From what I understand about diamonds they’re completely uninteresting to me.
The way you measure how valuable a diamond is? Purity.
The way you tell a lab made diamond from a “real” diamond? Purity.
If it’s too pure it’s fake. There is this weird market where you want the purist diamond you can find, but not too pure. So you want some imperfections, just the perfect number of imperfections.
Too many imperfections and it’s low quality.
Too few imperfections and it’s worthless enough to grind to dust and use on consumable parts for power tools.
The modern jewelry market is also substantially different than what past generations taught me jewelry was. To them, jewelry was meant to be a value store. You purchase a valuable ring, the stone and metal held their value and you or your heirs could sell it later if times were tough.
Now jewelry seems more like buying a new car. It loses half its value when you drive it off the lot.
The sentimental value of a diamond is its rarity. And natural diamonds with few imperfections are rare. And a big diamond, useless for anything else, is the only way to show how much the marriage is worth. This is what is being sold to us.
Synthetic diamonds are destroying 50 years of marketing.
Yes, it's all about marketing now. Previously DeBeers was able to control supply for diamonds which kept the prices artificially high but that's not the case anymore.
I suspect we'll be seeing an increase in branding in the diamond business. That's really the only way they can control prices since it's now possible to create man made ones. Given enough time the prices will collapse to the point of cost of producing them plus a small premium. Competition will make sure that happens. There's no way mined diamonds will be able to compete.
Diamonds aren't going away they are just making a marketing transition.
> The modern jewelry market is also substantially different than what past generations taught me jewelry was. To them, jewelry was meant to be a value store. You purchase a valuable ring, the stone and metal held their value and you or your heirs could sell it later if times were tough.
Jewelry sellers pretend their product is like precious metals: a store of value.
In fact, it's more like collectable trading cards: popularity contributes more value than component materials.
I.e. why heritage Tiffany or Rolex pieces still have substantial value
A while ago I checked to see how much gold actually exists in circulation. It is less than 22 meters cubed. That's it. Diamond mines regularly dump more than that in the ocean to create artificial scarcity. And at the end of the day, it is just carbon, one of the most abundant elements on the planet. Diamonds can just be produced in a lab with raw carbon, heat, and pressure. Companies even exist to make a diamond from a deceased person's ashes. Diamond value is amazingly artificial.
One of my relatives, uncle George, was fired ~30 years ago. His most valuable possession was a gold watch that baroness Coudenhove gave to a her maid 2-3 generations earlier. I don't remember who exactly the maid was, but she was somehow related to the family. In order to raise funds to buy his own tipper truck, George went to the Charles Bridge in Prague and found a buyer for the watch, a German tourist. The money was at least 50% of the price of the truck. These were the first steps on a long journey leading to a successful business.
This was in a country with high inflation that's just gone through a regime change. Did he get a good price for the watch? Yes, at that moment, the truck was more valuable than the watch.
It depends on the jewelry, diamonds are notoriously bad in resale. There are however genuinely rare and beautiful gemstones which retain their value... just not diamonds.
Diamonds are a lot like luxury clothing lines. What makes a Louis Vuitton bag genuine? It's all a mental category, there's no physical property test that can classify Louis Vuitton atoms from counterfeit atoms.
Diamonds have the unfortunate (for diamond sellers) property that they have a very simple chemical structure. So what DeBeers is trying to do is create a mental category for "natural diamonds" vs. "lab grown diamonds". The last thing they want is for diamonds (the investment / luxury good) to be defined by the diamond crystal structure.
Consumers are very happy to pay extra for these mental categories when they know the belief in the category is widespread. Let's say you know your significant other will be disappointed if you buy her a lab grown diamond. Well, you have no choice but to buy a natural diamond I guess. A social fiction like this is self reinforcing once it reaches a critical mass. That's what they're driving for
Watches are moving in a similar direction. Time telling moved from a mechanical masterpiece to a digital commodity and watchmakers have become luxury brands.
> Diamonds have the unfortunate (for diamond sellers) property that they have a very simple chemical structure.
On the bright side (for diamond sellers) they're known to originate from a certain location. So they could in theory be protected by Champagne style trademarks and extract higher pricing that way.
> Too few imperfections and it’s worthless enough to grind to dust and use on consumable parts for power tools.
Industrial diamonds have been important for much longer than synthetic gem-quality diamonds have. Abrasive tools need diamonds, but they don't need to be attractive, so they aren't.
> There is this weird market where you want the purist diamond you can find, but not too pure. So you want some imperfections, just the perfect number of imperfections.
Another "weird" market where this holds true is the dating market. In general it seems similar to how we evaluate other humans or forms of life in general. If another person is too perfect they either seem fake or trigger a weird uncanny valley effect.
Now I'm wondering what the markup is on a plain gold band compared to the spot price of gold.
There's a business idea, figure out how to sell jewelry at a markup low enough that it makes sense as a store of value and then actually participate in both buying and selling.
If you just stroll into a standard jewelry store looking for gold, markup over spot is disastrous.
I've heard of people making that sort of thing on a limited basis, but the market isn't there. There aren't enough people aware enough of the issue, and the temptation to just go ahead and charge the jewelry premium as a result is pretty overwhelming.
jewelry is rarely pure gold. so you'd have to take that into consideration of your spot price. the person you sell that jewelry to later will also incur an expense at melting and separating the gold of the lesser metals. so not really sure how jewelry is a good way to store gold value
I dont have a dog in this fight but hilariously the argument //for imperfection// i see here: People are flawed, damaged and utterly fragile. Is a "pure diamond" the projection of unrealistic expectations? Legal disclosures:
- I am married (for much longer than the bell curve would suggest)
- I did buy a diamond
- I did stress about spending that money
- I don't see the diamond as any real asset (financially or otherwise)
- I bought said diamond AFTER i asked my SO's patriarch for permission
- I DID NOT receive a dowry (imagine all of the dirtbikes i could have purchased with that sweet, sweet chattel monies!)
My opinion: Diamonds are hotpockets: there is a lot of money going into advertising an otherwise unhealthy thing (for you and global society as a whole).
I remember visiting my grandparents houses and they had curios everywhere. Just cabinets of dishes and Royal Doultons and silver spoon collections and such. And these were not wealthy people by any means. Growing up, my parents had similar. Copper cookware hanging from the wall that we never used, an entire room with a piano and sofas and more curio cabinets that we went into twice a year: Thanksgiving and Christmas.
A big issue is that all that stuff ended up with my parents and their siblings, and now all their stuff is ending up with my siblings and I. And none of us want any of it.
I got to thinking: why did they collect all this stuff? And I came up with two guesses:
1) historically it was seen as a good way to "store" your wealth. My grandparents grew up in an environment that deeply appreciated the Great Depression. My parents were raised by parents who experienced it.
2) When you have money and there aren't GTX 3080s or smartphones to buy, you find things to spend it on, even if they're not as practical.
I'm not saying this doesn't exist anymore: collectables is a massive thing. But I feel, in general, my siblings and my friends and I all kinda feel the same way: "why would I want an extra room we never use? Why would I want all that stuff I don't use?"
I'm wondering if this is purely a generational cultural transition: we are finding less value in expensive do-nothings now that there's a thousand-and-eleventy ways to spend that money in a more usable way?
We finally became real adults the other year, in that we were hosting a big Thanksgiving at our own place. When we pulled out all the fine china that we'd been handed down we found that we were going to be short some table settings.
We looked at all the traditional stores (Penny's, etc) and found the prices for new china sets to be quite a lot.
On a lark, we went to the charity shop to just see what we could find. Hey, maybe, just maybe, there would be a set that matched what we already had?
The kitchen area was just chock-a-block with fine china. Glasses, plates, little forks, you name it. The silver was real silver judging by the tarnishing, still in those wooden velvet lined boxes. A bit of cellotape binding all the various items together. A whole coffee pot, pure silver, just sitting there next to dozens more. Any style or coloring or gold plating that you liked. Yeah, some of the sets were incomplete. Missing a tea up or a spoon. But no gold lined dinner plate made in Italy or Japan was ever more than a dollar.
We pieced together a whole set for 16 people of everything we could think of for under $200. Little oyster forks, big dinner plates, gold plated napkin rings, you name it, we have it now. And if we ever break anything, back to the charity shop to just replace it for under $0.50. Get a whole new set of them for under $10.
People are practically giving away all the fine china in my part of the world, and they still can barely find anyone to take it.
I don't know what our ancestors were thinking with this stuff, but I doubt it turned out like they thought it would. A good lesson to us all.
They're usually listed with the weight of the various pieces.
If it's 750/1000 silver (or whatever: it's not pure silver I think) and there are x kilograms, you can figure out what these are more or less worth.
> The silver was real silver judging by the tarnishing
I wouldn't be so sure... Many other material do look not unlike silver and were precisely used to make it look like they were silver. These aren't worth anything.
I remember hearing from my mother about how her grandmother (my great grandmother) got her chinaset. It was during the great depression, and some flour companies held long running promotions where a piece of China would be placed inside the bag of flour. If you ended up with too many pieces of one type (for example tea cups), you could trade with your neigbors to equal out your set. It was a way of buying/owning something nice when you barely had money to pay for the food itself. I'm not sure how apocryphal this story is though. Could the China really have survived transport that way? Maybe the purchaser redeemed the China piece another way.
They would also use the bag the flour came in as material to make underwear. Literally nothing was wasted. That is probably also why this stuff got passed down to our generation: they couldn't bear to part with anything.
Isn't that the whole quintessentially Millennial "buy experiences, not things" meme?
In the old days, a middle class income buys you a good house and some trinkets to fill it with. Nowadays a middle class income buys you nothing except a few fun trips. Might as well make the best of it.
This also reminds me of when I bought my house, my agent had mentioned how homes with all these superfluous rooms are becoming more difficult to sell because as prices go up, buyers just see useless space that costs money.
(And now I'm also reminded about the sickening ostentatiousness of growing up in a home with so many rooms that as a kid I'd sometimes think, "hey I haven't been in this room in six months. Let's go inside just to... be inside for a minute.")
I think it's just changed. Tons of people I know with disposable income buy retro gaming systems, collectible old cartridges, etc., when a MiSTer (or even sufficiently advanced software emulation) can do. There is still some affinity for Stuff, it's perhaps just that there are more readily-available things to attach oneself to rather than the stuff your parents or grandparents attached to.
I don't want my grandparents'/parents' Hummels stash, either. My hypothetical kids probably won't want whatever I end up into.
I've been going through some of this after inheriting all my parents stuff. I feel some guilt about tossing so many things that they hung on to so they must have valued them (but I don't feel enough guilt to keep all this stuff).
I think there is a third possible cause to add to your list: companies exploiting something that maybe used to be sort of true but our parents hadn't realized it no longer applied. Collectible things might have been expensive and slow to produce when they were hand painted in upstate new york, then they started to be machine stamped across the world for pennies and for a while they could still fetch the old price and sentimentality as the market was saturated and then some.
I sometimes wonder if I'm going too far in the other direction and not sentimentality in at least a few things and preserving them. Maybe I'm setting up the pendulum swing in the other direction and my kids will have interest in collecting something when they grow up.
Fussell marked a lot of this behavior as related to class-socialization. I’ve sometimes found it hard to tell where my attitudes differing from my parents’ and other older relatives’ is part of a generational shift, and where it’s because theirs all fall very much in a range of every-flavor-of-prole through middle (in Fussell’s terms), while I’ve both accidentally and on-purpose adopted a lot of upper-middle (again, as Fussell breaks the terms down) preferences and attitudes. This can easily happen entirely unconsciously just from, say, going to college.
I’m with you on disliking useless or near-useless rooms (formal dining room when we already have a large eat-in area in the kitchen? LOL no, that’s an office now) and finding “collectibles” or curio cabinets full of never-used and not-even-particularly-nice (but even if they were—you should use things unless they’re purely art!) e.g. dishes practically repulsive, but I’m not sure how much of that’s generational and how much if it’s my own small, but significant, class shift.
As a side note, silicon carbide (also known as moissanite, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moissanite) has better optical properties (slightly higher refractive index, twice as high dispersion) while not carrying multiple ethical dilemmas. It has a slightly lower hardness, but it does not matter unless you want it precisely to cut things.
When I proposed to my wife, I proposed with a ring with a single, solitary moissanite gemstone, about 1kt. She loved it (I assume she still loves it, she still wears it and gets complements on it frequently). One of the main complements that she receives is how "shiny" it is, probably due to how refractive moissanite is compared to diamond. That made me feel good hearing how people noticed.
It was also SIGNIFICANTLY less money than an equally sized diamond at the time. I understand that you want to demonstrate your love and affection to your significant other, but I can't justify spending nearly $10k on a ring, whose gemstone was probably harvested by someone working in reprehensible conditions (probably slavery).
The engagement ring I bought my (now) wife has a main Moissanite stone (clear), a ring of artificial emeralds, and artificial diamond accent stones (clear). The fact that we can artificially produce gemstones is really cool, green is my favorite color, there are no negative ethical implications from mining, and it makes for a very pretty ring. And it cost a lot less than an equivalent-sized diamond, even an artificial one.
Totally cool and not everyone's cup of tea. Wasn't mine when I was growing up.
But I married a woman who grew up more in that type of sphere. I ended up having a lot of fun diamond shopping in the upstairs office of a dealer in the diamond district in NYC, learning a lot, connecting to the stone, etc. My wife loved it and I love seeing the ring on her hand.
If the market value of it goes to zero and it's just a sentimental thing we share and then give to our daughter, I got my money's worth.
Obviously wouldn't have done it if I couldn't afford it etc
Too late to edit my comment, what I meant more is like "learned the nuances of various stones, understood the nuances of this stone and appreciated it."
Maybe instead of connected I should have said something like "nerded out." But now, a few years down the road of marriage, with a house and two kids, I have a deep sentimental appreciation for the journey of which our engagement was the start.
Like I said, the ring wasn't necessary to that - if we couldn't afford it we'd do something else but it was an enjoyable part.
Had similar journey years ago, entering the shop naively thinking: ah, it will cost me a month' salary, soit!
I wonder how this goes at the other end of the table. Seeing all these young couples crazy rationalising their purchase, not to mention their sales toolbox they have to close these deals.
Can you clarify what this means? It's an inanimate object with no spiritual meaning or no meaning in general. Why not connect with something cheaper, like some pebble from a river bank?
I can't tell if this is satire or not, but of course you do your life your way.
Maybe we're old-fashioned. My wife's done some pretty "unequal" things like 2 pregnancies and many months of getting up at night to breastfeed. So I don't mind doing some of the "unequal" things from my side. Frankly, I think I get off easy :)
When I told my fiance I was thinking of proposing, I asked if she would like to be involved in picking out the engagement ring, and if she minded whether it was genuine or lab-grown. She did not. We commissioned a nice, lab-grown Alexandrite stone, which she loves, and the several grand in savings allowed me to get her a nicer band to go with it.
None of our family/friends that she shows off the ring to care that it's lab-grown. The only people who sneer that it is not a "real" diamond do not belong in our social circle.
When the only difference between a lab-grown diamond and a "real" one comes down to "Some children in an African diamond mine had to suffer to bring you the latter," you could very reasonably argue that the cruelty is the point.
>The only people who sneer that it is not a "real" diamond do not belong in our social circle.
Clearly, I'm not in that circle either. If someone shows me their ring that they a clearly proud of, just finding the gall to even dare asking "is it real" is so beyond me that I don't really even know where to begin. It's not like it's a knock off hand bag that these same people seem to embrace, so I really am quite content (more than that really) that I'm not in those circles.
Congrats on having a good experience with that whole process.
Boycott the cartel and their resource curse/slavery/conflict diamonds. There are plenty of other ways besides advertising-manufactured material expressions of commitment. Make your own rings.
>American couples date for about three years before getting engaged, and thanks to covid-19 very few people were out and about meeting potential husbands or wives in 2020. An unusually small number of people are probably getting engaged this year.
And all the people who would have got married during 2020 but couldn't?
Readit News
The way you measure how valuable a diamond is? Purity. The way you tell a lab made diamond from a “real” diamond? Purity.
If it’s too pure it’s fake. There is this weird market where you want the purist diamond you can find, but not too pure. So you want some imperfections, just the perfect number of imperfections.
Too many imperfections and it’s low quality.
Too few imperfections and it’s worthless enough to grind to dust and use on consumable parts for power tools.
The modern jewelry market is also substantially different than what past generations taught me jewelry was. To them, jewelry was meant to be a value store. You purchase a valuable ring, the stone and metal held their value and you or your heirs could sell it later if times were tough.
Now jewelry seems more like buying a new car. It loses half its value when you drive it off the lot.
The sentimental value of a diamond is its rarity. And natural diamonds with few imperfections are rare. And a big diamond, useless for anything else, is the only way to show how much the marriage is worth. This is what is being sold to us.
Synthetic diamonds are destroying 50 years of marketing.
And I can't believe males and females of 21st century still fall for this. Literally any use of this money could have been better.
I suspect we'll be seeing an increase in branding in the diamond business. That's really the only way they can control prices since it's now possible to create man made ones. Given enough time the prices will collapse to the point of cost of producing them plus a small premium. Competition will make sure that happens. There's no way mined diamonds will be able to compete.
Diamonds aren't going away they are just making a marketing transition.
Why not just destroy money? And record this as a memento if needed. May be less wasteful than making the diamond.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Foundation_Burn_a_Million_Qu...
It's not even just synthetic diamonds, natural diamond scarcity is artificial as well.
Jewelry sellers pretend their product is like precious metals: a store of value.
In fact, it's more like collectable trading cards: popularity contributes more value than component materials.
I.e. why heritage Tiffany or Rolex pieces still have substantial value
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/sp/chart-how-much-gold-is-i...
https://lifegem.com/
We hear about families selling their jewelry to escape the country or when they're short on funds, but did they actually get a good price for it?
This was in a country with high inflation that's just gone through a regime change. Did he get a good price for the watch? Yes, at that moment, the truck was more valuable than the watch.
Diamonds have the unfortunate (for diamond sellers) property that they have a very simple chemical structure. So what DeBeers is trying to do is create a mental category for "natural diamonds" vs. "lab grown diamonds". The last thing they want is for diamonds (the investment / luxury good) to be defined by the diamond crystal structure.
Consumers are very happy to pay extra for these mental categories when they know the belief in the category is widespread. Let's say you know your significant other will be disappointed if you buy her a lab grown diamond. Well, you have no choice but to buy a natural diamond I guess. A social fiction like this is self reinforcing once it reaches a critical mass. That's what they're driving for
> Diamonds have the unfortunate (for diamond sellers) property that they have a very simple chemical structure.
On the bright side (for diamond sellers) they're known to originate from a certain location. So they could in theory be protected by Champagne style trademarks and extract higher pricing that way.
Industrial diamonds have been important for much longer than synthetic gem-quality diamonds have. Abrasive tools need diamonds, but they don't need to be attractive, so they aren't.
Another "weird" market where this holds true is the dating market. In general it seems similar to how we evaluate other humans or forms of life in general. If another person is too perfect they either seem fake or trigger a weird uncanny valley effect.
There's a business idea, figure out how to sell jewelry at a markup low enough that it makes sense as a store of value and then actually participate in both buying and selling.
I've heard of people making that sort of thing on a limited basis, but the market isn't there. There aren't enough people aware enough of the issue, and the temptation to just go ahead and charge the jewelry premium as a result is pretty overwhelming.
Symmetry and skin smoothness are markers of beauty. Too much and a girl looks like she’s had too much work done, or the photo is shopped.
My opinion: Diamonds are hotpockets: there is a lot of money going into advertising an otherwise unhealthy thing (for you and global society as a whole).
A big issue is that all that stuff ended up with my parents and their siblings, and now all their stuff is ending up with my siblings and I. And none of us want any of it.
I got to thinking: why did they collect all this stuff? And I came up with two guesses:
1) historically it was seen as a good way to "store" your wealth. My grandparents grew up in an environment that deeply appreciated the Great Depression. My parents were raised by parents who experienced it.
2) When you have money and there aren't GTX 3080s or smartphones to buy, you find things to spend it on, even if they're not as practical.
I'm not saying this doesn't exist anymore: collectables is a massive thing. But I feel, in general, my siblings and my friends and I all kinda feel the same way: "why would I want an extra room we never use? Why would I want all that stuff I don't use?"
I'm wondering if this is purely a generational cultural transition: we are finding less value in expensive do-nothings now that there's a thousand-and-eleventy ways to spend that money in a more usable way?
We looked at all the traditional stores (Penny's, etc) and found the prices for new china sets to be quite a lot.
On a lark, we went to the charity shop to just see what we could find. Hey, maybe, just maybe, there would be a set that matched what we already had?
The kitchen area was just chock-a-block with fine china. Glasses, plates, little forks, you name it. The silver was real silver judging by the tarnishing, still in those wooden velvet lined boxes. A bit of cellotape binding all the various items together. A whole coffee pot, pure silver, just sitting there next to dozens more. Any style or coloring or gold plating that you liked. Yeah, some of the sets were incomplete. Missing a tea up or a spoon. But no gold lined dinner plate made in Italy or Japan was ever more than a dollar.
We pieced together a whole set for 16 people of everything we could think of for under $200. Little oyster forks, big dinner plates, gold plated napkin rings, you name it, we have it now. And if we ever break anything, back to the charity shop to just replace it for under $0.50. Get a whole new set of them for under $10.
People are practically giving away all the fine china in my part of the world, and they still can barely find anyone to take it.
I don't know what our ancestors were thinking with this stuff, but I doubt it turned out like they thought it would. A good lesson to us all.
Now here's the kicker: some of these sets have several kilograms of silver in them.
Here'd be the biggest french auction site and full "menagere" can go from 2 K EUR up to 15 K EUR for the rarest and biggest ones:
https://drouot.com/fr/l/22652407-couverts-espagnols-en-argen...
They're usually listed with the weight of the various pieces.
If it's 750/1000 silver (or whatever: it's not pure silver I think) and there are x kilograms, you can figure out what these are more or less worth.
> The silver was real silver judging by the tarnishing
I wouldn't be so sure... Many other material do look not unlike silver and were precisely used to make it look like they were silver. These aren't worth anything.
They would also use the bag the flour came in as material to make underwear. Literally nothing was wasted. That is probably also why this stuff got passed down to our generation: they couldn't bear to part with anything.
In the old days, a middle class income buys you a good house and some trinkets to fill it with. Nowadays a middle class income buys you nothing except a few fun trips. Might as well make the best of it.
This also reminds me of when I bought my house, my agent had mentioned how homes with all these superfluous rooms are becoming more difficult to sell because as prices go up, buyers just see useless space that costs money.
(And now I'm also reminded about the sickening ostentatiousness of growing up in a home with so many rooms that as a kid I'd sometimes think, "hey I haven't been in this room in six months. Let's go inside just to... be inside for a minute.")
I don't want my grandparents'/parents' Hummels stash, either. My hypothetical kids probably won't want whatever I end up into.
I think there is a third possible cause to add to your list: companies exploiting something that maybe used to be sort of true but our parents hadn't realized it no longer applied. Collectible things might have been expensive and slow to produce when they were hand painted in upstate new york, then they started to be machine stamped across the world for pennies and for a while they could still fetch the old price and sentimentality as the market was saturated and then some.
I sometimes wonder if I'm going too far in the other direction and not sentimentality in at least a few things and preserving them. Maybe I'm setting up the pendulum swing in the other direction and my kids will have interest in collecting something when they grow up.
I’m with you on disliking useless or near-useless rooms (formal dining room when we already have a large eat-in area in the kitchen? LOL no, that’s an office now) and finding “collectibles” or curio cabinets full of never-used and not-even-particularly-nice (but even if they were—you should use things unless they’re purely art!) e.g. dishes practically repulsive, but I’m not sure how much of that’s generational and how much if it’s my own small, but significant, class shift.
It was also SIGNIFICANTLY less money than an equally sized diamond at the time. I understand that you want to demonstrate your love and affection to your significant other, but I can't justify spending nearly $10k on a ring, whose gemstone was probably harvested by someone working in reprehensible conditions (probably slavery).
But I married a woman who grew up more in that type of sphere. I ended up having a lot of fun diamond shopping in the upstairs office of a dealer in the diamond district in NYC, learning a lot, connecting to the stone, etc. My wife loved it and I love seeing the ring on her hand.
If the market value of it goes to zero and it's just a sentimental thing we share and then give to our daughter, I got my money's worth.
Obviously wouldn't have done it if I couldn't afford it etc
Maybe instead of connected I should have said something like "nerded out." But now, a few years down the road of marriage, with a house and two kids, I have a deep sentimental appreciation for the journey of which our engagement was the start.
Like I said, the ring wasn't necessary to that - if we couldn't afford it we'd do something else but it was an enjoyable part.
I wonder how this goes at the other end of the table. Seeing all these young couples crazy rationalising their purchase, not to mention their sales toolbox they have to close these deals.
Can you clarify what this means? It's an inanimate object with no spiritual meaning or no meaning in general. Why not connect with something cheaper, like some pebble from a river bank?
it already did, the second you bought it
Maybe we're old-fashioned. My wife's done some pretty "unequal" things like 2 pregnancies and many months of getting up at night to breastfeed. So I don't mind doing some of the "unequal" things from my side. Frankly, I think I get off easy :)
When I told my fiance I was thinking of proposing, I asked if she would like to be involved in picking out the engagement ring, and if she minded whether it was genuine or lab-grown. She did not. We commissioned a nice, lab-grown Alexandrite stone, which she loves, and the several grand in savings allowed me to get her a nicer band to go with it.
None of our family/friends that she shows off the ring to care that it's lab-grown. The only people who sneer that it is not a "real" diamond do not belong in our social circle.
When the only difference between a lab-grown diamond and a "real" one comes down to "Some children in an African diamond mine had to suffer to bring you the latter," you could very reasonably argue that the cruelty is the point.
Clearly, I'm not in that circle either. If someone shows me their ring that they a clearly proud of, just finding the gall to even dare asking "is it real" is so beyond me that I don't really even know where to begin. It's not like it's a knock off hand bag that these same people seem to embrace, so I really am quite content (more than that really) that I'm not in those circles.
Congrats on having a good experience with that whole process.
I don't know exactly why they do that (I suspect it's just childish), but I know a few people that behave like that.
No one really cares about "real" diamonds
There is still significant demand from them for engagement rings.
And all the people who would have got married during 2020 but couldn't?