diamonds shows the strength of marketing.
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.
The current narrative is more along the lines of, "How much work should your fiancee spend on declaring his commitment to you?" The societal answer is at least two months. Salary is the convenient measure for this. The ring is the communication medium.
I got my wife a custom designed ring with a fairly large moissanite stone for ~$1,200 all in, and we spent about $2,000-$3,000 on the wedding itself. My wife actually would have been upset with me if I had gotten her a real diamond. Not so much because of concerns over conflict (though she did care about that) but because she felt that spending that much on a useless stone was outright stupid.
Might be an American thing? My parents spent about 1 month worth of my dad's salary on two wedding rings a long time ago. My dad actually wanted to buy a far more expensive ring for my mom, but she insisted to keep it simple and "cheap" and "unproblematic" to wear. Same story in the rest of the family.
Friends (usually a lot younger than my parents) spend even less on rings, I'd estimate 400-600 EUR per ring from what I keep hearing.
I've heard about that two months rule before, in American TV shows and movies, never thought about it. Now I wonder if it's really an American thing, or if people around me are just cheapskates :P
>These two achievements - making the diamond ring an essential part of getting married and dictating how much a man should pay - make it one of the most successful bits of marketing ever undertaken, says Dr TC Melewar, professor of marketing and strategy at Middlesex University.
>"They invented a tradition which captured some latent desire to mark this celebration of love," he says. Once the tradition had been created, they could put a price on it - such as a month or two's salary. And men, says Melewar, would pay whatever was expected because it was a "highly emotive" purchase.
Of course, it's all optional, jewelery purchases are not a mandatory part of getting married, I (heterosexual woman) have been married for a decade and neither of us purchased any sort of jewelery.
It's the opposite in my opinion. The richer the social circle, the less people care about stuff like diamonds or 2 months salary (which I never even heard of outside of online discussions). A diamond ring is barely a notable expense for a dual six figure earning couple.
I'm sure the jewelry businesses were peddling it, but I don't recall it ever being mentioned amongst people as if it were a cultural thing. Then again, maybe women talk about this kind of stuff, whereas men don't.
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 amusing factor to all of this, is that 99% of people can't visually tell the difference between a $100 and $10,000 ring. As a status symbol, it effectively works on the honor code, or based on someone directly reporting its cost! Sort of like fancy wine or art.
e.g. people will make a judgment on the 'realness' of your ring and it's validity as a status symbol, based if it's inflated value is perceived to be within budget, and if challenged you would have to stand ground by declaring it's cost.
I suspect - but obviously cannot prove - that this is an arena where being challenged means you've already lost because your claim is not credible. You're right, it's odd that something that's supposedly a clear signal is so murky to others.
Obviously this suggests that the status symbol hypothesis is kinda weak.
Please don't perpetuate flamewars on HN. You violated the guidelines, which ask:
"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."
If people would follow that simple rule, hellfires would die before they spread. Please don't contribute to spreading them by feeding them. The replies do more damage than the originals, because they open the floodgates.
>In the same alternative universe, the families of men look at the Cs of the ring and judge if "she is good enough for him". In the same alternative universe, men get together, pull out their diamond rings and discuss if those rings are worth the sacrifice.
You might need to take a break and take a walk away from media. Do you honestly think this is a thing for all women? Do you honestly believe life is like a television sitcom or romantic comedy?
> There's no need to flatter blatant sexism with the dignity of honest argument. Indeed, there is nothing to be gained by doing so.
If you think it's so out of line then why engage on that same level by replying with a bunch of "nope"?
I fail to see how his comment is blatantly sexist. If anything it's insulting both sexes equally and craps on the institution of marriage more than anything else.
Yes, his comment was unnecessarily cynical and we all know how well that goes over here when not directed at an approved boogeyman (BigCo, Congress, etc) but you can easily walk that cynicism back by replacing "down payment" with "signalling commitment" and "sex" with one of the other upsides to a stable marriage and the meaning is unchanged.
Buying rings isn't the problem- you stated "the value of a ring is how much a man is willing to pay for access to sex".
Without a further breakdown of why you think that's a reasonable statement to make it just sounds weirdly myopic.
People pay more because of status "I am a good provider and I can prove it", or because the woman wants to feel valued.
It doesn't go back to sex, not for a long time, in fact sex is very far removed from the idea of modern day marriage in the majority of western countries.
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.
>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.
No, they're really different. Just because the sunk cost fallacy has something to do with spending money doesn't mean it applies whenever money is spent in an unwise way.
But buying a wedding ring is not only about showing off, it is an old method of psychological trickery that is supposed to make relationships and marriage more durable.
It used to be "sunk cost" for a man, since until recently it was expected that if you break the engagement your ex-fiance would keep the ring (right now in most of the states law require it to be returned). Expensive wedding party is another sunk cost.
>> right now in most of the states law require it to be returned
Is this true? That would be very surprising, as it is essentially a gift, or at the very least, joint property subject to divorce adjudication like anything else.
Because houses and cars are useful, the GP pointed out that being uselessness is the entire point
>the high cost and useless-ness of the gift are a feature not a bug
The other thing is the marketing says diamonds are "forever," presumably like your love, but houses and cars require expensive maintenance and are easily damaged. Not good if you're buying something symbolic.
Not that I personally agree, far from it, we didn't make any jewelery purchases when we got married.
> The other thing is the marketing says diamonds are "forever," presumably like your love, but houses and cars require expensive maintenance and are easily damaged. Not good if you're buying something symbolic.
Definitely some symbolism there. Relationships (romantic and otherwise) are indeed more like houses and cars - innately valuable, easily damaged, and requiring regular maintenance - than diamonds.
Right, I agree (and that's why I'm not "into" diamonds/useless trinkets) - but that's a realistic take, not the sort of thing people who are buying/receiving diamonds want.
For houses it's completely plausible that the motivation is for the asset to appreciate in value and even if the marriage ends in divorce, both parties end up being able to extract some value from it. For a retail diamond the purchaser is likely to see zero value recovered from it whether divorce happens or not.
For cars, I suppose my hypothesis would say cars likely to depreciate very quickly (such as high-end SUV) are more suitable as engagement gifts than practical (prius or such), which fits roughly with my observations in real world
Reminds me of these outrageously expensive dishes some places are selling, where they put gold on the food, and other expensive ingredients that don't fit, all for the sake of creating the most expensive burger/steak/pizza whatever.
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.
On the other hand (pun not intended) diamonds are primarily used this way in engagement/wedding rings, which is a social signifier, so asking this question in the context of social pressure is arguably a better estimate of how people would behave for a form of conspicuous consumption.
> 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]
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...
Right or wrong, Galloway's thesis would specifically reject that idea. Synthetic diamonds are equivalent (or superior!) on an atoms level. But on a bits level they lack the history of being formed in the Earth's crust, which stays scarce.
Diamond marketing exploits that to good effect -- most diamonds are marked and registered in a database that traces its unique history. Doing so makes it possible to value the history as unique, and also leads by example in investing in the value of that history (they make a big deal out of the tech used to confirm authenticity). Since the final purpose of the diamond is to demonstrate stored value rather than produce it, the target buyer is focused on whether others recognize the value, not whether it is justified.
On a personal level, I think the history of "real" diamonds is almost always horrific and a negative asset! I hope companies like Pandora can put marketing power into creating scarcity stories for synthetic diamonds.
> Doing so makes it possible to value the history as unique
It may make it possible, but I would dispute that many people really care all that much about the story. Sure, they care about 'real', but what that means is up for debate.
> the target buyer is focused on whether others recognize the value
Pretty solidly they don't, hence the abysmal second hand values! But you're not wrong - to split hairs I think it's whether others recognise how much was spent, which lots of people confuse with value :)
> most diamonds are marked and registered in a database that traces its unique history
Most engineering projects around cultural products change (not necessarily improve) the "registered in a database" process. Whereas most value comes from creating / enriching a "unique history."
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.
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.
> A Veblen good is a type of luxury good for which the demand for a good increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. The higher prices of Veblen goods may make them desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. A product may be a Veblen good because it is a positional good, something few others can own.
Maybe the key would be to keep the artificial diamond ring at a similar price point. Larger, designer brand, more manual labor details, I don’t know. Not saving money, but get a superior product.
> 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.
Then he can spend the same money for a bigger diamond ? That would give also more bragging rights to the future wife (nobody will come and ask if it is a natural or artificial one).
You can turn around and resell a Banksy for something comparable to what you just paid.
Try doing that with a diamond. You walk out of the diamond showroom with it, and its resale value plummets to the value of the base metals, the work of the setting, plus a small fraction for what you had just paid for the diamond.
A certified laser etched diamond is a mass produced item that is pretty easy to authenticate. The brand name store selling it to you is invisible once it’s on your hand. There’s no such thing as a “used” diamond.
So the diamond is worth whatever it can be bought / sold for online. If walking out of the store drops it’s value, you’re donating to the store.
Buy an exactly equivalent stone elsewhere if the price drops too much after you buy it.
I think the issue is that there is no really trustworthy place to go for used diamonds to ensure you're not buying a cheap knock-off or lower grade gem. Most people don't understand cut, clarity, and whatever else are the other ones. Pawn shops are amazing places to buy SUPER cheap jewelry, especially diamonds. The issue is that, unless you definitely know what you're doing, it's super easy to get taken advantage of.
I wish there was a trustworthy clearinghouse/reseller for used jewelry and gemstones. That would be fantastic.
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).
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.
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.
Sure but, please, let's show some context sensitivity.
An engagement ring is emphatically not costume jewelry, and if you don't understand that "real jewelry" is an important sense the antonym of "costume jewelry", well, now you do.
> > Jewelry that is neither expensive nor rare stops being jewelry.
>
> Costume jewelry is usually neither expensive nor rare, and yet it remains popular with certain demographics.
Okay, let me clarify: Jewelry that is neither expensive nor rare stops being jewelry, it becomes costume 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.
You could just use an artificial stone and no one would know. If you just care about the signal, buy good replicas of things you could plausibly afford, how hard can it be.
Not everyone is comfortable with the risk that the truth might eventually come out.
What some intrepid manufacturer should do is create custom diamonds that are actually more expensive than natural diamonds, with some subtle structure that cannot be found in nature. That solves the problem of immoral sourcing, and better suits the purpose of displaying wealth.
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.
I never understood the idea behind a wedding ring being an "investment". It's not like you plan on ever selling it. It's purely an expense. If you wont sell it, then a ring's value is only in its aesthetic and any sentiment attached to it by the wearer - neither of which seem to be strongly related to the initial purchasing price.
Of course, people often sell their rings if they get divorced... but wouldn't that make actually an expensive ring an incentive to separate? The whole gesture makes very little sense.
The gesture, is that the man is willing to spend that much money, and because of that, is serious about the woman, sort of like a purchase. Its not an investment in the sense of producing or keeping value.
Of course, times are very different now, and it is quite an antiquated idea.
So like an escrow for a marriage proposal... except it's held by the person to which the offer is made and is never closed out if the offer is accepted. I still can't say I get it.
Rings I get. They are a symbol of commitment, a sentimental memento, and just a nice accessory. But the idea that the cost to purchase the ring is somehow a reflection of that is still silly to me.
Because people are rational and can be convinced to abandon notions of value deeply ingrained since childhood because of a nice analogy during a single lecture?
By this logic there are no good analogies because there will always be someone that will refuse to look at the situation differently for whatever reason.
To each their own...it helped me look at lab diamonds differently. I've always assumed they were somehow chemically inferior to the real ones, maybe compromised tensile strength or something.
> 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.
Assuming a somewhat efficient market, I'll take the $50 cheeseburger.
Obviously I would want a more expensive thing than a less expensive thing from a partner. If we split up, I could sell the more expensive thing for... more.
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.
Your comment proves the point on marketing; diamonds are not actually that rare, a lot of the scarcity is marketing plus control of supply by De Beers & others.
In fact, Diamonds are some of the most common gems in nature!
They’re actually not all that rare. Big Hope Diamond stones yes, but your run of the mill variety that 99.9% of people have are not all that rare. The “rarity” comes mostly from the the tight grip a small number of companies have over mining and production of raw stones. You can make tap water “rare” if you run the waterworks.
It also comes from selling them as "this is a sentimental item that you should keep forever" and "these are bought as meaningful gifts so it would be gauche to buy one second hand" to limit the size of the secondary market.
But the rarity leads to intensive mining and human rights abuses. There's a good kind of rare (like say, an original painting, bought from the artist) and a bad kind of rare.
Sentiments can change. Diamonds will not become unemotional, but the emotional reaction will likely go into reverse soon.
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.
>I think everyone kinda knows about synthetic diamonds, they just don’t care.
I 100% disagree. The stigma around cubic zirconia and 'fake' jewelry is real and alive, and absolutely carries over to any kind of man-made gems. I also don't think most people have any idea at all about the issues in the gem trade. Source: My highly educated co-workers who were astounded to read about conditions in emerald mines after Elon Musk got popular.
Cubic zirconia (Mohs 8) is less hard than diamonds (Mohs 10) or Moissanite (Mohs 9.25). For something that gets a lot of wear, the CZ will get scratched up and have its edges rounded off more over time than diamonds or Moissanite. But, if its something that only gets occasional wear this is likely not going to be too much of an issue. Just don't go banging your stone on a pile of diamonds.
CZ also has a lower refractive index and less dispersion than either diamonds or Moissanite.
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?"
He asked that way because it's irrelevant what the man would choose in the case that he's buying it for a woman (which is generally the case). If a majority of women prefer "real" diamonds, there's no way he's going to use his preference over hers for something this important. Women's preferences determine diamond buying behavior on the market. If you want to make a difference, you have to start there.
My initial instinct agreed with you,but I then wondered if there would actually be a relevant gender difference in answers.
In western culture, still today I think,majority of men would be buying and majority of women would be receiving diamonds. It would be interesting if this affects answers. Would a buyer go for more practical cheaper option while receiver goes for more expensive traditional options? Or a different split completely , or none? I think it'd be a fascinating exercise.
Same reaction. I've anecdotally asked this same question: "man-made or natural diamonds?" to my friends in the past – mostly because I can't get past the ethical concerns, but wanted to understand the other side.
I found majority of my men friends argued it's the same diamond without the ethical concerns if you go man-made, while majority of my women friends chose natural (reasons included social pressure, the story, and so on).
Anecdotes aren't proof. But perhaps there is something to looking at this from a gendered (proxy for giving vs. receiving?) lens.
As a male giving a ring, I bought a real one. Logic was that it was cheaper and better quality once you get over ~1-1.25 carats. If lab made wants to compete more meaningfully they'll need to get better at the engagement ring size diamonds which I'm sure they will with time
I would expect there to be a gender difference in the US, due to the social influence of marketing. But I don't think highlighting the difference would help the discussion in any way.
If the professor is making an argument that one choice is clearly the rational choice, and then highlights differences in how different groups make that choice, then they are directly implying that some groups are more irrational than others.
This phenomenon has to be more localized than Western culture (the worldwide diamond consumption hints at it being US-specific?) - I for example don't know anyone who even contemplated buying one for proposing. Granted, this is purely anectotal, but over extended family and workplace colleagues this includes a bunch of milieus.
Yes I do think it's an american thing to buy a separate engagement ring, having a prominent diamond, in addition to wedding rings (which often don't have diamonds).
My family in Europe doesn't have the whole engagement ring concept.
Well, there are (lots of) statistical regularities that disfavor specific groups of people. And any one individual could have answered “no,” and thus avoided showing themselves as an idiot who values rocks just because a monopoly prices them exorbitantly.
Its more the marketing that is sexist. Marketing for Jewelry (and especially diamonds) usually aims at woman, not men. Men more likely would choose the cost-saving option, because for them there is not much awarness around the pricing of such meaningless "decoration". And this would kinda sabotage the purpose of the question.
Good for them. It's literally the same material, and we can now use scientific and engineering advances to remove the need for people to toil and die underground to get them.
Hopefully the process is more environmentally friendly too.
They are real diamonds.
I find it hi-goddamned-larious that the moment these became viable, the industry switched from "Diamond purity is the be-all and end-all and you must have the clearest, most pure" to "Oh, well of course it's all about having the right impurities to increase sparkle and character, lab-grown diamonds don't have character"
Just like with sapphires, if we're not there already I'm sure it won't be long before exactly the right type and number of impurities or faults can be introduced to mimic any natural diamond.
Why do people pay insane amount for a box copy of Super Mario Bros, a game you can play one pretty much any device. ROM dumps are literary the same data.
I guess rarity is hard to set a price on. And people like being rare and unique.
Original Super Mario Bros carts are rare, diamonds are not. Natural diamonds have an artificially reduced supply thanks to a cartel, if their market actually functioned they’d be very cheap.
The original Super Mario Bros sold ~40 million copies, excluding all the re-releases. It’s not a rare game at all. You can buy the cartridges on eBay for less than $10. Complete in box versions for a few hundred at most.
The only thing rare about this big sale is that it’s sealed in the box in perfect condition. All that extra money just for packaging material. Collectors are truly weird.
I saw an "unboxing" video for Nintendo amiibo's recently, by a collector who had amassed a large collection (all of them?) was unboxing them on video. The unboxing process obviously de-values each of the items, but the amazing thing about it was how shocked he was at the detail & manufacturing quality of the figures after removing the packaging: details he couldn't make out at all when they were packaged.
It's so strange. Buying boxed items with no intention to (ever?) unbox essentially amounts to just paying for the box itself, rather than the contents.
Natural diamonds are really cheap. You can go online right now and buy rough diamonds for $3.50/carat. Diamonds that you would want to put into a ring are much rarer and diamonds have all the qualities that jewelry enthusiasts want are rarer than that.
We need to start thinking about jewelry like hi-fi audio. If you just want to listen to good music then lord knows you don't need a $10k setup. You hit diminishing returns really fast and your untrained eye isn't gonna be able to tell the difference between a $500, $2,000, and $10,000 diamond -- they will all be pretty. But that doesn't mean that there aren't people who do notice and do care.
OK, but then there's still a physical difference, purchasing the physical object, including original box, published by nintendo, or reprogramming your own generic which will contain different electronics.
But yes, as I said above, there is value to some people in the rarity and uniqueness of that original, even if you could pump out something that is to all intents and purposes identical.
But diamonds aren't all that rare, the market is managed to restrict supply, even with that everyone and their grandmother has one on their finger. And few people (other than geologists I guess) are really bothered about the back story here. They have an idea about what's "real", and what's not, but that can change.
(I also think where we're just talking about lumps of a material, it's slightly different to a manufactured object, perhaps)
> Actual diamonds have occlusions, slight color shifts, unique sparkle patterns
All of which can either be recreated in a lab now, or are likely to be possible before long. See for example synthetic star sapphires.
> I like rocks and minerals
Good for you, so does my step-dad (he's a geologist). The man was a nightmare to try and drag around the New York museum of natural history, I thought we'd never get out of the mineral section...
Would the lab grown process tolerate adding in some super-fine particulate matter, added using a random number generator to control the amount? "Natural" imperfections on-demand?
Most likely yes, this has already happened with other synthetic gems - look up star sapphires, once exotic and sometimes mounted on engagement rings alongside diamonds, the process to create carborundum was figured out, and then another to insert the right inclusion, and hey-presto, you can buy them in bulk for around $1 per carat. They can create bi-colour sapphires now too.
A quick search of the internet turns up various articles about inclusions in diamonds deliberately introduced to control the properties of the resulting material. So if we're not there yet with synthetic jewellery diamonds, we will be.
The sapphire market is interesting in some ways, 'natural' sapphires still fetch a few hundred dollars per carat. It genuinely fascinates me that someone would pay (as an example I just found) over £7000 for a ring with a 4.98 carat "natural" bi-colour sapphire set with six small 0.1 carat diamonds, when you can get a synthetic stone chemically and physically the same for around £12.
Last I checked, lab grown diamonds had no fluorescence. If that is still the case, it might make fluorescent diamonds more valuable than non, as a sign they are more “natural”. Though in the past fluorescence in diamonds was considered a negative trait.
See also: the return of vinyl. Tube amplifiers. Yellow lighting. All from people arguing that poor reproduction of audio and natural light is superior!
Tube amplifiers are still where it's at for guitars. Still not beaten despite the attempts of digital signal processing. The reason is that the same thing that makes it a bad general amplifier makes it an excellent guitar amp.
Can you elaborate more? What are the things that are bad for general amp but good for guitar amp? Is the amplification non-linear in some specific ways and how does it help with guitar music? (I know nothing about guitar except what it looks like.)
General amps seek to diminish distortion. In particular:
1. Clipping - an overly amplified signal can have the peaks of its signal "clipped" off.
2. Cross-over distortion - because of the way most amplifiers work, one part of the circuit amplifies the positive signal, and one the negative (above and below the midpoint of the signal). Where the one part "crosses over" you can get a misalignment which results in distortion.
3. Harmonic distortion - for example the extent to which a 400Hz tone is translated into a certain amount of 800Hz, 1600Hz etc overtones.
All of these things can actually result in a cool guitar sound in the right proportions. Hard rock in particular has strongly distorted sounds created by tube amps (for the most part). But even sounds which we think of as cleaner have a significant amount of tube distortion (e.g. the intro to Sweet Home Alabama, or the main riff of Day Tripper). If you put an electric guitar into a regular amplifier, in general, it sounds flat and terrible.
The vinyl thing is ironic because the reason it sounds better is that it's such a horrible medium that only highly skilled production sounds right on it. Your half hour bedroom mix won't cut it.
The flip side though, is that you're making diamond miners unemployed. I suspect if they had alternate employment opportunities available that were more pleasant/better-paying, they'd have already taken them.
So losers are the poor folks digging in the ground and winners are the companies who've just built themselves a lab.
Maybe a way out of this, would be price up the grown diamonds to include a charitable donation to help create alternate employment for the miners. Would be quite nice to have that representation included in the shiny thing on a finger.
This argument is as old as time. There even was a satirical text on the matter 2 centuries ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric_Bastiat#Eco...: The Sun, being an infinite source of free light, is unfair competition to candlemakers and should be blocked to allow the economy to grow and people to make a wage.
This is the case with any advance, and could be said about all sorts of exploitative, dangerous forms of employment. In general we seek to remove these and consider it a good thing and an advance for humanity.
Should I feel sad we no longer send kids up chimneys to sweep them?
I agree that social programs are needed to help these folks, but I think even without them, undermining this industry is a win.
I've seen vidoes from some of those mines and I don't think the miners browse job openings with their morning coffee before heading off to work. I think they probably just do whatever the man with the (literal or figurative) gun tells them to.
If the best option available to people was diamond mining, by taking that away from them we’re by definition pushing them into an even worse option. That’s a big problem I have with a lot of the do-good commentary on developing world labour. Taking away options from people, even bad ones from our point of view, isn’t necessarily doing them any favours. None of these peoples options are going to look good to us. Actually helping these people means improving their existing options, or giving them new better ones.
Having said that, I think given the other pretty grievous activities associated with the diamond trade, this is probably a good move. They’re not called blood diamonds for nothing.
Who said anything about slavery? The vast majority of third world workers mining diamonds do so in the regulated commercial sector. These are largely technical engineering jobs that bring investment in infrastructure into the country, certainly much more so than many other local opportunities. A single mine like those in Botswana can employ thousands of people, and be the core of the local economy. I'm not saying there are no slaves in diamond mines, but if so it's a marginal source.
Oh my good grief. What on earth did you think I was advocating?
>If your business is to force people into slavery, then it is part of your business to remove other avenues for them to get out of slavery.
I suspect your sentence got a little mangled. It sounds like you're saying that businesses should try to prevent people from getting out of slavery by removing other avenues by which they could free themselves.
I suspect you mean that they should create those avenues for freedom, instead.
So far these diamonds were both the primary cause of conflicts, as well as the main way of financing and prolonging them. Wars are expensive, so if you take money out of the game many militias/ fractions/ criminals will simply loose interest in those territories, and that should reduce the corruption and make things more stable for people there. In theory, that's way more important for progress than outside help, although it will also be needed.
If it isn't diamonds, it will be land, water rights, drug distribution, religious purity, and on and on.
Diamonds are just another means of gaining power and wealth. They're only a problem in societies that don't have the mechanisms for dealing with inevitable power and wealth disparities.
> If the best option available to people was diamond mining
The best option available to a person in the short term is not necessarily the best option for a society in the long term. In this case, it almost certainly isn't. Compare "resource curse" [1].
I think that we shouldn't keep funding exploitative companies that treat people badly, and industries that are dangerous for workers and environmentally damaging. I think that's a win anyway.
Here's another take - able bodied workers are less likely to be sucked into an industry which digs up shiny rocks to send overseas, and may be able to take up something of more benefit to the local economy.
I’m worried that it takes a certain amount of poverty/desperation in the local workforce to be exploited heinously. For them, an exploitative job is probably the difference between eating a little or not eating at all. Yes, it’s good that they won’t be exploited once the mined diamond industry goes away, but I think they’re still getting the rug pulled out from under them. Their income is replaced with nothing, and in a country with a weak economy, there’s probably very little there to help these people in the interim. It’s a desperate situation, even if it’s for their benefit.
There's a very strong chance I am completely wrong about this but my feeling on the matter is as follows.
As long as mined diamonds are profitable there is a strong incentive for criminal interests to hinder any attempts to improve the lot of the local inhabitants so they have a continued supply of very cheap labour. If you make diamond mining unprofitable then the criminal elements move on to other more profitable enterprises. This leaves the local populace free from interference, and efforts by aid agencies to improve their lot may have a better chance of succeeding.
I agree with you. I think it will all work out for the better. I just think the path between exploitation and greener pastures may be a rough one if there is no support structure to keep people from getting desperate once they are jobless. It’s hard to look to the future when you’re worried about putting food on the table tonight. It’s a good thing that this is happening, but I sympathize with the people affected because it might get worse before it gets better. I hope they can keep their chins up and see that there is a huge light at the end of the tunnel.
Or how about a functioning government with minimal corruption for starters? clean water? a functional banking system? access to education? UBI is putting the cart before the horse
Charities like GiveDirectly do it using various mobile baking programs along with physically driving shipments of cash to remote areas that don’t have phone access. It’s a complicated problem that involves a lot of human time but it’s also a mostly solved problem.
If you want to read about the insanity of manipulation in the diamond industry, this Atlantic article on de Beers from 1982 is a … gem.
Of the many shocking moments, one that stood out to me was the way they went after post-war Japan to convert their "backwards" desires to ones of a more "forward-thinking" diamond friendly impulse:
"J. Walter Thompson began its campaign by
suggesting that diamonds were a visible
sign of modern Western values. It created
a series of color advertisements in Japanese
magazines showing beautiful women displaying
their diamond rings. All the women had
Western facial features and wore European
clothes. Moreover, the women in most of
the advertisements were involved in some
activity -- such as bicycling, camping,
yachting, ocean swimming, or mountain
climbing -- that defied Japanese traditions.
In the background, there usually stood a
Japanese man, also attired in fashionable
European clothes. In addition, almost all
of the automobiles, sporting equipment, and
other artifacts in the picture were conspicuous
foreign imports. The message was clear:
diamonds represent a sharp break with the
Oriental past and a sign of entry into modern life."
"The campaign was remarkably successful. Until 1959,
the importation of diamonds had not even been
permitted by the postwar Japanese government. When
the campaign began, in 1967, not quite 5 percent
of engaged Japanese women received a diamond
engagement ring. By 1972, the proportion had risen
to 27 percent. By 1978, half of all Japanese women
who were married wore a diamond; by 1981, some 60
percent of Japanese brides wore diamonds. In a
mere fourteen years, the 1,500-year Japanese
tradition had been radically revised. Diamonds
became a staple of the Japanese marriage. Japan
became the second largest market, after the United
States, for the sale of diamond engagement rings."
This has for a long time now been the best article I’ve ever read from The Atlantic and I used to be a magazine subscriber. If you haven’t read it already, I highly recommend it!
I am operating under the assumption here that said articles can pertain to any topic, and not just diamonds. If that is not the case, I do apologize.
I am a huge fan of William Langewiesche's work (some of which, incidentally, has been for The Atlantic). He writes crisp, longform articles on a variety of topics, including but not limited to aviation [1], shipping [2], nuclear proliferation [3], the dark net [4], and private military contractors [5].
There was an article the other day that talked about the resale value of diamonds. Basically jewelers refuse to buy back diamonds at any reasonable price (compared to original retail value. And refuse to make new rings with old diamond etc. So there is very little market for second hand diamonds.
Diamond prices are fairly stable, the issue is jewelers mark prices way up and most people don't know what a good price is. If a diamond goes for $5k wholesale, chances are they're looking to sell it for $10-20k. Since most people only buy 1-2 engagement rings in their lifetime they don't know what is a reasonable price. They "shop around" at three stores that are all owned by the same company. So they end up paying $15k for a ring. Then if they need to return it they only get $5k for it. They overpaid due to the emotion of the moment and expect to get something close.
Even in the article you listed there were a number of offers all close to each other. ~8-10k is a 'reasonable price' for that ring.
Most jewelers I've interacted with are more than happy to buy your diamond for a bit under wholesale cost. They're also happy to make rings with old diamonds. They make money selling settings too.
One issue is the public. There are a number of people who don't want a "Used Ring". But, there are a large number of diamonds being sold that have been owned previously.
I feel like if you took and old diamond ring, reset it and refinished it, there would be no way to tell that it was "used". Maybe resetting it will introduce some flaws that weren't there before.
Kind of crazy when people say they want a "new" diamond, uh....well all of them are literally millions of years old unless it's lab grown.
> I feel like if you took and old diamond ring, reset it and refinished it, there would be no way to tell that it was "used". Maybe resetting it will introduce some flaws that weren't there before.
Can anyone who works in the diamond industry respond to this? Can anyone tell if a diamond has been made into a ring before? Would it damage the diamond to remove it from the ring? This sounds like an opportunity to plaster signs that say "WE BUY DIAMOND RINGS" all over and buy them back from consumers at a discount from wholesale.
Not in the diamond industry. But, most diamonds are etched with a serial number. GIA etches a report number you can look up online for instance. Similar to a VIN you could probably google it and see if it's been listed/sold elsewhere. Unlikely though as the turn around on diamonds is very low.
The easiest way is to determine through the setting. Styles change. If it's a setting from the 50s that isn't made anymore it's probably old. If it's a setting from a company that is < 10 years old it's got a better chance of being new.
Diamonds are not damaged when swapping settings. They are often removed and reset if a prong breaks for instance.
Most people just don't want to buy from estate sales or auction. So, jewelry stores will do that, clean it up, put it in a new setting (or leave it as is), and resell it as 'new'.
This is all correct! I've worked in the diamond business for almost a decade now and see people complain on HN and Reddit constantly about diamonds all while barely understanding the industry at all. The common complaint of "you can't sell them for what you paid" is a dumb complaint because they don't understand the HUGE markup the stones receive at retail.
Here's the profit margins that the stones receive along the way:
- Miners selling to cutters - 10-15% profit
- Cutters selling to wholesalers - 3-5% profit
- Wholesalers selling to retail - 10-20% profit
- Retail to consumers - 100-200% profit
Everyone on these threads is always mad at the miners and I never see any anger placed on the Jared's, Kay's, Zale's of the world (all owned by the same company btw).
> The common complaint of "you can't sell them for what you paid"
You and the other person gives loads of reasons why people giving that complaint are entirely right. The marketing is (partly) that it is valuable. In practice you'll not be able to resell it for a similar value.
I was hoping the takeaway would be “don’t buy diamonds from retail”. BlueNile is the best option here in the US for buying diamonds, usually around a 10-15% markup over wholesale.
My wife is a jewelry buyer for big retail , this is accurate but people also don’t understand the overhead and cost associated with retail in general. It’s much more burdened that some B2B middleman. My opinion after countless conversations with her about the industry is the best model would be something like Trunk Club where they mail you a bunch of rings, you decided which to keep. It probably exists in some format, if not, the obvious problem is the value of the inventory and the potential for fraud/theft that it would attract. Unfortunately it’s essentially what’s been going on in our house since covid WFH, she had a million dollars of product sitting on a shelf in her home office.
> Basically jewelers refuse to buy back diamonds at any reasonable price (compared to original retail value. And refuse to make new rings with old diamond etc.
I bought my wife's diamond out of an ugly ring I found at a pawn shop. I brought it to a jeweler at a mall and had him pop it in one of his bands.
I saved a TON of money, my wife got a modern design with a really high quality stone, and the jeweler still got some business and his ring on another finger.
The comment predicts a precipitous fall in price. A gem-quality diamond price index [1] shows fluctuation but nothing precipitous:
Jun 7 2018: 124.79 (day of Reddit comment)
May 4 2021: 124.27 (today)
The reddit comment ignores obvious macroeconomic trends. Growth of middle class in China and India are adding to the diamond demand (a lot), in addition to general global population growth and greater purchasing power.
I'm at the marriage age right now and I see tons of my friends getting married.
A friend got proposed a couple of months ago and her ring is ~40k USD. In my opinion, that's crazy since they're spending ~30k CAD on their wedding.
My partner also mentioned that she'd like a wedding ring of the same calibre since according to her - diamond ring is how much love / value / worth I hold for her. Furthermore, a significant group of middle/upper-middle class want naturally occurring diamonds (because they're "real") over lab produced ones (not because of the quality, but because of the tag associated with and the societal group pressure). Furthermore, the same group also hate moissanite because it's not diamond.
It's irrational, marketing and conditioning all they way down.
Hopefully, stuff like this forces lab grown diamonds to the mainstream culture so that we can finally get rid of that mentality.
> My partner also mentioned that she'd like a wedding ring of the same calibre since according to her - diamond ring is how much love / value / worth I hold for her.
I don't really understand situations where peoples' partners say things like this and it comes as a surprise. This feels like an extremely aggressive statement on how they view your relationship, and the level of trust and mutual understanding you have.
I just can't imagine getting to the point of considering marrying someone and not knowing well in advance that they will hold an opinion like this. And if they seemed like the kind of person who would have this opinion... I probably wouldn't be staying with them, because it seems like it would flag a variety of other uncomfortable personality traits.
How did you react? Was it a surprise to hear this?
Social signaling and innate competitiveness is a hell of a drug. A former all-Linux employer had standardized on issuing Dell laptops, and everything was fine. Until some joiner in middle/lower management petitioned for a Macbook Pro and got it, and a couple more popped up in the Excel-jockey stratum, and the floodgates were opened. PMs and team leads all started to report all sorts of "problems" with their old laptops (too slow, gets too hot) to motivate for replacements - thought they had to run Linux VMs to get any work done. The Dell/Apple laptops weren't just tools anymore - they were now a social signal/status symbol to say "I am an important person" in every meeting room. It was fascinating to observe, because getting a Macbook made their lives worse (having to develop in a VM with slow disk I/O - this was before docker took over the world). Computers became the visible representation of your place on the totem pole; the same thing happens with engagement rings within social circles when going for drinks/brunch. You don't want to be caught dead with the Dell of engagement rings in a room full of Macs.
> I probably wouldn't be staying with them, because it seems like it would flag a variety of other uncomfortable personality traits.
I wouldn't go that far - we all have hobbies/interests we are passionate about that we're not utilitarian about and are willing to go all-out on. Judging a person on one axis feels like a mistake to me.
Cocaine is also a drug, and yet, one doesn't need to date someone addicted to either.
> I wouldn't go that far - we all have hobbies/interests we are passionate about that we're not utilitarian about and are willing to go all-out on. Judging a person on one axis feels like a mistake to me.
I don't this is a hobby so much as a world view, or as you stated, an addiction. To me it indicates a very materialistic, shallow worldview. If 40k rings are required to show love, what do they think of people who aren't as wealthy? What would they think of you if you lost your job? Heck if someone's marrying you, why do you need to show your love at all, shouldn't that be established to them?
I think you should be incredibly judgy about who you choose to marry.
> To me it indicates a very materialistic, shallow worldview. If 40k rings are required to show love, what do they think of people who aren't as wealthy?
Or - hear me out - the partner was embarrassed to verbalize that she's competing with the friend's engagement ring, and therefore created a less embarrassing, post-hoc rationalization as to why she wants a $40k ring too. Here's a thought experiment - had the friend gotten a $6k ring, would she have asked for a ring closer to $6k or still gone with $40k, by some intuition?
> Heck if someone's marrying you, why do you need to show your love at all, shouldn't that be established to them?
Unfortunately, no (on both sides: some people marry for the wrong reasons, and it's not close to showing your love - which shouldn't be an event)
> I think you should be incredibly judgy about who you choose to marry.
> Or - hear me out - the partner was embarrassed to verbalize that she's competing with the friend's engagement ring, and therefore created a less embarrassing, post-hoc rationalization as to why she wants a $40k ring too. Here's a thought experiment - had the friend gotten a $6k ring, would she have asked for a ring closer to $6k or still gone with $40k, by some intuition?
Marginally better, but still greatly concerning that the person you're supposed to trust most is too embarrassed to communicate openly imo.
Do an experiment - ask your partner if she wouldn't marry you if you don't give her precious stone. If she won't, I can't see how such a relationship is based on love, rather than various calculations. The idea that money express love is plain stupid from any point of view I can imagine.
One big warning sign right there.
FYI I didn't give my wife any diamond, in fact when I proposed to her on top of Mont Blanc after grueling dangerous skitour I didn't even have a ring since she never wore any before, so I couldn't get correct size.
It didn't matter a bit and still doesn't - everybody we talked about considers my proposal way cooler than usual big money being thrown around. I bought her a ring of her choice afterwards (cheap stuff), and no surprise - she lost it / got stolen when working at tomography lab few months afterwards. Not a problem, imagine losing a ring worth 40k (upon sale, resale maybe 50% of it if lucky).
Some people have just been conditioned, by friends/family/marketing, that 'if he doesn't buy you a diamond, he doesn't love you'. There is _some_ logical thought to it. Putting money down on a marriage can be seen as a sign of commitment, and that's the way it's usually portrayed. If he won't spend money on the symbol of your marriage, then he hasn't committed.
I, personally, decided I would not marry someone who thought this way. I know it is a weird hill to die on, but if someone won't change their mind even after seeing all of the pertinent information about the diamond mining industry and the marketing, then that is not the type of person I want to marry. I luckily found an amazing woman who thinks the same way I do.
> My partner also mentioned that she'd like a wedding ring of the same calibre since according to her - diamond ring is how much love / value / worth I hold for her.
Do not marry this person. At the very least, they're bad with money (presuming you/they are not a multimillionaire presently where $40k is just pocket money).
Wow, you might want to talk with your partner about buying a ~40k ring. That seems like it could be a big sticking point in a marriage, especially considering it could pay for an entire university degree.
> diamond ring is how much love / value / worth I hold for her
Wow.. I find it hard to believe how someone can say/repeat such a statement about the size and authenticity of a shiny rock to equal the love you have for the person. It sounds so materialistic - but, I can't blame her either, it's part of the value system of the surrounding society she grew up in. It's impressive how effective the diamond industry's marketing has been over the last century or so.
Don't want to get too personal but why not date in a different circle?
Almost no matter how financially well off you are, why have $40K on your finger. Not worth the danger (unless maybe you are $100m+, have 24/7 security, rich).
Years ago the natural diamond in my wife's wedding ring fell out somewhere, so she stopped wearing the ring. When our 25th anniversary was coming up I asked her if she wanted to get a new ring. Our 20-something year old daughters got wind of this and said under no circumstances could we get a natural diamond. I'd never paid much attention to the issue since I hadn't been in the market for a diamond in the 26 since years since I purchased one for the first ring (a ring that only cost $600 since I was a poor college student, no wonder the diamond eventually fell out).
I did some looking around and learned about Moissanite. The women on r/moissanite were especially enthused about it. From there I learned that you could design and purchase Moissanite jewelry directly from China. I had my wife look through the rings of one of the stores on Alibaba and choose one that she liked, except the color was wrong (she wanted rose gold instead of platinum). So I reached out to the company and asked about the possibility of getting it made in rose gold. I was assured it was no problem. I told them I wanted solid rose gold and not plated. They said the price would be higher, but no problem. I sent my wife's ring size and a few days later they sent back CAD mockups of what the ring would look like with measurements. I had them enlarge the bottom of the band and we came to an agreement on what cut/color/clarity/etc. all of the side moissanite stones would be. Then we started working on the main stone. We came to an agreement on size (2 Carat), color, clarity, style, etc. We could specify everything about the stone from the height of the crown to the width of the edge to the way the stone was cut to the bottom point - frankly we had to read up a lot of how stones are cut and what the different options are to know how to appropriately respond. About a week later they had finished cutting the stone and sent us videos of it under different light conditions so that we could approve it. Then they manufactured the ring and sent us videos of it to approve. After approval and final payment we received it in the mail about 3 days later.
Frankly my wife loves the ring. It really is gorgeous and everyone thinks the Moissanite is a real diamond.
My favorite part is that the entire thing only cost me $700. 10 out of 10 I'd definitely do it that way again.
Married members of HN, what did you do if you think diamonds are utterly ridiclious however due to societal constraints some kind of ring is required for your SO?
I did not get a dianmond, but a Moissanite ring. A couple of things I learned along the way:
- I bought the ring and the Moissenite seperately. I bought the ring at a regular jewelry store (my spouse found one she liked). It is a very HARD sell when you buy the ring to also get the diamond. I ended up buying the ring online to pick it up, and I have wondered since then if they would have refused to sell me the ring if I tried to buy it in store without a diamond.
- I bought the moissanite online. It was nice seeing a linear increase in price on size versus an exponential price difference (I got it from here: https://www.charlesandcolvard.com/ )
- When I took the moissanite to a jewelry store to get it mounted, the "fake" diamond detector actually said the moissanite was a diamond! I was actually very surprised to see that, and I was candid in the fact that I brought them a moissanite.
- As soon as the jewelry store found out I bought them a moissanite, they said they cannot do anything with it. I ended up bringing the ring and moissanite to a store that deals in moissanites.
My spouse likes her ring, and absolutely no one has been able to tell the difference. I have seen is commenting on how "flawless" the "diamond" looks, and the "diamond" must have cost a lot due to it looking flawless.
Interesting. When I went in to a jeweler to get my Wife's ring appraised for insurance purposes, the tester they pulled out said that one of the (3) diamonds was moissenite. Not surprised that those testers are nearly worthless.
So arguably buying a diamond ring has always been a symbol of wage oppression and terrible mining conditions in Africa, and any right thinking person should boycott it.
Fortunately my SO isn't that struck by sparkly rocks. She prefers antique jewellery with character and history. Her wedding ring is 150 years old.
Diamond engagement rings date back to 1477, and diamond jewelry dates back much further. It was viewed as very exclusive/rare. Diamond engagement rings for the masses was from DeBeers advertising starting in 1938.
The growth in diamond mine production in the late 1800s tremendously increased diamond supply. DeBeers took advantage of historical perception of rarity and actual lower cost of materials to create a new market.
Although to be fair, this was in part because diamonds are hard to cut and they don't look good without faceted cuts. Diamonds only started becoming popular in the late 1800s when South African mines started producing them in bulk and modern cuts were developed, and they went mainstream once the De Beers marketing engine kicked in after WW2.
Likewise. My wife now wears my late mother's wedding ring, after we had it remade to fit her. (Resizing was non-trivial, as it is not a simple circle.) It's not hugely valuable, but it has a unique character and history.
(Added twist: the jeweller couldn't have it ready in time for the ceremony, so we made do with a dime-store trinket, and swapped it later.)
The most compliments I ever got on my spouses ring is in the couple months after our first child was born and her fingers were too swollen to wear the original wedding rings. She switched to a $10 Target ring with a huge fake diamond.
If you are on the same page as your partner, you'll have no trouble sorting this thing out. In my case I bought a joke ring that cost me about 2$ in a toy store.
If you are not on the same page as your partner, you have more important concerns than a stupid ring of metal.
> In my case I bought a joke ring that cost me about 2$ in a toy store.
I love it.
My ring was a spinner, which people find far more interesting than some pretty stones in it. It cost about $10.
Hers was one with a fingernail-sized stone the colour of her eyes, that cost a few hundred.
The metals matched on eyesight, which was good enough for us.
The rings represented what we expected from our marriage - to join us, the way we were, rather than some showy way of expressing our love. We're no longer in the age of selling a ring to get by if a marriage falls apart or something else happens.
There are many considerations and compromises to be made when finding a partner. Compromising on her stance regarding blood diamonds might be necessary when finding a partner who shares your other values.
I think it's safe to say that if I were marrying someone who required a blood diamond, we'd be on different enough pages that we should not get married.
Few people outside of a satanic cult would actually require a blood diamond specifically. But people do have different tolerances to the risk of getting a stone that isn't as "conflict-free" as the jeweler says it is.
I did exactly the same, engagement ring was made of plastic with some fake shiny stone! Though for our wedding rings we did get real gold with no stones.
However, my feeling is I don't trust this 100%, and for my SO having a "real diamond" meant a lot. For me, in this case, the need to get a "real diamond" for my SO trumped my ethical stance on where the diamond was sourced.
I think if you are going for 100% ethical purity, then you should either get no diamond (many other beautiful, precious gemstones if you still want one) or just go for it to make your SO happy.
Did your SO explain why it's so important for them to get a "real diamond"? While I understand wanting a valuable piece of jewelry as a token of the value of your relationship, I must admit that the extreme fixations on specifically diamonds always seemed rather odd given that there are so many other beautiful gemstones to chose from. Of course it's also cultural thing, I think diamond engagement rings are especially popular in America?
This might well be the most successful marketing campaign in history.
I'm not in America, but she studied jewellery and has a deep interest in gemstones. The story of it being formed in the earth over a long period of time is what gives earth diamonds something that lab diamonds just don't have, purely the story. I think this is largely down to the marketing of diamonds which has really embedded itself in the culture of jewellery and the rituals around getting engaged.
We did discuss the ethical concerns of earth vs lab diamonds beforehand, and the decision to go with an earth diamond was intentional.
The diamond was a yellow, cushion cut diamond. I agree, there are other gemstones that are often overlooked and have beautiful qualities.
When you buy a mined diamond, you are paying for the story, of it being a finite thing, formed in the earth over a very long period of time. Lab grown diamonds don't have that story.
Separately, the work that goes into cutting/finishing diamonds is incredible and there is a huge amount of variety between individual diamonds. They are very fascinating things.
>When you buy a mined diamond, you are paying for the story, of it being a finite thing, formed in the earth over a very long period of time. Lab grown diamonds don't have that story.
I do not know who the “you” is here, but I would bet most people that want to consume diamonds (especially mined) as an end user for display purposes want to do so to signal their (potential) purchasing power, especially amongst their network.
Although, in this day and age, diamond and jewelry in general are pretty poor status signals. In general, material objects are a poorer show of status than simply having vacation pictures from all over the world constantly showing leisure time (the more finite and expensive commodity).
The "you" here is someone buying a mined diamond. I would imagine you're right on status being one of the top reasons someone buys a diamond in the first place. There's other reasons (aesthetics, tradition), but I think the earth diamonds status as a rare expensive thing and it's artificial scarcity is what keeps them so desireable.
I'd argue that the fact that they're rare, special things found in the earth is a big part of the story. At least from people I've talked to who prefer earth grown diamonds, this is something that's come up multiple times.
However, people always turn a blind eye to the part of the story that involves cruelty, which is largely down to De Beers excellent marketing and creation of artificial scarcity.
I don't mean to sound like I'm apologising for the industry. I agree with you, the general population don't care about the geology of diamonds. But there's definitely this feeling that lab grown diamonds are seen as this "other" thing that "isn't real" and I think that largely stems from this mythical idea of diamonds being rare things that are found in the earth.
I think it's quite common knowledge that diamonds were traditionally mined before we were able to make them in a lab, and because of this it's seen as the default to which any other methods of making a diamond are compared.
I agree that the general population sees the ones dug out of the ground as "real" right now. I think the story being paid for is the DeBeers story though, of diamonds and marriage being inseperable, I don't think many people consider much where they came from, or consider the "rare thing dug up out of the ground" part of it particularly important in itself.
I guess I'm splitting hairs, yes there is definitely a cultural hangup about mined diamonds being "real" and made diamonds being imitations, fake, whatever. I just don't think many people care that much about the actual backstory, they just want a 'real' one. As such I think the synthetic diamond industry has a bit of an uphill struggle on its hands, but not an unwinnable one if they can convince people that theirs are 'real' too.
And to my (very literalist in many respects) mind, they are.
(edit - I will add that I have gone out of my way to source lab-created stones and silver settings to make jewellery for my partner in the past, so far mostly using star-sapphires, and she seems to have loved them. I find the idea of lab-recreated gems pretty fascinating, and I think that enthusiasm helped.)
Semi-related, but here's an interesting fact, De Beers (the company that popularised diamonds for engagement rings, hoards a huge supply, and creates artificial scarcity) has also invested heavily in lab grown diamonds: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-29/de-beers-...
They've been doing this to try and undercut lab diamond growing company's in an attempt to retain control of the diamond market in an era where lab diamonds are becoming more and more popular as people consider their ethical choices.
> However, my feeling is I don't trust this 100%, and for my SO having a "real diamond" meant a lot. For me, in this case, the need to get a "real diamond" for my SO trumped my ethical stance on where the diamond was sourced.
Lab grown diamonds are real diamonds. There is a simple, easy, and cost-effective solution to the problem you seem to have skipped over here.
I agree with you, which is why I put real diamond in quotes here. Lab or earth grown, both are real. Sadly, not everyone sees lab grown as having as much desirability as earth grown diamonds. While I would be open to receiving a lab diamond, I've met many people for whom it would be seen as a budget option.
Although through an objective lens they are the same, for a lot of people there is an emotional difference between buying (or receiving) a lab grown vs earth grown diamond which means they can't be treated like-for-like in every situation.
Oh absolutely! My partner studied jewellery, and had an interest in picking the exact stone for the ring, so in this case that wasn't a viable option. I think in a lot of cases, when you're buying gifts for people etc. defaulting to a lab diamond is a great choice. Big companies (Pandora etc.) moving to lab diamonds will help make that choice the norm and push back against the stigma that lab diamonds aren't "the real thing".
Alternate view: Almost everything in life is ridiculous when you view it with cold logic. It's utterly ridiculous to put golden balls on a fake tree in your house every year, but due to societal constraints most people in Western societies do it.
Your SO probably doesn't want a logical gift, she wants something sentimental that makes her feel that you care about her. For some people, that's an expensive rock with no utility, for others it might be something different. But applying logic to what's ultimately an emotional, illogical affair isn't always productive.
You should where possible create rituals which do have a direct purpose anyway.
Big example of real rituals which have purpose, Key Signing Ceremonies. Small example, when I leave somewhere I always pat both pockets twice, everything I absolutely need is always in those pockets, keys, wallet, phone. And so I won't leave them behind.
The weird thing about the diamond engagement ring is that it isn't a powerful symbol of anything. The wedding ring is the powerful symbol, and that would conventionally just be a metal band. You see those everywhere which is of course made more practical by their being a simple metal band.
> when I leave somewhere I always pat both pockets twice, everything I absolutely need is always in those pockets, keys, wallet, phone.
After my wallet fell out of my pants pocket into my office chair and I thought I'd lost it for 2 days, I updated this ritual to do it every time I walk through a doorway. That way if I lose something I know exactly which room it's in.
I'm entirely against this sentiment, because logic isn't cold, it's a way to maximize your comfort and happiness. However, useless, expensive gifts are more effective than purposeful gifts from a mating perspective - wasting money is a sign of wealth, and that's cold logic.
The ring is basically a sacrifice, which goes with the "blood diamond" thing pretty neatly.
Exactly. The ring is not for you and your wife will be wearing this for the rest of her life if all goes well. If you are unwilling to give her something extravagant because you value paper money so much more, then you’re not ready to go through with the sacrifices that come with a marriage. If your wife wants a diamond, but you want to control your wife and bend her to your will of not having a diamond, you can try and you might succeed, but there will be some resentment every time she sees it on her finger and this will not be an issue that just fades away. Expect to hear it echoing for a long time. Do you want your marriage proposal to be associated with an argument, disagreement, or even a compromise?
On the other hand, a loving relationship and marriage is worth much more than a diamond ring ever could be. When you have a caring wife and you both love and help each other you’ll get an immeasurable improvement in your life.
To conclude, yes it’s overpriced, yes there are problems with diamond mining, yes DeBeers artificially controls the supply, and yes you can find a rarer stone for less, or something more exotic, but your wife wants a diamond, so you buy a diamond and hopefully live a happy life.
Just to say, thats a great attitude - and that I am happy to hear is an option amoungst a sea of 'if you are not on the same page your marriage is in trouble' comments
Yeah, I'm not understanding a lot of the sentiment here. I suppose if you're a fresh grad, or not making a ton of money. However if an engagement ring's cost is some barrier to getting married... perhaps you're too young to get married?
Life is expensive, and between cars, house, the actual wedding, kids, etc. The money I spent on my wives engagement ring seems like child's play.
Also I feel like most women want it, because it's what everyone asks of them. 100% it's societal pressure. If you tell someone you got engaged, question #1 will be "Ohh let me see the ring!"
> Also I feel like most women want it, because it's what everyone asks of them.
To me it feels more like a classic case of mimetism: all beautiful / successful / happy / rich people have a diamond ring, so most women naturally want one too. It's not really about fear, but more about a strong desire to have the same object as your role models.
Perhaps mimetism. Do you lump say all fashion under that category as well?
I think there is an unofficial "pecking order" of society. People treat you differently if you roll up in a new Mercedes vs a new Honda. If your purse is a Louis Vuitton or a Walmart brand. They all functionally do the same thing, but society uses these things to lump people into camps.
In that same regard, I've seen women who are not materialistic seem embarrassed to show off their modest ring which is wrong. I think a lot of people treat engagement rings in the same way as designer bags, and nice cars.
We can say it doesn't matter, but if society ranks you differently I think it does matter on some level.
> Life is expensive, and between cars, house, the actual wedding, kids, etc. The money I spent on my wives engagement ring seems like child's play.
I wonder if your literal children would feel like that if you'd taken the same money for a ring that will (presuming you proceed with marriage) pretty much never get worn, and invested it in an index fund until their 21st birthday.
"child's play" indeed is what I would call this level of financial misplanning.
>I wonder if your literal children would feel like that if you'd taken the same money for a ring that will (presuming you proceed with marriage) pretty much never get worn, and invested it in an index fund until their 21st birthday.
I don't know what culture you're from. But in North America engagement rings are worn as every day jewellery. So it gets used daily.
>I wonder if your literal children would feel like that if you'd taken the same money for a ring that will (presuming you proceed with marriage) pretty much never get worn, and invested it in an index fund until their 21st birthday.
I guess you're presuming that because I spent money on one thing... I'm unable to spend money on another thing? Do you apply the same logic to everything in your life? "I really should have gone with the cheapest clothing available as then I could have saved $x towards my children's future!"
Regardless my children do in fact have investment accounts opened in their names and invested in index funds, and I don't regret buying my wife a nice engagement ring, our our Audi, or our house, etc etc. I hope if you get married you don't put every expense through the view point of "If I invested this for 21 years!" as you'd never take a day of vacation, or enjoy yourself. :)
Warren Buffet takes this even further. He doesn't spend any money on consumption, choosing instead to invest it for 21+ years. And then he keeps it invested and refuses to give it to his children.
"How dare you spend what at the end of the day is a trivial amount of money on something that your significant other appreciates and enjoys. You should be eating soylent green and living in a 400 square foot home!"
If I were struggling to get by, it would be a fair discussion. However the audience on HN I presume to be middle class, if not upper middle class it seems like an odd argument to make.
I am curious, is the diamond thing a US-centric trope? I do not know anyone here who genuinely cares about that sort of thing, generally people want some discreet metal ring. It may be a precious ore to symbolize the commitment but otherwise I have not seen anything outlandish among my friends or family members who got married.
Eastern Europe. We didn't bother with the engagement stuff and the wedding rings were plain gold bands. Which we don't bother with any more after 20 years.
I've almost never heard of anyone buying engagement rings, diamonds or no diamonds.
I do know a nouveau riche (or aspirational nouveau riche) couple whose wedding bands have tiny diamonds on them.
In Germany it is not a thing either. Discreet gold/silver rings are much more common. I like it, it is less decadent and you can wear the ring every day.
That's weird, all my SO's friends who are engaged/married here in .de got diamond engagement rings. They also wear a wedding band, and tend to only wear the engagement ring on special occasions..
As we know, Germany is very diverse. Probably it depends on the region and the social environment. I know that in conservative families it is common that mothers give their inherited engagement ring to their oldest son/the first married son for example.
In my direct environment many people broke with that tradition.
Caved in and bought an expensive diamond. What really counts here is social ideas of what is necessary. You can push against but most people will do what's socially the done thing. I shudder to think what horrible things we might be able to get people to do as a gateway to getting married. Eg the Spartans had to murder a Helot to graduate IIRC. What if you had to beat up a random person to get married? People would still do it I think.
Not long after I got married, I read about Moissanite.
My wife told me not to get anything for my eventual proposal because she's not going to be wearing it. She preemptively said yes before I did anything.
But a ring is still needed for the ceremony.
I bought some small amounts of rose gold and white gold, gave it to a custom jeweler and told them to do whatever they always wanted to do (but no client ever accepted) using only the gold I bought.
They gave me back a rose gold ring, with a gigantic "gemstone" made of the white gold I bought.
From far away, the ring made everyone think it had a huge diamond on it. It was really funny.
Total cost $1000 including labor, not cheap but at least the ring was special. Formally proposed with it and my wife liked it.
My wife, as promised, never wore it after the wedding. She likes to be not robbed.
Not married (yet), but I gave my SO an "engagement iPad".
It was around what you would expect an engagement ring to cost you in this region of the world, the lens cover is made out of sapphire crystal so the jewelry aspect is there, and should I perish in an accident the resale value should give her 2-3 months of runway assuming she moves in with my family, considering we have an infant daughter.
On top of that she very much enjoys the practical aspect of this gift.
Why practice a personal relationship in a way others have designed?
Isn't it somewhat contrary to the theme of Hacker News? To me, the term "hacking" describes the habit of doing things in a more interesting/efficient/fun way than how they are usually done.
Beyond the social convention that "it's the thing to do" at a certain point in a relationship, some reasons are:
- Marriage provides financial assurance for a spouse who will defer their career to raise children.
- Some friends and family (particularly those of the spouse) will absolutely treat you differently when you're married to someone versus in a long-term unmarried relationship.
- Depending on the jurisdiction, spouses have certain rights that unmarried partners do not, e.g. with regards to the legal system and hospital visitation. I know a couple that got married because one of them was an activist/journalist and frequently attended protests in which he was at risk of arrest.
- In some circumstances, it makes it easier to purchase a home together and make other large joint financial investments.
- Under some tax regimes, you pay lower taxes when married.
- U.S. citizens living abroad in a low-tax country with a foreign spouse can engage in advantageous tax planning.
So, although the question-asker is being downvoted, your response does actually cover interesting discussion topics, and to summarise, the answer could be that the systems and conventions need to change?
- I believe in the UK (where I live) one has all of the legal and financial implications automatically when a relationship reaches a certain age (3 years I believe). Legally you would be treated the same way as if you were married.
- Friends and family; My family certainly feel this way, my wife's I'm not sure. I'm "mixed"-culture/race/etc so some of my family have different cultural views. My wife and I don't feel strongly either way about how our children deal with this when they grow up, so perhaps our (millenial) generation is changing the "social" side of it already?
- Legally I believe you have all of the rights you describe, however, it may be more difficult to prove the relationship without a piece of paper. We've had to present our marriage certificate for various things relating to our child(ren) for example.
- It _should_ have no effect on your ability to purchase a home in the UK
- There is a tax benefit for low income couples in the UK, but I believe our law doesn't specify "married".
- I don't know how any of this affects UK citizens abroad as I've never looked into it.
> I believe in the UK (where I live) one has all of the legal and financial implications automatically when a relationship reaches a certain age (3 years I believe). Legally you would be treated the same way as if you were married.
Not an expert on the UK, but here in Canada common law marriage is absolutely a thing. Just filled in my 2021 census yesterday and one of the selectable marital status was "common law" and many government documents refer to the status. Common law relationships are generally much easier to dissolve, but courts have held them as strong as legal marriages, especially if the relationship lasts decades and includes children. They form without any specific action beyond time spent living together.
Interesting reading, thanks for that. I have learned something. I was intentionally liberal with my use of the word "believe", because it seems difficult (to me) to prove the relationship without that piece of paper. I imagine (note I say imagine, this is based on no evidence or research),you could challenge it successfully in a court of law though, if required, for some reason?
The myth aside, I don't think you have "no" rights, the first link says "fewer". It's really hard to prove something without an "official" document though so I understand how it could be more complicated.
I think that in many (most?) countries nowadays, marriage is already no more than just a legal status that offers those practical points, so I am not sure if anything needs to change.
You don't have to get a ceremony/ring/party, go at the church or whatever your culture/religion associates with the act of getting married.
You can just sign the contract privately, which makes you legally married.
Same for divorce, I believe it only gets complicated when you fight about children, money and assets, otherwise you can both just decide to stop the contract.
Also in the UK, plus one to everything above (with the caveat I have no experience in the children area)
For friends and family, the older relatives on both sides I believe just assume we're married.
There is one difference, and that is in default treatment. If I died/was rendered otherwise incapable of communicating my desires, there is now an onus on my partner to prove that we are in the relationship she claims we are. That exists with marriage too except it's "solved" by a marriage certificate.
Disclaimer: I'm not a tax advisor and this is not tax advice. It might not even be correct. Do your own research and consult an attorney about your specific situation. For entertainment purposes only and so on.
U.S. citizens must pay taxes on worldwide income, regardless of what country they live in. Citizens of almost all other countries are not required to do this (they pay income taxes to the country where they live and/or earn income). It's a remarkably raw deal for U.S. citizens abroad, considering that we don't get any services to go along with our tax obligations. You'd think we could at least pop into the consulate for one of those COVID vaccines that are now so plentiful stateside that they can hardly give 'em away, but no.
Now, if you're a U.S. citizen and you live abroad in a country with no income tax (e.g. Monaco) or low income tax (e.g. Bulgaria), and you earn more than the ~$100k limit of the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion (FEIE), then you're going to be paying U.S. tax, because you won't have paid enough foreign tax to deduct it all under the Foreign Tax Credit. Also all of your non-"earned" income is going to be subject to U.S. tax - dividends, capital gains, etc.
But let's say you live in Monaco (0%), Bulgaria (10% flat), Dubai (0%), Panama (25% top bracket), or the Cayman Islands (0%) and your spouse is not a U.S. citizen or permanent resident (not a "U.S. person" for IRS purposes). If your excess (> $100k) family income is credited to your spouse (or a company owned by your spouse), and that income is not generated in the USA (e.g. not from a U.S.-based business, rental properties in the U.S., U.S. stocks, or business trips to the U.S.), and you file with status "Married Filing Separately" on your U.S. tax return, then your spouse's income is not included on your tax return.
Say you do consulting out there on your little island in the Bahamas, and your foreign spouse sets up a consulting company and hires you as an employee. You get paid a salary by the company that is conveniently under the FEIE limit and thus pay no U.S. tax. Your spouse gets the dividends and pays no tax on them. So long as this isn't entirely a paper fiction arrangement wherein you do 100% of the work but your spouse gets basically all of the money, for U.S. tax purposes it ought to be kosher. (Again disclaimer: not a tax lawyer, this could be wildly incorrect, consult your own advisor about your specific situation)
Your family company's profits get invested into real estate (again in low-tax / no-tax jurisdictions) in your spouse's name. The passive income from that again flows to your spouse for tax purposes, and as long as you keep filing "Married Filing Separately", your spouse is invisible for U.S. tax purposes and no U.S. tax is due.
This is the only way that I know of, short of renouncing citizenship, for a high-earning U.S. citizen expat to avoid taxation of their worldwide income. You still have to file a bunch of paperwork, though. Also, due to a stupid quirk of IRS policy, because your spouse doesn't have a SSN/ITIN, you can't complete a 1040 in the e-file system and you have to file a paper return. Hope you FedEx'd it to the right address, because only a few IRS offices will accept courier deliveries.
You must also be careful about how you set things up for estate planning purposes. If you both live in the U.S. then there is in general no estate tax due when one spouse dies and bequeaths their assets to the other spouse. If you live in a different country, then it can get very complicated! Depending on who owns the assets, what country they're located in, who owned them before marriage, whether they were "gifted" to the other spouse over time or not, etc., the surviving spouse may owe substantial taxes in one country or the other.
It's an interesting question! I think a lot of the time when both partners feel getting married adds no value, they don't marry! I know plenty of older couples who never got married and don't regret it.
Some good reasons I've heard.
1. Legally it's a lot simpler if you're married, if one partner dies for the other partner to get control over assets/legacy.
2. For many couples it's a ceremonious way of making a commitment that is recognised and understood between cultures.
3. In some cases, it allows for certain benefits/perks to be shared (tax, healthcare).
4. It's fun to have a party and get family together.
I personally don't see Hacker News as one homogenous culture with a distinct opinion on what "hacking" is. Being curious, rational and experimental, I still think getting married can fit into that.
If you were truly trying to optimise every aspect of life to be some sort of objective best option, I think getting married may or may not be the right option. I do think generally we give too much power to "the culture" over how we live our lives though and so I do think being sceptical of the rituals/ceremonies we're born into is a positive thing.
>"To me, the term "hacking" describes the habit of doing things in a more interesting/efficient/fun way than how they are usually done."
I was with computers and sometime electronics for like 40 years already. That alone supplies me with enough "interesting ways". I do not have to have every other aspect of my life to be "interesting". I do not sleep on a stool either.
There are also many convenient practical aspects of registering marriage that are mentioned in other replies.
I considered marriage and we even filed half the paperwork, but I decided against it because it would end up in the public records that I am married, and to whom exactly.
While I personally would find this very weird, from an infosec perspective, having a relatable backstory should make it easier for you in regards of infosec.
With married status you can conceal things probably better than not.
At least in germany you can go to the Einwohnermeldeamt (citizen Report office) and can request a blockage into your data. This should be enough for a stalker.
Are you allowed to decide what happens to your partner in case of an emergency? Or to decide for her if she is unable to decide anymore?
Also would you save taxes? Here our income is combined and divided 50/50. When I earn 100k and she 20k, we both pay taxes for 60k which comes to something like 100-200$ per month or 2-4% in savings.
If it is similar your stalker already hurts you on a daily basis.
From a practical point of view, once kids where involved and we started looking at things like inheritance, it turns out that many things would be much quicker and easier, legally, if we where married if one of us got very sick or died (in our particular jurisdiction).
You have to if you want to be close to your partner if something happens and they are in the hospital.
For me it was a great way to reproduce an image I liked very much, an old image of my baptism/christianing (I'm no longer part of that Organisation) where all my family was together.
We invited them all and we're planning things to make sure it is a great experience for our guests and based on the feedback it worked out.
It should be possible to do this without a crazy event but it is easier with something people know.
Also I was sick to my stomach for a while week and very nervous on the wedding day. I do assume that this experience is unique in itself but I'm not sure how significant this is in a relationship.
Here it can also help the partner in case of inheritance.
For example, if you haven't lived together for over 3 years and aren't married, then unless there's a will the partner won't inherit anything. If you have a kid, the kid will get most of the inheritance but can't manage the money until they're 18.
Been a few cases in the media here where the kid inherits lots of money on a locked account while the partner that's left struggles to make ends meet.
In germany at least there is quite the tax incentive.. Say you earn 150,000k, and your SO earns 30,000, then you pay tax at 180k/2(90k) levels instead of 150k levels....
Currently my wife is humming the first 4 bars of The Star Spangled Banner over and over and over.
The best answer I can come up with is that marriage is a constant battle of wills. A never ending struggle for absolute supremacy over the will of another person. To take an independent human and bend them to your desire or at least drive them crazy.
What's more thrilling than that? Also how can you be more crushed when that's done to you.
In short marriage is 100% pure adrenaline. Now that bloodsports have been abolished it's the purest most glorious release for any sadist out there ... also any masochist because one way or the other you're gonna get a big swig from both cups.
There are lots of other types of pretty rock available.
I think also if you decide to bow to those constraints, grit your teeth and buy a diamond, you can get ones certified to as less likely to have murder and slavery involved in their extraction. Albeit you'd still be supporting that ridiculous market indirectly. Smashing the stigma against lab diamonds seems like a great idea.
Explain it to them. If they don't understand or come to some compromise, maybe they aren't the right SO to marry. I'm married and we don't wear rings at all, we discussed it and agreed they were pointless and spent the money on better things.
Lab grown diamond was much cheaper for the size; looks just as great; I have no emotional attachment to dirt grown or lab grown. I think diamonds are kind of ridiculous since they were a PR campaign by De Beers, but they are quite beautiful, and lab diamonds are high quality for cheap. Social judgement is a real thing and it is nice to just sidestep it with a "good enough diamond" (I think social judgment of diamonds is completely ridiculous, that is the one reason why I considered just not getting a diamond at all so I wasn't in that game). But it is nice to never even have to think about it and people tend to just say "oh that's a nice diamond" (I went for an average "nice" size for my area, not gaudy) and move on, and if it was lost or stolen, I could actually afford to buy another one...
I simply didn't care - bought a meteorite ring instead. Everyone is impressed as few know such a thing exists. I even tell them it's rarer than diamonds (I don't know that for a fact, but it makes a good story for the wow factor).
It's got to be a conversation between you and your spouse - my (now wife) said she definitely wanted a diamond. I ended up proposing with my great grandmothers ring, that has a small diamond. She loved it. Some people will want to go select a ring together at diamonds direct. Some won't even care about a ring.
As far as friends and family goes, they can get over it. I actually have a lot of fun telling people about the current scam that are diamonds, if they make any sideways remarks about my wife and my preferences. There really is no defending the diamond industry, so if they are pushy or too nosy, it's an easy argument to 'win'.
My wife understood my concerns, and she really wanted a diamond that was left to her by her grandmother. Easy compromise with a custom ring.
( I also managed to accidentally end two relationships that were already going in the wrong direction by casually mentioning my concerns about diamonds. At least I noticed how it was being interpreted the second time. 8-/ No complaints with how that accidentally played out. )
Not every society in the world requires a diamond on the wedding ring. In large parts of Europe, the wedding ring is just a golden ring, maybe a bit bigger or nicer, but doesn't cost an arm and a leg compared to other jewellery.
I always found the stories that middle-class people are expected to pay 20+K for the wedding ring quite hard to believe, but it may be it's true in some parts of the world.
My (now) wife picked out her engagement ring on Etsy. It's an antique ring with a sapphire gem. Of course that took away some of the surprise from the proposal, but we were of the opinion that the fact one wants to get married shouldn't be a surprise. And the time/place of the proposal can still be somewhat of a surprise, or at least special.
In the UK at least, there is an "engagement ring" that has a diamond typically, and then a "wedding band" that is typically a gold (or silver) band that goes next to the engagement ring on the ring finger, with a similar ring for the other partner on the ring finger.
That's not really what they meant by "acceptable" - just that either of those metals are traditional.
What's "acceptable" depends on the people in the relationship, and what will make each of them happy.
I didn't have a ring when I proposed to my partner as it was a fairly spontaneous decision when we were in a foreign country, and I knew the location of the proposal would matter much more to her than a ring.
But then after we got back we worked together with a jeweller to design a ring, which made sense as she has better design judgment than me, and we weren't doing anything very lavish/expensive, just something tasteful that she would love (for the record it didn't have diamonds, but rather a morganite stone with white gold).
The conversation is framed from the point of view of tradition in some parts of the world. Of course the cops won't arrest you if you decide not to get an engagement ring. It's like going to work in flip flops, it's not illegal, just frowned upon in many circles.
These faux-intellectual "I'm a robot, beep boop I don't understand context and I parse conversations like a compiler would, semantic error on line 5" conversations are probably the least productive on this website, and they're unfortunately very common. It's not smart, it's just obtuse.
Talk about it. It may turn out that the societal constraints don't enforce the conflict mined diamond. And you may find out more about what it is that is motivating the choice.
But you can't force things and insist that the whole thing is a useless charade. Objectively, sure, but not everything in life has to be.
My SO did not want a traditional diamond gold engagement ring due to normative ways, consumption, global diamond trade, etc. but it’s hard to not buy such a thing number one, and two, u have to wear it each day. I bought a polar bear diamond (Canadian) which in addition to being mined in a friendly way (environment, labor, etc), uses a cut that hides its size. It’s brilliant in the light and sparkles like no other. Then I chose platinum as it isn’t as showy as gold and doesn’t corrode like silver. So overall, it’s an amazing ring to look at, isn’t traditional but so too hides its cost. Rings are for spending time thinking about your partner and what they want to be shackled with. She really liked it, even though she never would have expected it to look like what it is.
Same here. We both did want a ring of some sort. I wouldn't care much about the material as long as it takes all the beating from elements that my fingers are subjected to, and Mrs would find diamonds or rocks abhorring and wouldn't even go for a gold band. So we bought modest silver bands that happen to be replicas of some ancient bands found a few hundred years ago locally. Mine has been sitting around my finger for fifteen years now except during a brief enlargening operation.
I bought a 1.5 carat lab-grown clear sapphire for $900 and had it installed into a custom old-school setting made of platinum. I said, in many earlier conversations, diamonds are overpriced and I wouldn’t waste my money on it.
My mother had inherited a bunch of jewelry from her mother, among which was her engagement ring. It was a really nice ring that was just sitting in a box, so I asked if I could have it and used that.
We opted for a moissanite. Partly because of the ethical problems with diamond mining, and partly because my wife didn't want to carry something with the replacement value of a small car around on her finger. See previous discussions of moissanites on HN: https://www.google.com/search?q=moissanite+site%3Anews.ycomb...
Knew my partner wanted a diamond and of a certain cut. Knew I wasn't excited about spending a fortune on a diamond. So I split the budget midway so half was spent on the diamond/ring and half was spent on a trip to propose overseas somewhere memorable. Ultimately the happiness of your partner is what counts, but this combination made it more palatable for my practical self.
Instead of a diamond ring, I went with a saphire ring. My wife likes blue and it was all I could afford at the time (~$800). She loved it either way and knows we were dead ass broke at the time and doesn't complain.
She works as a physical therapist now and wears a silicon ring because she bent the wedding ring giving CPR to a patient in a hospital a few years ago (patient lived).
I remember reading some threads on slashdot about alternative materials for wedding rings accompanied with stories of why they were more romantic than gold and diamonds.
I really wish I could find them or similar discussion because I’d really like to make a push for a non-diamond ring.
But as other replies here mention - if she wants a diamond, it’s a diamond that she wants.
I opted for a moissanite engagement ring from Charles & Colvard. There really isn't any perceivable difference between moissanite and diamond, except the light reflected by moissanite seems a bit more colourful.
We bought an antique one, containing two diamonds and a nice large amethyst. Because the diamond secondhand market trades at such a detriment to new ones this was very affordable.
Engagement ring had a diamond, but pretty basic. Think I paid €250 six years ago (which wasn't even 3 days salary, let alone 3 months). Wedding rings are just white gold.
What ethical grounds? Based off an article you read a few years ago about 1 mine in 1 African country that accounts for < 1% of all global diamond supply?
Along with being a visible symbol of my love and commitment to my wife, I also use my wedding ring to open beer bottles - so, you know, not utterly ridiculous.
It's disingenuous to proclaim that this is the only meaning - every person and culture that uses rings in this way applies their own meaning to it.
That said, when I was deciding whether or not I, as a male, wanted a wedding ring, this was exactly the reason that convinced me. I got married much younger than average and liked the idea of being visible "'off the market' and belongs to someone else."
Probably best to remove "If you think you are any kind of forward thinking person" from your discussion starter if soft insults are going to be a problem.
But back to the actual topic, what about the point they raise: What if both people want to do it?
Quick reminder of options for men looking to get married and looking to avoid getting exploited by De Beers:
1. Man made diamonds. Better clarity and color and larger gems for the same price. Or the same gem for a smaller price.
2. Second hand mined diamonds. Better jewelers, deceased estates, auction houses like Sotheby's and Christie's etc.
3. Other precious stones which are not diamonds.
4. Not buying a stone or a ring (eg if she doesn't take your surname and you don't wish to have traditional gender roles it would be unreasonable to expect a gem to be provided).
We just got out first “fake” diamond.
It is not perfect, it does have bubbles in it (s1), so the idea that lab grown diamonds are all flawless is just not true.
The price was what reeled us in. My wife in inherited two diamond earrings from her mother that were fairly large, also my wife has three piercings in each ear. Buying a property sized natural diamond was way, way, too expensive. We tried to look for a zirconia or crystal that would match the set, but nothing sparkles like a diamond; well the lab grown diamond just fist right into the set like a long lost sibling.
What made my wife finally be ok with the lab grown diamond, in her mind, was that the gems and the gold were not what made the jewelry valuable to her. They are valuable because they were her mother’s. When my son, or his kids, eventually get our jewelry I hope that the value is the same for them for their sentiment and not their spot price.
The lab grown diamond will be just as durable and beautiful as the natural ones. And, I would not be unhappy if the price of diamonds drops to be as cheap as a pebble.
I think this is a lot less significant than it seems at first glance:
> Although diamonds have traditionally only been a very small share of the 100 million pieces Pandora sells worldwide each year, Mr Lacik believes that will be boosted by lower prices.
I think it's significant in that diamonds may now make up a lot more of the lower end of the market. This has the possibility to change their image from one of remote inaccessibility to one of availability to the masses.
While this is a great step forward, let's not ascribe too much to it just yet. Pandora's niche is cheap, impulse-buy jewelry, a lot of it under $100, so diamonds rarely feature anyway and few people would buy their engagement rings there. It'll take Tiffany switching to synthetics to make De Beers really start crapping their trousers.
The diamond industry managed to convince consumers that diamonds are rare, highly desirable, and something that traditionally one gives as an engagement ring. None of those are particularly true.
They’re nice gems but true traditionalists generally prefer other gemstones. It’s about time the world moves on from the mined diamond charade.
That said I wonder if this isnt because its easier to restrict supply with branded artificial diamonds, compared to mined ones. If they expect the diamond rich regions of africa to stabilize in the next two decades, then they have to move away from natural diamonds asap.
Biggest jeweller is not biggest diamond seller in this case. Still this seems like a great initiative.
>Although diamonds have traditionally only been a very small share of the 100 million pieces Pandora sells worldwide each year, Mr Lacik believes that will be boosted by lower prices.
Branding and emotion is the driving power. In the same way there's an emotional element to buying baby equipment (feeling like you need brand new clothes, cot, pram etc), there's a perception that true love is represented by a pricey diamond engagement ring. Having lived in South Africa and then after finding out how this industry controls the supply to maintain high prices, I specifically asked my fiancé for a lab-diamond. And I love my ring.. it's just a beautiful and sparkly.
I feel sorry for the people who still believe in forking out a small fortune for a diamond.
I find it ironic that many people in this thread are extolling the virtues of lab grown diamonds, as they are nearly indistinguishable from natural ones and cost around 50% less. But they still cost quite a bit, whereas cubic zirconia is also nearly indistinguishable to the naked untrained eye and cost a tiny fraction of that cost.
Those who see value in a synthetic diamond over a CZ should also see the value some perceive in a natural diamond over a synthetic. And those who see value in a CZ over nothing at all should see why some value a synthetic diamond and so on.
I should also mention that even imperceptible to the human eye traits of diamonds like clarity and color, above SI or near-colorless affect value and pricing despite the fact that nobody can tell with the naked eye in normal conditions whether your stone is a F color or I.
Some people just ascribe value to these things, probably in the same way others value comics, baseball cards, art, NFTs...
So let people value what they want rather than pass judgement.
Good move. The problems related to mining is my main reason for not wanting to buy any jewelry with gems. Maybe I'd consider buying something from a brand that avoids all mined diamonds.
"Pandora also emphasized price as a consideration behind its decision. Lab-made stones cost about a third of mined ones and the switch will make diamond jewelry accessible to more consumers, it said."
In other words, this is a cost-cutting measure that happens to have environmental and ethical benefits: everybody wins. But somehow the headline is "Jeweler Pandora Takes Ethical Stand Against Mined Diamonds".
It can't be both an ethical stand an a convenient way to increase profits.
Fun fact: The expensive diamond engagement ring emerged as a way to facilitate premarital sex in the 1930s.
That's when "Breach of Promise to Marry" laws gradually were abolished across the US. So now men could propose, enjoy premarital sex for a while, only to leave the woman no longer a virgin and possibly with STDs and/or pregnant.
The very expensive diamond you can keep even if he leaves became the "insurance policy" to replace the legal option.
A general life pro tip is before buying anything expensive, check the resell value. If there is no second hand market, then it's a consumable. Aim to minimise all consumption. The cost of owning something is the depreciation and the insurance policy you take out on it (or just accept the risk). The cost of owning a $10k diamond is likely to be far, far higher than the cost of owning a $10k violin, for example.
Off-topic:
Nylene blue made a video where he transform (serendipitously) glass beads to very beautiful "jowels" through supracritical impacts.
I wonder if this paradigm has been tried for jewels and if it could make more interesting lab grown diamonds.
Not to nitpick, but just to make sure this wonderful creator gets credit where credit's due: his youtuber name is NileRed, and NileBlue (not Nylene blue) is the name of his secondary, less serious and less scripted, channel.
It's a win-win for the company gets the image of caring for the environment, and they can buy the Lab diamonds for a 15000% mark up. So if you buy a $1,000 Lab Diamond, they are literally getting it for almost $7. All it really is, is heating up carbon.
Diamonds are really ugly and boring. I'm so glad they're finally becoming passé, there are a lot more interesting gemstones and jewelry configs than just "big diamond in the middle".
Or buy an antique and have it resized. You might actually get value and history with it. Imagine jewelry that appreciates in value rather than loses two thirds as soon as you leave the shop.
Never understood diamonds. Practically in the real world, how would you know the difference between a diamond and a simply piece of glass or the cheapest possible fake diamond?
Which is IMHO a really fun example of how how unintuitive these things can be. It's a really really hard rock, shouldn't it be really stable? But it just doesn't work like that.
Don't worry guys, the price is gonna be the same. It's Not about environment, it's about lowering the cost and making more money.
I can prove it! Why don't they stop mining gold and start turning lead into the precious metal? Because it's cost prohibitive.
Don't be naive.
I really love this topic because it's been fascinating to watch my own thinking on it change.
There are many comments below that come from the point of view that diamond rings don't make sense. On one hand this is completely true. On the other hand, whether they do or don't make sense depends on who's evaluating and there are many perspectives one could come at this from.
I wanted to share my point of view and how it evolved in case it helps as nuance (or helps people understand when their partner is coming from)
Growing up really poor and practical, I thought of diamond engagement rings as really stupid and impractical and that I would either never buy one, or buy one begrudgingly.
Fast forward to a few years ago I met the woman that I am now married to. She grew up very differently from me and in many ways we think very differently. For example she values "how things work" and "tradition" much more than I do, because I focus on first principles thinking and how things ought to change.
So her attitude towards diamond rings wasn't "I need something this expensive" or "you'll do it if you love me" but simply "this is how it works."
It would be easy to say that my attitude was more nuanced and evolved but I also recognized that I had dated plenty of women who thought more like I do (in general and perhaps on this topic specifically) but that I didn't want to marry them. That I wanted to marry this woman because of who she is, and her tradition focus is part of that, and her attitude towards diamonds is part of THAT.
I also noticed how women around her felt about their rings. They loved them and thought they were special. Her parents had just celebrated their 40th anniversary and her dad chose to buy her mom a new diamond ring which she loves.
So here I was and my option was to either "put my foot down" and have our engagement go along my original principles or to recognize that my partner by nature of who she is sees it differently and to recognize how much joy and sentiment she will get out of it. I realized it's a no-brainer.
I ended up having fun with it. Visiting old Jewish diamond dealers in dusty and super secured upstairs offices in NYs diamond district. Looking through loupes at the makeup and imperfections until I found a stone that resonated with me.
Long story short I don't regret the approximately 20k I had spent for a second. It has brought more than than worth of joy already. I "get it" more now than I did before.
We can say it's all marketing but everything is marketing, or rather product market fit. We don't really judge people for spending more money (or its equivalent, time) on things that make them happy. If someone spends 20k more on a car because they love it, or have 20k worth of vintage video games in their house, we don't get worked up about it. Those things are marketing too but the product resonated with the audience and I think the diamonds are much the same.
Again it's all about who you are proposing to. The person's attitudes towards things are holistic. If I wanted to marry someone who thought more like I used to, I could have. But turned out the partner I needed was someone who thinks differently - and when you do that you have to accept that and make them happy in a way that makes sense for them.
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.