February 13, 2003
Happy Valentines Day
Everyone knows that diamonds are harvested from dangerous mines by children and used to finance war, amputation and misery. But there is plenty more being said when you tie your love to a rock. Here then, in time for Valentines Day, is the true and tawdry story of love and diamonds.
In 1477 Archduke Maximilian gave a diamond to his sweetheart, Mary of Burgundy, on the occasion of their marriage; in return he got to tap that ass, and also Burgundy, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. This is thought to have been the first use of a diamond as metonymy for love. Mary died five years later, and Maximilian went on to marry their sons off in a series of politically motivated marriages to consolidate his power. So much for true love. Needless to say, the diamond engagement ring never really took off after its introduction by Max and Mary. Diamonds carried on for centuries as just another pretty rock in the jewelry box.
In his fantastic book Twenty Ads That Shook the World, James Twitchell examines the origins of the diamond as a symbol for love, and finds that the spread of the tradition was the result of an incredibly clever marketing scheme; a scheme developed by an international cartel to get around fair trade laws in the US.
Diamonds had always been desirable as an investment commodity, but like all commodities the market was constantly upset by rapid changes in supply and demand. Whenever the economy went south the market was flooded with diamonds and their relative value plummeted. Up until the late thirties, diamonds were given as gifts to the object of affection, but so were sapphires and rubies and teams of clydesdales and wirelesses.
In the great depression, the diamond market was in a shambles. Everyone who had diamonds had sold them, or bought them at cut-rate prices and resold them. There were too many diamonds on the market to make any money importing them because wholesalers and jewelers were buying the stones domestically and repurposing them. And this pissed of a certain cartel.
Since the turn of the century, DeBeers has been producing 90 percent of the diamonds in the world. They are a monopoly power; so much so that they aren't even allowed to sell their diamonds in the US. (this is why you've never seen the DeBeers store at your local mall - not yet anyway).
When the diamond market bottomed out in the late thirties, the company found that they could no longer compete with what Twichell calls the “after-market” – the network of wholesalers and independent shops that trafficked the jewels domestically. DeBeers couldn’t compete directly with the domestic sellers because they were forbidden from actually opening shop in the US. But what they could do was to dry up the after-market. And the trick to doing that was to come up with a way to make a diamond indispensable; to make it so valuable that a person might well die before parting with it.
“So, son, what have you got for us?”
“Well sir, when my grandfather died we buried him with his violin…."
"Yes, your grandfather. Odd fellow, wasn't he? Tried to get into the office through the front once as I recall."
"Yes sir. Well, sir, he loved that violin. It was so important to him that the thought of anyone else using if after he, um, died, was too upsetting. He had too take it with him"
"Interesting. No after-market. Go on."
"Well sir, the only thing people are going to die for is love. Tie diamonds to love and they will never be able to give them up.”
“I like it son. What’s the copy?”
“A diamond is forever, Sir.”
“That’ll keep ‘em out of the fucking pawn shops. Good work son.”
If you inherited a diamond engagement ring, it's likely that your dear grandfather bought it sometime after the 1930s, because before then there was no advertising campaign, and there weren't many diamond engagement rings. Unless, of course, you trace your lineage to Maximilian and Mary, in which case you are probably genetically predisposed to bad luck in love anyway and it doesn’t really matter what you do.
When you say "A Diamond Is Forever," you are falling for a marketing ploy that was developed by a corrupt international conglomerate has been turning human misery into love for decades. Check out adiamondisforever.com. Notice that there are no sponsors --nowhere to actually buy the diamond. That's because the campaign is financed by a company called "The Diamond Trading Company," described in the "about us" section as "the world's leading diamond sales and marketing company." A quick google search shows that The Diamond Trading Company is actually just the marketing arm of Debeers. Debeers doesn’t need to sell diamonds on the site because they are the only game in town. If you buy a diamond, there's a 90 percent chance it passed through DeBeers. Debeers doesn't have to worry about the competition – it just needs to make you want that diamond baby. That, my friends, is fucking great marketing.
Now what percentage of the diamond market do you think is made up of conflict diamonds? 10? 15? 30? Does it really matter? The dealer may tell you that what you are buying is not a conflict diamond, but think about the fact that 90% of the market is controlled by DeBeers mining concerns, and then make up your own mind about what your love is worth. Better yet, say it with flowers.
Happy Valentines Day!
