Have you ever tried to sell a diamond?
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Long story short, I'm currently on my honeymoon, and her yellow saffire ring blows everyone away.
If your girlfriend turns you down for lack of a diamond, you have probably chosen poorly. However, she might (reasonably) turn you down if she's dissappointed, so make your feelings known long in advance, or you might be in trouble.
Get your rings at Brilliant Earth in SF (I did my shopping online, and was not dissappointed). They are the only ethical jewelers I've found, and I looked hard. My wife's ring has a large yellow saffire (fair trade from Sri Lanka, mined from shallow mines with a low environmental impact), small diamonds from Canada (sadly lab diamonds are not good enough for jewelry yet), and recycled gold.
The ring is pretty unique, and utterly amazing, and I would recommend this route for any ethically minded person.
Wait! You're browsing Hacker News on your honeymoon?!
I'm also blown away by the imgur apparently on android. It was the easiest thing I've ever uploaded.
Congratulations to the DeBeers marketing department, they've done an excellent job of making people believe this sort of stuff is needed.
And DeBeers certainly didn't create the notion of conspicuous consumption as a romantic gesture—women have been receiving silver and gold trinkets for millennia, especially ones adorned with various gemstones. DeBeers just popularized diamonds as the gem to be specifically associated with such gestures—and they're a fairly effective/obvious one, too, since they're eye-catching, distinctive, and easy to adorn oneself with.
Well, if it happened to be their line of business, and they had a monopoly on the supply of it. It's hard to market things you can find in your back yard.
It's small, portable and relatively fungible.
She definitely knows that, too.
And yes, you could call it a reverse dowry.
Or a spousal hedge.
That said, a nice 4ct cushion cut sapphire with pavé diamonds around the stone would knock the socks off of nearly any girl out there so I wouldn't sweat it one way or another.
It knocks the socks off everyone. That said, we mostly don't correct people who think its diamond (protip: no matter how much you believe it, no-one who just admired your wife's ring wants to hear about blood diamonds or how evil debeers is.)
FYI, rubies are saffires (but you're referring to the colour of course.)
...and to this day, I don't understand how some people's minds even work. (It was a hypothetical discussion and my life wasn't appreciably derailed by this conversation, it's just memorable to me because of the utter incomprehension I felt.)
If people stopped buying diamonds, it would be a disaster for the continent.
Saying that, I still would hate to buy something that may have been mined by a slave and purchased by a cartel.
It's only 'legitimate' and productive because people like them so much; if people stopped liking them so much, then such employment ceases to be legitimate and becomes on par with being paid to dig a ditch and then fill it right back up.
There's really no gain to capture economic centers in developed parts of the world, because they do things like finance or entrepreneurship or software which are actually dependent on a stable settled population in a consistent legal system. That's why despite all the gangsters in LA, they just sell drugs instead of taking over Hollywood by force and trying to profit from the film industry. Even when gangsters take something over in this country, it's through infiltration rather than mounting a physical invasion of the city.
African gangsters (better known as "rebels", "paramilitary groups", etc.), on the other hand, can actually take over a diamond mine or something and collect all of the income relatively quickly. Crush the demand for diamonds, and the diamond-rich parts of Africa become that much more stable just because they'll have to work harder to generate wealth. And then, maybe, it won't be worthwhile for the paramilitaries and rebels to attack it.
I got pretty lucky in that I read the article before I met her, and told her about how bad diamonds were early on. That meant we had the discussion years before I proposed. She had diamonds stamped in her heart too, but we compromized, and I went to huge effort to get her an amazing ring.
If the ring is amazing, she'll be OK, and so will her friends.
(My wife points out that she has friends who would have said no, on the basis that if the suitor wouldn't do what she wanted for a proposal, he wasn't the right guy for her. This may sound douchy, but the proposal is hugely important to (some, maybe most) women. So maybe I just got lucky.)
The author has a website, http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/diamond/prologue.htm with what appears to be the complete contents of the book. I don't know if he's updated it since 1982.
Add a bit of capitalist profit-hunger, and you end up with companies doing everything they can to maximize the money people spend on the rites, by manipulating the cultural expectations.
De Beers was basically formed by an English colonialist (Cecil John Rhodes). He controlled a company which basically owned a country (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_South_Africa_Company).
He also had his own private army and tried to overthrow a sovereign government (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jameson_Raid).
One of the aims of the Rhodes scholarship is Anglicization. A person who did not study in English cannot apply (even though he is fluent).
Until recently they also excluded women.
In any cases, the legacy of Rhodes is despicable - even if he left behind a scholarship program. His creation of the state of Zimbabwe (with two different ethnic groups) results in problems to this day.
I don't think I was suggesting that it did.
edit: oops I mean 2003; 11.09 was the issue number
A good alternative is Canadian diamonds, which are not owned by DeBeers, not mined or polished by slaves, and not the cause of any conflict. That solves about half the problems with diamonds.
Get them from Brilliant Earth (I'm not employed there, just a very satisfied customer.)
Not that that makes it immoral to do so. I wouldn't go that far.
That said, a one karat stone is no good as a solitaire (the book from the article above talks about this: one karat stones all go into eternity rings, which were invented by debeers due to a massive oversupply of Russian one karat stones. Actually, the book implies that these stones may have been lab stones, as no-one knew where the Russians got so many one karat stones from.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moissanite
Someone would have to really study the ring to realize it wasn't diamond.
Plus it first came from meteorites which puts it high on the geek scale ;)
"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"
I wonder what we'll use next. I've always wanted to give my wife a ring with a bit of a meteorite set in it because, hey, its from outer space. Where does one find such things?
While in the case of diamonds it's a matter of wasting money, encouraging inane consumerism and odious environmental practices for the sake of a few wealthy oligarchs...
When the same thing happens in politics...
It encourages meaningless consumerism and odious environmental practices for the sake of a few wealthy oligarchs.
The Lesson: Distrust messages from oligarchs.
They can stay off-shore, sell diamonds to US companies, and ship them in. Unless the US govt is willing to stop US companies from buying or confiscates the shipments or tha payments, there's not much that the US govt can do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Beers_Diamonds_Antitrust_Lit...
Does anyone think it seems like a very low number? Just $130 million for consumers, considering the cartel has been operating for decades and brought in billions?