Diamonds are not a boy’s best friend.

Tweet

So are diamonds really that valuable? The answer is a big fat rock on your finger NO, or, at least the ones we are encouraged to buy for our loved ones with half our bloody salary! It was Coca Cola that put Santa in his now familiar red coat to sell their beverage back in the 1940s and it was diamond giant De Beers who connected love and romance with diamonds through advertising, coincidentally around the same Coca Cola stole Santa for Christmas. In the 1940s one of the greatest advertising campaigns was thought up, the connecting of love and worth to diamonds. Pretty girls in posters and in magazine adverts were shown with glowing faces when they received a diamond ring on their engagement. Most people couldn’t afford rocks back then and a low carat gold band was the thing. But post war America saw incomes rise sharply and the advertisers spotted their chance to promote many products in this time of euphoria. Who wouldn’t want to marry their gal after surviving the war? The more you paid for the diamond the more your love for the girl! It was very clever stuff. Through the 1950s and 60s diamond sales exploded and the key to keeping them valuable was to pretend there was a shortage of them on the planet, which is just not true. The only issue was they are hard to mine but with cheap third world labor doing the dirty work down there, even today, the rocks were coming out of the ground anyway. Because De Beers controlled most commercial mines around the world they could set the price of diamonds buy simply hoarding away the diamonds in warehouses across the word. The kicker to seal the deal that diamonds are somehow super rare was to not allow all diamonds from smaller traders to come on the market, the so-called ’blood diamonds’ from mostly Africa, A blood diamond is classed as a diamond mined in war zones, often in Africa, and allegedly used to fund wars, but in reality just a way of blocking private miners in the biggest diamond baring countries getting their stones on to the market so to drive down prices. Most African countries are at war at some pint and so easy to enforce these blood diamond laws by the so-called authorities. If you could buy one wholesale in West Africa from a local mine and get it bespoke cut down thee you could get the job done for $500 on a rock worth 6 grand in Manhattan. So summing up a huge spectacular high carat diamonds are rare, like the ones on movie stars fingers, but just below that value, diamonds are not that rare and the rock you slide on your girl’s finger that you paid $2000 grand for is worth about a tenth of that, the power of advertising and branding at its most potent. Connecting love to the rock was the key. A diamond is not a boy’s best friend...