“Only clever marketing has made the colourless stones so precious to us. Isn’t it time we fell out of love with diamonds?” Helen Rumbelow asks in Times Online.
It’s that moment. He’s on one knee, he opens the box, the ring twinkles in the light. Ah, a diamond! Does that mean it must be love? Or that your suitor has paid a massively overinflated price for a cheap and common stone, whose value is artificially manipulated by a single company founded by Britain’s greatest colonialist, a stone whose profits have recently funded the bloodiest of violent conflicts in Africa, and whose entire modern tradition was invented by an expensive marketing campaign in the mid-20th century?
Hint: if you want to keep the mood romantic, don’t answer b. But think for a while about this gem, which is so naturally abundant as to be, under normal circumstances, practically worthless, and which is hard for many to tell from imitation glass jewellery. Yet it has found itself on to the fingers, and into the most intimate love stories of millions of women. Why do 75 per cent of British grooms-to-be get suckered into buying their fiancées a diamond engagement ring, when before the 1930s, that practice was vanishingly rare?
How have these transparent lumps become so valuable, so contentious, that we learnt last week they may force the supermodel Naomi Campbell before a United Nations war crimes tribunal? She may or may not have been presented with a huge “blood diamond” from Charles Taylor, the former Liberian President now accused of crimes against humanity. She says not, and in quite forceful terms — if you need reminding what Campbell looks like in a strop, watch her storming out of an ABC television interview when cornered on the subject. War, marketing, and celebrity have been tangled up in a trinket that comes with saying “I do”. This piece of jewellery must rank as one of the greatest feats of industrial persuasion of modern times. Just what is it with diamonds?
“I do believe it was chance,” said Tom Zoellner, author of The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit and Desire. “If another stone had been underground at the time of those particular historical conditions that allowed it to become the cash crop of the British Empire, I think we’d now be wearing something else.”
Diamonds were for centuries a niche market. Human beings have always loved glittery, shiny stones and metals, and the Indian royal family thought diamonds the home of the gods, but Westerners were just as interested in rubies, sapphires and other gems. A rummage through your great-grandmother’s jewellery box rarely brings up diamonds. For engagement rings, pearls were the most popular, given their pure colour and the symbolism of their creation.
Then came Cecil Rhodes, a British boy sent to South Africa for his asthma, where he quickly started to make his fortune buying up ailing diamond mines — one of the most productive was on the farm of the De Beers brothers. Rhodes was a crafty businessman — he knew that diamonds were naturally plentiful but not particularly popular. So first, he needed to make the De Beers company as close to a monopoly as possible, and artificially restrict supply. Second, he had to create a mystique around diamonds.
The near-monopoly De Beers achieved meant that for most of the 20th century their executives could not travel to America, for fear of arrest under anti-trust legislation. In the 1930s, they employed a New York ad company who “pulled off a brilliant marketing coup” says Zoellner. “They saturated the media with so many ads, stating this created fact — that for centuries men had given women diamonds as symbols of the marriage contract, and of course you’ll do the same, or you’ll look cheap. They invented history, with so much repetition and elegance that people believed them.”
This culminated in 1947, when a young copywriter, Frances Gerety, created what Advertising Age voted the most enduring advertising slogan of the 20th century: “A Diamond Is Forever”. The modern association between marriage and diamonds was born.
“What a brilliant thing De Beers has done — set up a tollbooth at the entrance of a life event!” says Zoellner. “Any Western man who is in a position to tie the knot certainly feels a cultural imperative to buy a diamond. They will then feel obliged to spend a month’s or two months’ salary on that ring: a sum that sounds like it comes from a charming Edwardian ritual, but is in fact also from the ad men.”
According to a De Beers survey (the company still sells 45 per cent of the world’s diamonds) men are more likely than women to forsake household items in order to spend more on a diamond ring. The stone is, for them, a measure of love and status. As Greg Campbell, author of Blood Diamonds, says: “several generations have now grown up believing that part of love and marriage is the exchange of this expensive gem. The entire tradition is the creation of the diamond industry.”
What makes this strange is that diamonds, although pretty, have no intrinsic value. Being the hardest natural substance, they are useful for scientific instruments, but beyond that, their value is purely subjective.
“They are far more abundant than the diamond industry will admit,” says Campbell. “Other natural resources that contribute to high-stakes conflict — such as oil, timber, and rubber — at least have a function. All diamonds are for is for display on a ring, earring or necklace to elicit waves of jealousy.”
And so to the term “blood diamond”. Alex Yearsley was the head of the diamond campaign at the charity Global Witness, and advised on the film Blood Diamond, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
“If you have bought a big diamond, more than two carats, in the past 15 years, there’s probably a 30 or 40 per cent chance that it came from Sierra Leone or Angola,” says Yearsley.
Now the law has been changed so that rough diamonds must be certified to say that they have not come from countries where diamonds were financing war and human rights abuses. “Today,” says Yearsley, “you are unlikely to buy a blood diamond, although that depends on the definition of what one is. In some countries the corruption is so entrenched, it’s impossible to crack.”
So, back to that man on one knee, proferring his diamond ring. He has bought it out of love, but also out of years of exposure to diamond-industry slogans. You think him adorable, but also an unimaginative victim of mass-marketing. Not sure you want to say “I do” to that? Me too, but then I’ve never had to decide, as no one’s ever offered me diamonds. On reflection, perhaps there’s a reason for that.
