Diamonds are a Girl's Best Scam...

Sitting here watching my Midget watch Sesame Street, and chatting with my good friend Benaren, regarding his ridiculous love for the little clear stone known as the diamond...


Yep, you guessed it folks... Soapbox time...

I’m going to offend all of my female readers here and get a silent applause from men around the world. But ladies I’ve got to spell it out for you- congratulations, you’ve been fucking brainwashed. Women want to go into debt for a useless rock that sits on their hand because of a very cleaver marketing campaign. Moreover, they could get the exact same rock for a tenth of the cost but refuse to do so because this campaign was so effective. The diamond industry has effectively manipulated human pride to make themselves rich.


For us women, comparing jewelry is our phallic posturing contest: look at how big MY dic… errr, I mean, diamond is."


Let's start off with a few little known facts about this beloved (yuck...) stone.


There’s no denying that diamonds are a "traditional (yet highly expensive) symbol of romance and love. Why, a man needs a diamond ring to ask the woman of his dream to marry him, right (Just so you know Jeff, if you give me a diamond, I'll likely punch you in the face with it...)? But was it always that way? Did you know that someone worked very, very hard to make diamond rings de rigueur (prescribed or required by fashion, etiquette, or custom) in marriage proposals? Or that diamonds aren’t actually rare at all? Or that they make lousy investments?

1. The Earliest Use of Diamonds: Polishing Axes.

If you ask a hundred people what they think of first when they hear the word “diamond,” I bet you get 99 who say a diamond engagement ring.

Truth is, the majority of diamonds mined today are used for industrial purposes – and that may also be the very first use of diamonds by humans.

Harvard physicist Peter Lu and colleagues found that ancient Chinese used diamonds to polish ceremonial burial axes in the late stone age or over 4,500 years ago.

The axes, which are made from corundum (or ruby in its red form and sapphire in other colors), were polished to a mirror finish. Corundum is the second hardest naturally occurring substance on Earth and close examination of these axes revealed that they could’ve been made only with diamond abrasives.

It’s quite fitting since today, 80% of mined diamonds (about 100 million carats) are used for the industrial purposes of cutting, drilling, grinding, and polishing.

2. Diamonds are not the hardest substance on Earth.

“Diamonds are the hardest substance on Earth” is practically a mantra for jewelers trying to impress you with its physical properties, if at first, you’re not swayed by its beauty. Too bad it’s not true: while diamonds are the hardest natural mineral substance, it is not the hardest substance known to man.

In 2005, physicists Natalia Dubrovinskaia and colleagues compressed carbon fullerene molecules and heating them at the same time to create a series of interconnected rods called Aggregated Diamond Nanorods (ADNRs or “hyperdiamond”). It’s about 11% harder than a diamond.

3. De Beers: The Diamond Cartel.

I can’t talk about diamonds without talking about "De Beers™", the company that single handedly made the diamond industry what it is today. De Beers was founded by Cecil Rhodes, who also founded the state of Rhodesia which later became Zambia and Zimbabwe. The Rhodes Scholarship is also named after him, and funded by his estate.

Rhodes started by renting water pumps to miners during a diamond rush in 1867 in Kimberley, South Africa. He later expanded into mines, and about twenty years later became the sole owner of all diamond mining operations in the country.

Rhodes built De Beers™ into a diamond cartel (well, they prefer “single-channel marketing” and since they’re one company, they’re technically a monopoly). De Beers™ mines diamonds, then handle their sales and distribution through various entities (in London, it’s known as the innocuously named Diamond Trading Company; in Israel, it’s simply called “the syndicate”; in Belgium, it’s called the CSO or Central Selling Organization.).

If you want to buy diamonds from De Beers™, you’ve got to play by their rules: diamonds are sold in events known as “sights.” There are 10 sights held each year, and to buy, you have to be a sight holder (these are usually diamond dealers whose business is to have the stones cut and polished and then resold at diamond clearing centers of Antwerp, New York, and Tel Aviv).

The diamonds are sold on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. A sight holder is given a small box of uncut diamonds priced between $1 and $25 million. De Beers™ set the price – there is no haggling and no re-selling of diamonds in uncut form. It is rare for sight holders to refuse a diamond package offered to them, for fear of not being invited back. And those who dare to purchase diamonds from other sources than De Beers™, will have their sight holder privilege revoked immediately upon discovery.

In the early days, De Beers™ controlled about 90% of the world’s diamond supply. Today, its monopoly on diamonds has been significantly reduced. It is estimated that the cartel now controls about 60 to 75% of the world’s diamond trade... Though in my opinion, that's still to damn much...

4. So Why The Name ‘De Beers™’?

Short and simply put, De Beers™ was actually named for the brothers Johannel Nicholas de Beer and Diederik Arnoldus de Beer, whose farm Cecil Rhodes bought when diamond
mines were discovered on it.

5. Diamonds are Rare!

Diamonds were actually quite rare in the past, but not anymore. While it’s true that the process of extracting diamond is quite laborious (mines move many tons of dirt per carat of diamond found) and that gem-quality diamonds are relatively few (only about 1 in 1 million diamonds are quality one carat stones, only 1 in 5 million are 2-carat; and 1 in 15 million are 3-carat), diamonds are not rare in an economic sense because supply exceeds demand.

To maintain the high prices of diamonds, De Beers™ creates an artificial scarcity: they stockpile mined diamonds and sell them in small amounts.

Donna Bergenstock, a marketing professor at Muhlenberg College, points out their scarcity is a myth, one created long ago by De Beers™, the South African company that's dug up most of the world's diamonds.

"There are … billions of dollars of diamonds sitting in vaults — in London, in South Africa — that De Beers™ specifically keeps off the market in order to artificially raise the price of diamonds," she says.

The supply is so vast that if DeBeers hadn't controlled the world market for decades, diamonds would be much cheaper.

"The diamond is really just a piece of carbon. It's just a rock," says Bergenstock.

Perhaps De Beers™ chairman Nicky Oppenheimer said it best: “diamonds are intrinsically worthless, except for the deep psychological need they fill.”

6. Moon-Sized Diamond?

So- diamonds aren’t rare on Earth, and it may not be rare in space either. In 2004, astronomer Travis Metcalfe of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and colleagues discovered a diamond star that is 10 billion, trillion, trillion carats! The cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallized carbon, 4,000 km across (that's 2485 miles across), some 50 light-years (50,000 years away) from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus. It’s the compressed heart of an old star that was once bright like our Sun but has since faded and shrunk. Astronomers have decided to call the star “Lucy” after the Beatles song, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds(how absolutely fitting if I do say so, myself). According to scientists, if we wait long enough, our own sun will eventually turn into one such large diamond star!

I have an idea... I'm going to invent warp travel, build a ship, and travel to that star and mine the motherfucker... take that De Beers™... Who's with me?

7. World's Most Famous Diamonds.

Just because they’re not rare, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t exceptional diamonds. There’s the 45-carat Hope Diamond (and its famous Curse), the mystical Koh-I-Noor Diamond, and the largest diamond ever found, the 546 carat Golden Jubilee.

Here’s a truly fascinating story about the little known, Bokassa Diamond. In 1977, a bat-shit insane, Central African dictator named Jean-Bédel Bokassa declared himself an emperor and asked Albert Jolis, the president of a diamond mining operation, for a diamond ring (he made sure Jolis knew that nothing smaller than a golf ball-sized rock would do!).

Jolis didn’t have the money to buy such a large stone but if he didn’t deliver one, his company would lose the mining concession in Central Africa. So he devised a clever ruse: Jolis found a large piece of black diamond bort (a poorly crystallized diamond usually fit only to be crushed into abrasive powder) that curiously resembled Africa in shape. He ordered the diamond polished and mounted on a large ring. A one-quarter carat white diamond was then set roughly where the country is located on the continent.

Jolis presented the “unique” diamond to Bokassa, and the clueless emperor loved it! He thought that the $500 ring was worth over $500,000! Just two years later, when Bokassa was overthrown in a coup, Jolis heard that he went into exile with his prize diamond ring, and noted wryly: “It’s a priceless diamond as long as he doesn’t try to sell it.”

Now that is fucking hilarious.

8. The Most Brilliant Advertising Campaign of All Time: "A Diamond Is Forever".

The 1930s was a bad decade for the diamond industry: the price of the diamond had declined worldwide. Europe was on the verge of another war and the idea of a diamond engagement ring didn’t take hold. Indeed, engagement rings were considered a luxury and when given, they rarely, if ever, contained diamonds.

In 1938, De Beers engaged N.W. Ayer & Son, the first advertising agency in the United States, to change the image of diamonds in America. The ad agency suggested a clever ad campaign to link diamonds to romance in the public’s mind. To do this, they placed diamonds in the fingers of Hollywood stars and suggested stories to newspapers on how diamond rings symbolized romance. Even high school students were targeted:

N. W. Ayer outlined a subtle program that included arranging for lecturers to visit high schools across the country. “All of these lectures revolve around the diamond engagement ring, and are reaching thousands of girls in their assemblies, classes and informal meetings in our leading educational institutions,” the agency explained in a memorandum to De Beers™.

The agency had organized, in 1946, a weekly service called “Hollywood Personalities,” which provided 125 leading newspapers with descriptions of the diamonds worn by movie stars. The idea was to create prestigious “role models” for the poorer middle-class wage-earners. The advertising agency explained, in its 1948 strategy paper, “We spread the word of diamonds worn by stars of screen and stage, by wives and daughters of political leaders, by any woman who can make the grocer’s wife and the mechanic’s sweetheart say ‘I wish I had what she has.’”.
   
In 1948, an N.W. Ayer copywriter named Frances Gerety, had a flash of inspiration and came up with the slogan “A Diamond is Forever.” It’s a fitting slogan, because it reminds people that it is a memorial to love, and as such, must stay forever in the family, never to be sold. Ironically, Gerety never married and died a spinster.

But equating diamonds with romance wasn’t enough. Toward the end of the 1950s, N.W. Ayer found that the Americans were ready for the next logical step, making a diamond ring a necessary element in betrothal:

“Since 1939 an entirely new generation of young people has grown to marriageable age,” it said. “To this new generation a diamond ring is considered a necessity to engagements by virtually
everyone.” The message had been so successfully impressed on the minds of this generation that those who could not afford to buy a diamond at the time of their marriage would “defer the purchase” rather than forgo it."

Then the clever ad agency went one step further. N.W. Ayers noted that when women were involved in the selection of the engagement ring, they tended to pick cheaper rings. So De Beers™ encouraged the “surprise” engagement, with men picking the diamond on their own (with the clear message that the more expensive the stone, the better he’ll look in the eyes of a woman).

They even gave clueless men a guideline: American men should spend at least two months wages, whereas Japanese men should spend three. Why? Because they can:

But the guidelines differed by nation. A “two months’ salary” equivalent was touted in the United States, whereas men in Great Britain got off the hook with only one month. Japan’s expectation was set the highest, at three months. I asked a De Beers representative why the Japanese were told to spend so much compared to the Americans or the English.

“We were, quite frankly, trying to bid them up,” he answered.

In 1939, when De Beers™ engaged N.W. Ayer to change the way the American public view diamonds, its annual sales of the gem was $23 million. By 1979, the ad agency had helped De Beers expand its sales to more than $2.1 billion.

Despite this hype, diamonds aren't forever; they can be damaged or destroyed. The value of diamonds varies widely depending on grade and, despite efforts at standardization, is basically arbitrary--experts often disagree sharply on the worth of a particular gem. Sure, the same can be said of paintings or other collectibles. The difference is that the world diamond market is largely controlled by a single private enterprise, the South Africa-based De Beers™ cartel. The geniuses behind De Beers™ recognized early on that a stable, profitable diamond industry depended on controlling both supply and demand. De Beers™ rarely discovers new sources of diamonds; rather, it focuses on controlling existing ones, limiting production, and if necessary buying up surplus gems and stockpiling them to prop up the market. It sets prices arbitrarily and cuts off supplies to dealers who buy through unauthorized channels. On the marketing side, De Beers™ hired advertising firms, starting with N.W. Ayer in the late 1930s, to render axiomatic the idea that diamonds = true love. De Beers and Ayer didn't invent diamond engagement rings but did rescue a fading concept--in 1932 worldwide diamond sales had been only $100,000. Ayer's ploys ranged from planting news stories about newly betrothed celebrities flaunting big rocks to positioning diamonds as heirlooms, preventing the market from being flooded with secondhand goods. (The market for used diamonds is dismal, by the way.) The campaign worked--U.S. wholesale diamond sales increased from $23 million in 1939 to $2.1 billion in 1979. The J. Walter Thompson agency performed a similar miracle in Japan in the 1960s, essentially creating a tradition of diamond engagement rings out of thin air.

9. Diamonds are Actually Lousy Investments

De Beers™ is quite famous for never lowering the price of diamonds. During the Great Depression, the cartel drastically cut supplies and stockpiled diamonds to prop up their price. But do diamonds make good investments?

Unless you’re a certified diamond seller, the answer is no: you won’t be able to sell a diamond ring for more than what you pay for it. And the reason is simple: with diamonds, you buy at retail and sell at wholesale, if you can sell it at all.

In 1982, Edward Jay Epstein wrote an intriguing article for The Atlantic, titled “Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?” In it, he wrote about an experiment to determine a diamond’s value as an investment.

The Atlantic conducted another experiment to determine the extent to which larger diamonds appreciate in value over a one-year period. In 1970, it bought a 1.42 carat diamond for $1166. In 1971, the highest offer it received for the same gem was $889. Rather than sell it at such an enormous loss, Watts decided to extend the experiment until 1974, when he again made the round of the jewelers in Hatton Garden to have it appraised. During this tour of the diamond district, Watts found that the diamond had mysteriously shrunk in weight to 1.04 carats. One of the jewelers had apparently switched diamonds during the appraisal. In that same year, Watts, undaunted, bought another diamond, this one 1.4 carats, from a reputable London dealer. He paid $4063. A week later, he decided to sell it. The maximum offer he received was $1565.

Why is there no active after-market for diamonds? It is estimated that the public holds about 500 million carats of gem diamonds – if a significant portion of the public begins selling, then the price of diamond would plummet. To prevent this from happening, the diamond industry spent a huge sum in making diamonds “heirloom” properties to be passed down for generations, keeping the price of diamond artificially high (so people wouldn’t be tempted to unload them for fear of losing money) and discourage jewelers from buying diamonds from the public.

10. Artificial Diamonds

The idea of making artificial diamond isn’t new. H.G. Wells proposed exactly such a thing in his story “The Diamond Maker” in 1911. Since then, scientists have come up with ways to create synthetic diamonds and
diamond simulants like cubic zirconia – but experts could always tell them apart. Until now.

In the past decade, scientists have perfected a technique called Chemical Vapor Deposition, where carbon gas cloud is passed over diamond seeds in a vacuum chamber heated to more than 1,800 degrees. In a matter of days, they are now able to “grow” diamonds that are virtually indistinguishable from natural ones, even to the experts:

Seeking an unbiased assessment of the quality of these laboratory diamonds, I asked Bryant Linares to let me borrow an Apollo stone. The next day, I place the .38 carat, princess-cut stone in front of Virgil Ghita in Ghita’s narrow jewelry store in downtown Boston. With a pair of tweezers, he brings the diamond up to his right eye and studies it with a jeweler’s loupe, slowly turning the gem in the mote-filled afternoon
sun. “Nice stone, excellent color. I don’t see any imperfections,” he says. “Where did you get it?”

“It was grown in a lab about 20 miles from here,” I reply. He lowers the loupe and looks at me for a moment. Then he studies the stone again, pursing his brow. He sighs. “There’s no way to tell that it’s lab-created.”

But if you think that the price of diamond will fall precipitously, think again. Companies that make cultured diamonds like Apollo and Gemesis aren’t stupid: they’re not going to kill the goose that laid the diamond egg by flooding the market with cheap stones.

Essentially, they are just as greedy as those assholes from De Beers™...

Now, let's briefly discuss Blood Diamonds, or Conflict Diamonds...

What are conflict/blood diamonds?

Conflict/blood diamonds are used by rebel groups to fuel conflict and civil wars, and by terrorist groups to finance their activities.

Is The Kimberley Process just PR?

It's an agreement that is supposed to prevent conflict diamonds from getting into the market but ended up being more of a PR stunt since it's based on a system of self-policing. The U.N. reported in October 2006 that due to poor enforcement of the Kimberley Process, $23 million of conflict diamonds from Cote d'lvoire alone entered the legitimate market. Sure De Beers won't buy diamonds coming out of Cote d'lvoire, but they'll turn a blind eye to the smuggling of diamonds from there through Ghana and Mali where they are certified as being conflict-free.

Percentage in the market?

During the height of the diamond conflict in the 1990s, the diamond industry reported that no more than 4% of the diamonds in the market were conflict diamonds, when in reality it has been shown to be closer to 15% .
Asking for conflict-free certificates is not enough!

In April 2006 after a scathing report by Partnership Africa Canada about activities in Brazil, an internal review showed that 49 of 147 Kimberley Process certificates were fraudulent. Besides these fraudulent certificates, real certificates could still be issued if conflict diamonds were smuggled and mixed with legally traded ones before being certified.

Children in India are cutting and polishing the diamonds!

Children in India can become "bonded" — forced to work to pay off the debts of their family. These children end up working in the diamond factories.

Children in conflict zones are being used as soldiers!

The images in Blood Diamond with child soldiers are very real. They are drugged and brainwashed to handle the manslaughter they are forced to do.

Now, if you've truly read and taken to heart, all that I've written here, here are some diamond alternatives for you...

Absolute™
Diamonique™
Moissanite™

A simple price example...

Absolute
Diamond
Moissanite (By the way, these "diamonds" will fool all currently available diamond testers...)

Personally, I like the Absolute one the best, simply because, it's well... pink lol.

In closing, I personally doubt that I'll ever own a diamond. I don't feel the need to. Just give me Diamonique, Absolute or Moissanite, and I'll be a totally happy woman.