Marketing is for ever, diamonds are for whatever

Well you tell me, what are diamonds for? Many people would tell you they are for engagement rings, but they could probably not tell you why that is, other than because they are supposedly enduring, pretty and are rare and expensive gems that are only relinquished from the earths clutches at extreme expense and inconvenience.

As it turns out diamonds are really not that enduring - they damaged or destroyed quite easily by a variety of physical and chemical processes, have many inexpensive immitators that to the unprofessional eye are indistinguishable from the real thing, and finally it turns out are neither that rare, or if the free market had its way, expensive. The only thing that is true that many poor and impoverished souls to toil at a rock face to mine them without ever seeing any of the benefits of their phenomenal later value. Even worse they frequently leveraged as a universal monetary unit more convenient and convertible than gold and thus the control of them is frequently the source of much blood loss, leading to the term "conflict diamonds".

So where did this modern day perception of diamonds as a token symbol of enduring love come from? Why do men the world over feel obliged to fork over three months salary to buy a rock mined by people who are quite probably paid less in their life time than the rock is "worth"?

Well its easy. Marketing. Most particularly market be the De Beers company. Indeed it turns out that diamonds were for the most part largely overlooked as the precious stone of choice. Until the post WWII years that is. That's when De Beers really got going on a very dramatic and powerful marketing campaign to turn them into the "must have" token of love that all men must deliver, and all women must expect. Movie stars, the nations wealthiest and famous were all recruited and made complicit in this campaign. And it worked, it worked so well that now the majority of diamonds are deemed so valuable that the owners dare not take them out in public. Yes the majority are privately held and locked away in safes. The rest, alone with the mines that produce them are almost entirely controlled by guess who - De Beeers. The free market prices are kept artificially high at all times by careful manipulation of supply to meet demand.

Naturally there is a steady demand. People are getting engaged, married and re-married all the time. But all those diamonds just keep ending up in vaults and those that are resold seldom get recycled for engagement purposes. Using old gold may be deemed romantic, but no girl wants an old diamond for her engagement ring. Of course it would be okay, but the marketing people took care to brainwash us all that its not. The reason is if all the people who owned diamonds got them out and decided to sell them it would cause a huge crash in the price of diamonds. There would be diamonds everywhere, they would suddenly be viewed as cheap and cheerful and De Beers would be left rocking (ha, ha, pun intentional) from the consequences.

You may not believe me, but the full scoop was detailed in a three part article in The Atlantic Monthly in the early eighties. Now you all know what I think about corporations that manipulate markets and their customers and exploit pretty much everyone and everything they touch for the benefit of a multi-billion dollar industry. So fast-forward, if you will to the early 2000s....

I was more than delighted to read in Wired Magazine an article about two companies who are independently working on ways to manufacture diamonds. One is Gemisis that is manufacturing colored diamonds in a Russian designed "pressure cooker" contraption. The other is Apollo that is manufacturing white diamonds by a gas sublimation process similar to that used in making galium arsenide wafers for microchips. Both appear to be to be only months away from retail selling of flawless one to five caret diamonds "grown" in just a few days and sold for a substantial discount compared to those mined and sold by De Beers. In reality the actual cost of these diamonds is probably just a few hundred dollars each, the asking prices may be substantially below De Beers inflated prices but they will still be thousands of dollars each. So sorry guys, you wont get away with spending just a days salary on a huge rock for your gal any day soon.

However De Beers has taken note. And they are apparently running scared... They have already started lobbying the US government to strictly regulate the naming of the manufactured diamonds. They don't like "cultured diamonds" but they do like "synthetic diamonds". Not surprising since "synthetic" definitely has overtones of "not the real thing". They do desperately want to portray that only "real" diamonds will do as a symbol of real love, anything else is fake. unforatunately all indications are that a burgeoning number of younger consumers really loathe the background of where diamonds come from and how they got to the window of the jewelers via a huge chain of people starting with exploited miners and ending with rich fat cat diamond dealers. They want to divorce there purchase from all that and have a clean, unblemished perfect diamond that has been manufactured with no risk of blood on its hands and global marketing conspiracies controlling its price. Indeed people who have heard about Apollo and Gemisis are literally holding out and waiting for their products to reach the market.

For those that don't see the argument based on a more ethical origin of the jewel, Gemisis contends its still an easy sell. As they point out, they can easily price their manufactured yellow diamonds at or below half the price of the very rare and expensive De Beers product. And they can also manufacture them with extraordinary perfection and sized. So dollar for dollar a customer can look at two diamonds side by side, one from Gemisis and one from De Beers. To their eye there is no difference - both perfect sparkling yellow diamonds, both the same price. How to choose? The only problem for De Beers is the Gemisis diamond will be twice as big. As well all know, if a diamond is good, a bigger diamond is better and no one but the purchaser will ever know the difference...

So I'm rather pleased that De Beers will finally get a run for its money and quite possibly will loose. It will be forced to unleash more diamonds onto the market to lower its prices and compete, it will eventually be exposed as the "dirty" diamond producer that no one really wants much to have to do with. And all those middle men now actively engaged in the dirtly little trade of pushing shiney stones to happless young lovers who can often as not ill afford them, well they'll just have to go an find something more useful to do with their lives. Its not clear to me how the miners previous engaged in the diamond business will fair - it seems likely there will always be some market for geologicaly manufactured diamonds torn from the earth. It may or may not be enough to sustain them. But likely as not a good number of countries will have to look for other natural resources to defend from exploitative foreign corporations. I hope they fair better the seond time around.

Personally I think its trying to call apples, oranges and oranges, apples. They are all diamonds