There’s no denying that diamonds are a traditional symbol of romance and love. Why, a man needs a diamond ring to ask the woman of his dream to marry him, right? But was it always that way? Did you know that someone worked very, very hard to make diamond rings de rigueur in marriage proposals? Or that diamonds aren’t actually very rare at all? Or that they make lousy investments?
1. The Earliest Use of Diamonds: Polishing Axes
Truth is, the majority of diamonds mined today are used for industrial purposes – and that may also be the very first use of diamonds by humans.
Harvard physicist Peter Lu and colleagues found that ancient Chinese used diamonds to polish ceremonial burial axes in the late stone age or over 4,500 years ago.
The axes, which are made from corundum (or ruby in its red form and sapphire in other colors), were polished to a mirror finish. Corundum is the second hardest naturally occurring substance on Earth and close examination of these axes revealed that they could’ve been made only with diamond abrasives.
It’s quite fitting since today, 80% of mined diamonds (about 100 million carats) are used for the industrial purposes of cutting, drilling, grinding, and polishing.
2. Diamonds Are Not The Hardest Substance on Earth
In 2005, physicists Natalia Dubrovinskaia and colleagues compressed carbon fullerene molecules and heating them at the same time to create a series of interconnected rods called Aggregated Diamond Nanorods (ADNRs or “hyperdiamond”). It’s about 11% harder than a diamond
3. De Beers: The Diamond Cartel
Rhodes started by renting water pumps to miners during a diamond rush in 1867 at Kimberley, South Africa. He expanded into mines and about twenty years later became the sole owner of all diamond mining operations in the country.
Rhodes built De Beers into a diamond cartel (well, they prefer “single-channel marketing” and since they’re one company, they’re technically a monopoly). De Beers mines diamonds, then handle their sales and distribution through various entities (in London, it’s known as the innocuously named Diamond Trading Company; in Israel, it’s simply called “the syndicate”; in Belgium, it’s called the CSO or Central Selling Organization.)
If you want to buy diamonds from De Beers, you’ve got to play by their rules: diamond are sold in events known as “sights.” There are 10 sights held each year, and to buy, you have to be a sightholder (these are usually diamond dealers whose business is to have the stones cut and polished and then resold at diamond clearing centers of Antwerp, New York, and Tel Aviv).
The diamonds are sold on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. A sightholder is given a small box of uncut diamonds priced between $1 and $25 million. De Beers set the price – there is no haggling and no re-selling of diamonds in uncut form. It is rare for sightholders to refuse a diamond package offered to them, for fear of not being invited back. And those who dare to purchase diamonds from other sources than De Beers will have their sightholder privilege revoked.
In the early days, De Beers controlled about 90% of the world’s diamond supply. Today, its monopoly on diamonds has been significantly reduced. It is estimated that the cartel now controls about 60 to 75% of the world’s diamond trade
4. So Why The Name ‘De Beers’?
De Beers was actually named for the brothers Johannel Nicholas de Beer and Diederik Arnoldus de Beer, whose farm Cecil Rhodes bought when diamond mines were discovered on it.
5. Are Diamonds Rare?
To maintain the high prices of diamonds, De Beers creates an artificial scarcity: they stockpile mined diamonds and sell them in small amounts.
Perhaps De Beers chairman Nicky Oppenheimer said it best: “diamonds are intrinsically worthless, except for the deep psychological need they fill.” (mental_floss, vol 7 issue 6, p. 21 “Diamond Engagement Rings” by Rebecca Zerzan)
6. Moon-Sized Diamond
The cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallised carbon, 4,000 km across, some 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus.
It’s the compressed heart of an old star that was once bright like our Sun but has since faded and shrunk.
Astronomers have decided to call the star “Lucy” after the Beatles song, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
According to scientists, if you wait long enough, our own sun will eventually turn into one such large diamond star!
7. Famous Diamonds
Hnere’s a truly fascinating story about the Bokassa Diamond. In 1977, a crazy Central African dictator named Jean-Bédel Bokassa declared himself an emperor and asked Albert Jolis, the president of a diamond mining operation, for a diamond ring (he made sure Jolis knew that nothing smaller than a golf ball-sized rock would do!)
Jolis didn’t have the money to buy such a large stone but if he didn’t deliver one, his company would lose the mining concession in Central Africa. So he devised a clever ruse: Jolis found a large piece of black diamond bort (a poorly crystallized diamond usually fit only to be crushed into abrasive powder) that curiously resembled Africa in shape. He ordered the diamond polished and mounted on a large ring. A one-quarter carat white diamond was then set roughly where the country is located on the continent.
Jolis presented the “unique” diamond to Bokassa, and the clueless emperor loved it! He thought that the $500 ring was worth over $500,000! Just two years later, when Bokassa was overthrown in a coup, Jolis heard that he went into exile with his prize diamond ring, and noted wryly: “It’s a priceless diamond as long as he doesn’t try to sell it.” (Source)
8. The Most Brilliant Advertising Campaign of All Time: A Diamond Is Forever
The 1930s was a bad decade for the diamond industry: the price of diamond had declined worldwide. Europe was in the verge of another war and the idea of a diamond engagement ring didn’t take hold. Indeed, engagement rings were considered a luxury and when given, they rarely contained diamonds.
In 1938, De Beers engaged N.W. Ayer & Son, the first advertising agency in the United States, to change the image of diamonds in America. The ad agency suggested a clever ad campaign to link diamonds to romance in the public’s mind. To do this, they placed diamonds in the fingers of Hollywood stars and suggested stories to newspapers on how diamond rings symbolized romance. Even high school students were targeted:
9. Diamonds are Actually Lousy Investments
De Beers is quite famous for never lowering the price of diamonds. During the Great Depression, the cartel drastically cut supplies and stockpiled diamonds to prop up their price. But do diamonds make good investments?
Unless you’re a certified diamond seller, the answer is no: you won’t be able to sell a diamond ring for more than what you pay for it. And the reason is simple: with diamonds, you buy at retail and sell at wholesale, if you can sell it at all.
In 1982, Edward Jay Epstein wrote an intriguing article for The Atlantic, titled “Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?” In it, he wrote about an experiment to determine a diamond’s value as an investment.
10. Artificial Diamonds
In the past decade, scientists have perfected a technique called Chemical Vapor Deposition, where carbon gas cloud is passed over diamond seeds in a vacuum chamber heated to more than 1,800 degrees. In a matter of days, they are now able to “grow” diamonds that are virtually indistinguishable from natural ones, even to the experts:
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