A Diamond is Forever. And That Was the Plan

Daniel wants to know why diamonds are so expensive.

The answer has less to do with geology than most people think.

Diamonds are not as rare as their price suggests. Gem-quality diamonds are genuinely uncommon, but the gap between what diamonds cost to mine and what they sell for has long been shaped by something else: controlled supply. A company called De Beers, founded in South Africa in 1888, eventually controlled roughly eighty-five percent of the world's diamond supply. Once you control most of the supply of something, you control the price. De Beers kept supply deliberately low -- not because diamonds were scarce in the ground, but because releasing too many would reveal how many there actually were. The sense of scarcity in the market was carefully managed. Not simply left to nature.

But controlling supply only explains the price. It doesn't explain why diamonds became the symbol of love.

That part came later. By the late 1930s, diamond sales were struggling. Most Americans didn't exchange diamond engagement rings -- diamonds were seen as something only the very wealthy bought. De Beers hired an advertising agency and gave them a challenge: make diamonds feel necessary. Not just desirable. Necessary.

In 1947, a copywriter named Frances Gerety came up with a slogan. She reportedly wasn't happy with it herself. Her colleagues weren't impressed either.

The slogan was: A Diamond is Forever.

Advertising Age later named it the slogan of the century. The campaign didn't just sell diamonds. It created a cultural expectation -- that an engagement ring should have a diamond, that the size of the stone reflects the seriousness of the love. And the slogan had another effect: if people rarely resold their rings, fewer diamonds returned to the market, helping preserve the perception of scarcity. Whether that was a deliberate strategy or a fortunate consequence, the result was the same.

Within a generation, diamond engagement rings went from being something mainly wealthy people bought to being the cultural standard. The expectation that a diamond ring is the only proper way to mark an engagement was largely created by an advertising campaign.

The feelings people attach to diamonds are real. What the story changes is not the feelings -- just the understanding of where some of them came from.

Daniel's observation about what you are actually seeing when you look at a diamond ring -- and his closing line about Frances Gerety -- are the last two exchanges worth staying for.

What you will find in this episode:

• Why diamonds are not as rare as their price suggests -- and what De Beers actually controlled
• How one company managed market scarcity for most of the twentieth century
• Why diamond engagement rings were not always the cultural standard
• The 1947 advertising campaign that changed everything -- and the copywriter who almost didn't submit her slogan
• Why the feelings attached to diamonds are real -- and why knowing the history makes them more interesting, not less
• Daniel's closing line about Frances Gerety

Surprising, balanced, and the kind of episode that makes you think differently about value, perception, and how culture gets made.

Listen, wonder, and learn.

Find us @smilewithDaniel everywhere.