Everyone is "trying" to be less stupid. But selling my wife's diamond rings and buying cubic zirconia replicas at this point feels like a very stupid move even though I know I will net a bunch of money up front, I hear divorces are very expensive.
Personally, I just didn't even bother buying an engagement ring (or wedding ring for that matter) because it's a "tradition" that means literally absolutely nothing to me. My husband doesn't care that I don't want jewelry and he prefers to not wear a wedding ring too. So I guess we are happy being "less stupid."
The synthesis process for the giant corundum boules used to make lenses and windows and such is pretty cool, too.
> "Synthetic diamonds, which can be produced in about 500 hours, share the same physical, chemical and optical characteristics as natural stones. But they are not nearly as valuable."
This "article" is an advertisement. This bullshit statement seals it. Value is demand driven. The only way for DeBeers to force mined diamonds to sell for more than grown diamonds is with relentless marketing to make people think there is a meaningful difference. And there is. Mined diamonds have historically resulted in a lot of human misery to bring the stones to market, whereas grown diamonds use some electricity and can come from any industrial park.
I understand the value of an heirloom that symbolizes one's progenitor's marriage. Presumably, that is how the ring tradition originated, and why the durability of diamond is a significant selling point for that use case. But I don't think rings are well-suited to this purpose now and would rather leave some other trinket behind, well aware that the true legacy of the progenitors lives on through the posterity.
Even if its a "charitable gift" on the seller's part, it saves one family from the suffering of buying a diamond.
> it's a "tradition" that means literally absolutely nothing to me.
Please preach to all the impressionable young women you know.
The idea someone would worry replacing expensive trinkets with cheaper but similar looking trinkets might damage your marriage is extremely foreign to me! I can say that much at least!
Plus I don't know many impressionable young women these days because I'm approaching 40 and the majority of my friends are already married or no longer impressionable. :)
I remember an article years ago that went into detail about De Beers' manipulation of the market, and how change from "larger is better" to "clearer is better" happened just as a large mine outside of De Beers control opened that had quite a few large diamonds coming from it on a regular basis. That same article made some assertions about the secondary market being somewhat manipulated, IIRC, but this was close to a decade ago, so sourcing it might be hard, and I'm also unsure how accurate it was at this point. I think it was about how modern incarnation of idea of giving rings for marriage was also largely manipulated by De Beers.
This issue is squarely in the women feminists' court, and (for the most part) they haven't taken up the cause to stop supporting this evil system that hurts both men and women.
I've looked and I can't find any.
I don't know if they actually do this but I imagine if you sell your ring to a jeweler they can send it off for the band to be melted down the stone to be polished and re-set so the resulting ring is resold as "new."