June 29, 2026 • 11 mins
The tradition of putting diamonds on engagement rings is less than a century old, but some 80% of engagement rings in the U.S. now bear them. Learn how a cartel and an ad campaign created such a pervasive demand for diamonds in today's episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://money.howstuffworks.com/true-story-blood-diamonds.htm and this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IceJ-gUm-gQ. To learn more about the De Beers cartel, check out the episode of Stuff They Don't Want You To Know 'Diamonds: The Conspiracy' https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-they-dont-want-you-to-know/diamonds-the-conspiracy
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey brain Stuff
Lauren vogelbam here. We all like to think that we
aren't overly swayed by advertisements, but even if you can
resist the urge to order a pizza after watching a
tantalizing commercial, ads absolutely impact you, and not just by
(00:23):
getting jingle stuck in your head. AD campaigns can change
our society. A perfect example is the tradition of giving
diamond engagement rings, which isn't even a whole century old.
Today's question is why do most engagement rings feature diamonds?
You know, why not rubies or opals or nuggets of
(00:44):
delicious beef jerky. That last one wouldn't work out for
obvious reasons. But it turns out that, yes, you can
trace this precious tradition back to an ad campaign. To
be fair, diamonds are really cool rocks, and I think
that a lot of rocks are cool. But diamonds objectively
are made of mere carbon, one of the most common
(01:06):
elements on our planet. A carbon accounts for more than
eighteen percent of your body weight. But the carbon in
diamonds has been crystallized beneath Earth's crust and its molten mantle,
some one hundred miles or one hundred and sixty kilometers
under the surface. It happens that deep because that's where
pressures reach four hundred and thirty five thousand pounds per
(01:27):
square inch or thirty kilobars, and temperatures reach at least
seven hundred and fifty degrees fahrenheit or four hundred celsius.
The carbon crystals that come out of that pressure cooker
are the hardest known material that occurs in nature and
are excellent conducting heat, so they make for terrific industrial tools,
(01:48):
laboratory equipment, and even experimental electronic components. It's some of
these practical properties that originally made diamonds valuable. Ancient Indians
found riverbed to potosets of rough diamonds thousands of years
ago and identified them as stones that no known tools
could cut. These diamonds became objects of mythical significance, used
(02:10):
in religious objects and talismans. Researchers have found evidence that
these stones made their way to ancient China, where stone
age crafts people were using them to polish ceremonial axes
to a mirror finish four thousand, five hundred years ago.
Diamonds can also be you know, really pretty rough ones
were used in jewelry in ancient Rome two thousand years ago.
(02:33):
Around the thirteen to fifteen hundreds, diamonds became sparkly additions
and centerpieces in jewelry for basically only nobility because they
were the only ones who could afford it. The market
opened up a little when deposits were found in Brazil
in the seventeen hundreds, and this coincided with the growing
middleish class of people who could swing for small luxuries.
(02:54):
But diamonds were still truly scarce, that is until the
winter of eighteen sixty six, which is when a fifteen
year old kid in South Africa stumbled across the first
evidence of what turned out to be a huge deposit
of diamonds. Though the first few were found in riverbeds,
in less than a decade, mines had revealed more diamonds
(03:17):
than had been found in India across thousands of years.
This actually created something of a problem. Okay. In the
early days, English businessman Cecil Roads moved in and started
buying up all the property he could, including a farm
owned by two brothers named Deber. He had a few competitors,
(03:39):
but over the next couple decades, owners of smaller diamond
mines joined up with owners of larger ones and eventually
created a consortium called the De Beer's Consolidated Mines, with
Roads at the head. By eighteen eighty eight, they essentially
controlled the entire South African diamond supply. But with control
(03:59):
over so many diamonds, they worried about flooding the market
and making the price too cheap to be worth the
expense of mining them. So Rhodes controlled the supply by
creating intermediaries to buy the uncut diamonds from the De
Beer's company, send them on to cutters and polishers, and
from there onto retailed jewelers to sell. Debiers controlled every
(04:22):
step of the sale and distribution of the gems, and
was thus able to decide how many diamonds to release
every year, as well as set its own price points
that had to be met worldwide, regardless of any given
jewelers association with the Deber's diamond cartel. I've seen different figures,
but De Beer's controlled some ninety percent of the world's
(04:42):
diamond market for decades, so that took care of the supply.
But how about the demand. The diamond engagement ring was
not a tradition in any culture before De Beer's got
into the diamond business. Before the middle of the nineteen
hundredds opals, rubies, sapphires, and turquoise were way more popular
(05:04):
than diamonds as engagement stones. As of nineteen thirty nine,
only some ten percent of US engagement rings bore diamonds,
and the jewels being used were smaller and of poorer
quality than the stones common today, But by the end
of the twentieth century, about seventy five percent of US
engagement rings featured diamonds. Here's where that world shaking ad
(05:27):
campaign comes in. Okay. By the nineteen thirties, Debiers was
in a tight spot. The financial strains of World War One,
the ensuing Great Depression, and the looming promise of a
second World War had sent the demand for its carefully priced,
controlled artificially scarce diamonds into freefall. Young couple's entering marriage
(05:49):
didn't want luxury goods. They wanted practical things like home
appliances or maybe a car. Further antitrust laws prevented de
beers from directly to doing business in the United States,
so in nineteen thirty eight, De Beer's hired ad agency
n w Ayer to research the market and produce a
(06:10):
comprehensive US AD campaign, A print, radio and celebrity publicity.
Ayer identified the engagement ring market as one worth pursuing,
and since diamonds had no real physical value, the agency
and their lead copywriter for the client, a one Mary
Francis Garrity, worked to assign diamond's emotional value. Print ads
(06:33):
compared diamonds to paintings by Picasso and Dali, unique and precious.
They loaned diamonds out to famous women to wear to
fancy events like the Academy Awards and the Kentucky Derby.
They commissioned portraits of famous couples who had recently gotten
engaged with diamond rings. The number of diamonds being purchased
(06:53):
for engagement rings in the US tripled in less than
a decade. Then, in nineteen five forty seven, they launched
garrity slogan, A diamond is Forever it was and is.
A brilliant campaign pun intended it set up diamonds as
a near indispensable part of engagement traditions and further as
(07:15):
heirlooms to be cherished and kept, never to be resold
back into the market, meaning more diamonds would be bought,
and almost all of them new. But then another discovery
changed the game again. In nineteen fifty five, deposits of
diamonds were found in Siberia, yielding a lot of relatively
small stones. Instead of trying to compete with the new mine,
(07:38):
De Beer struck a deal with the Soviet Union to
buy its supply to incorporate it into the company's already
existing structures. But they had just spent a couple of
decades promoting diamonds as the bigger, the better, so to
sell these small diamonds, De Beers created the four ceas system,
a clarity, carrot cut, and color, so that even diminutive
(08:00):
diamonds could cost as much as the larger ones if
they were higher quality. Of course, there are some other
factors that helped launch the tradition of diamond engagement rings.
Right around the same time that Ayer's campaign was starting up,
laws surrounding engagement to marriage were changing. Previously a spurned fiance,
but usually a woman could sue their ex if the
(08:23):
engagement dissolved before marriage. These laws, sometimes called heart balm laws,
or a relic from a not two distant time when
marriage was a major economic proposition for a lot of women.
For a certain class, it was a woman's job to
get married, so any money awarded from a heartbalm suit
could help a girl recoup the cost of having been
(08:44):
off the market for a while. But in the nineteen
thirties and forties, these laws were dismantled, and in response,
engagement rings got a little bit more expensive as a
type of unofficial engagement insurance. Also, later on the nineteen
fifties and sixties, a culture of conspicuous consumption came into play,
a further driving sales. But whatever the surrounding cultural issues,
(09:08):
diamonds stuck as symbols of love. From the nineteen seventies
through the nineteen nineties, Deber's monopolies suffered from further discoveries
of diamonds around the world and unwillingness of various parties
to bow to the cartel. A further consumers became more
aware of the true costs of diamonds due to bloody
conflicts surrounding their control and the control of the governments
(09:32):
in the areas where they're found. People didn't want to
buy these blood diamonds, so de Beers teamed up with
the United Nations to establish what's called the Kimberly Process
in two thousand and three as a sort of passport
system for diamonds. It now indicates all stones countries of
origin and ensures that no money generated by their sales
(09:52):
will fund terrorist groups. Unfortunately, the Kimberly Process isn't perfect,
and it can't regulate or prevent the other numerous issues
inherent in the diamond trade, including child labor, workers' rights violations,
and environmental devastation. But the game is changing again today
with the introduction of affordable synthetic diamonds into the market,
(10:16):
the public's taste for natural diamonds has seriously shifted. These
diamonds are grown in industrial labs but are functionally indistinguishable
from natural diamonds. As of twenty twenty six, eighty three
percent of newly given engagement rings still feature a diamond. However,
sixty one percent of center stones are now synthetic. The
(10:38):
past four years have seen the retail price of natural
diamonds fall by forty percent. In the short term, this
is unfortunately causing more instability in regions that already struggle
with the supply of diamonds for international trade. It has
been a wild less than a century for diamond engagement rings. I,
for one, wonder whether the diamond bubble could be collapsing
(11:02):
or whether this new tradition could well be forever. Today's
episode is based on the article The True Story of
Blood Diamonds on HowStuffWorks dot Com written by Diana Brown,
and on an old brain Stuff video called why do
We put Diamonds on Engagement Rings? Written by Me to
(11:23):
hear my less polite opinions about the industry, check out
the episode of the podcast Stuff They Don't Want You
To Know called Diamonds the Conspiracy. Brain Stuff is production
of iHeartRadio in partnership with HowStuffWorks dot Com. Is produced
by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey brain Stuff
Lauren vogelbam here. We all like to think that we
aren't overly swayed by advertisements, but even if you can
resist the urge to order a pizza after watching a
tantalizing commercial, ads absolutely impact you, and not just by
(00:23):
getting jingle stuck in your head. AD campaigns can change
our society. A perfect example is the tradition of giving
diamond engagement rings, which isn't even a whole century old.
Today's question is why do most engagement rings feature diamonds?
You know, why not rubies or opals or nuggets of
(00:44):
delicious beef jerky. That last one wouldn't work out for
obvious reasons. But it turns out that, yes, you can
trace this precious tradition back to an ad campaign. To
be fair, diamonds are really cool rocks, and I think
that a lot of rocks are cool. But diamonds objectively
are made of mere carbon, one of the most common
(01:06):
elements on our planet. A carbon accounts for more than
eighteen percent of your body weight. But the carbon in
diamonds has been crystallized beneath Earth's crust and its molten mantle,
some one hundred miles or one hundred and sixty kilometers
under the surface. It happens that deep because that's where
pressures reach four hundred and thirty five thousand pounds per
(01:27):
square inch or thirty kilobars, and temperatures reach at least
seven hundred and fifty degrees fahrenheit or four hundred celsius.
The carbon crystals that come out of that pressure cooker
are the hardest known material that occurs in nature and
are excellent conducting heat, so they make for terrific industrial tools,
(01:48):
laboratory equipment, and even experimental electronic components. It's some of
these practical properties that originally made diamonds valuable. Ancient Indians
found riverbed to potosets of rough diamonds thousands of years
ago and identified them as stones that no known tools
could cut. These diamonds became objects of mythical significance, used
(02:10):
in religious objects and talismans. Researchers have found evidence that
these stones made their way to ancient China, where stone
age crafts people were using them to polish ceremonial axes
to a mirror finish four thousand, five hundred years ago.
Diamonds can also be you know, really pretty rough ones
were used in jewelry in ancient Rome two thousand years ago.
(02:33):
Around the thirteen to fifteen hundreds, diamonds became sparkly additions
and centerpieces in jewelry for basically only nobility because they
were the only ones who could afford it. The market
opened up a little when deposits were found in Brazil
in the seventeen hundreds, and this coincided with the growing
middleish class of people who could swing for small luxuries.
(02:54):
But diamonds were still truly scarce, that is until the
winter of eighteen sixty six, which is when a fifteen
year old kid in South Africa stumbled across the first
evidence of what turned out to be a huge deposit
of diamonds. Though the first few were found in riverbeds,
in less than a decade, mines had revealed more diamonds
(03:17):
than had been found in India across thousands of years.
This actually created something of a problem. Okay. In the
early days, English businessman Cecil Roads moved in and started
buying up all the property he could, including a farm
owned by two brothers named Deber. He had a few competitors,
(03:39):
but over the next couple decades, owners of smaller diamond
mines joined up with owners of larger ones and eventually
created a consortium called the De Beer's Consolidated Mines, with
Roads at the head. By eighteen eighty eight, they essentially
controlled the entire South African diamond supply. But with control
(03:59):
over so many diamonds, they worried about flooding the market
and making the price too cheap to be worth the
expense of mining them. So Rhodes controlled the supply by
creating intermediaries to buy the uncut diamonds from the De
Beer's company, send them on to cutters and polishers, and
from there onto retailed jewelers to sell. Debiers controlled every
(04:22):
step of the sale and distribution of the gems, and
was thus able to decide how many diamonds to release
every year, as well as set its own price points
that had to be met worldwide, regardless of any given
jewelers association with the Deber's diamond cartel. I've seen different figures,
but De Beer's controlled some ninety percent of the world's
(04:42):
diamond market for decades, so that took care of the supply.
But how about the demand. The diamond engagement ring was
not a tradition in any culture before De Beer's got
into the diamond business. Before the middle of the nineteen
hundredds opals, rubies, sapphires, and turquoise were way more popular
(05:04):
than diamonds as engagement stones. As of nineteen thirty nine,
only some ten percent of US engagement rings bore diamonds,
and the jewels being used were smaller and of poorer
quality than the stones common today, But by the end
of the twentieth century, about seventy five percent of US
engagement rings featured diamonds. Here's where that world shaking ad
(05:27):
campaign comes in. Okay. By the nineteen thirties, Debiers was
in a tight spot. The financial strains of World War One,
the ensuing Great Depression, and the looming promise of a
second World War had sent the demand for its carefully priced,
controlled artificially scarce diamonds into freefall. Young couple's entering marriage
(05:49):
didn't want luxury goods. They wanted practical things like home
appliances or maybe a car. Further antitrust laws prevented de
beers from directly to doing business in the United States,
so in nineteen thirty eight, De Beer's hired ad agency
n w Ayer to research the market and produce a
(06:10):
comprehensive US AD campaign, A print, radio and celebrity publicity.
Ayer identified the engagement ring market as one worth pursuing,
and since diamonds had no real physical value, the agency
and their lead copywriter for the client, a one Mary
Francis Garrity, worked to assign diamond's emotional value. Print ads
(06:33):
compared diamonds to paintings by Picasso and Dali, unique and precious.
They loaned diamonds out to famous women to wear to
fancy events like the Academy Awards and the Kentucky Derby.
They commissioned portraits of famous couples who had recently gotten
engaged with diamond rings. The number of diamonds being purchased
(06:53):
for engagement rings in the US tripled in less than
a decade. Then, in nineteen five forty seven, they launched
garrity slogan, A diamond is Forever it was and is.
A brilliant campaign pun intended it set up diamonds as
a near indispensable part of engagement traditions and further as
(07:15):
heirlooms to be cherished and kept, never to be resold
back into the market, meaning more diamonds would be bought,
and almost all of them new. But then another discovery
changed the game again. In nineteen fifty five, deposits of
diamonds were found in Siberia, yielding a lot of relatively
small stones. Instead of trying to compete with the new mine,
(07:38):
De Beer struck a deal with the Soviet Union to
buy its supply to incorporate it into the company's already
existing structures. But they had just spent a couple of
decades promoting diamonds as the bigger, the better, so to
sell these small diamonds, De Beers created the four ceas system,
a clarity, carrot cut, and color, so that even diminutive
(08:00):
diamonds could cost as much as the larger ones if
they were higher quality. Of course, there are some other
factors that helped launch the tradition of diamond engagement rings.
Right around the same time that Ayer's campaign was starting up,
laws surrounding engagement to marriage were changing. Previously a spurned fiance,
but usually a woman could sue their ex if the
(08:23):
engagement dissolved before marriage. These laws, sometimes called heart balm laws,
or a relic from a not two distant time when
marriage was a major economic proposition for a lot of women.
For a certain class, it was a woman's job to
get married, so any money awarded from a heartbalm suit
could help a girl recoup the cost of having been
(08:44):
off the market for a while. But in the nineteen
thirties and forties, these laws were dismantled, and in response,
engagement rings got a little bit more expensive as a
type of unofficial engagement insurance. Also, later on the nineteen
fifties and sixties, a culture of conspicuous consumption came into play,
a further driving sales. But whatever the surrounding cultural issues,
(09:08):
diamonds stuck as symbols of love. From the nineteen seventies
through the nineteen nineties, Deber's monopolies suffered from further discoveries
of diamonds around the world and unwillingness of various parties
to bow to the cartel. A further consumers became more
aware of the true costs of diamonds due to bloody
conflicts surrounding their control and the control of the governments
(09:32):
in the areas where they're found. People didn't want to
buy these blood diamonds, so de Beers teamed up with
the United Nations to establish what's called the Kimberly Process
in two thousand and three as a sort of passport
system for diamonds. It now indicates all stones countries of
origin and ensures that no money generated by their sales
(09:52):
will fund terrorist groups. Unfortunately, the Kimberly Process isn't perfect,
and it can't regulate or prevent the other numerous issues
inherent in the diamond trade, including child labor, workers' rights violations,
and environmental devastation. But the game is changing again today
with the introduction of affordable synthetic diamonds into the market,
(10:16):
the public's taste for natural diamonds has seriously shifted. These
diamonds are grown in industrial labs but are functionally indistinguishable
from natural diamonds. As of twenty twenty six, eighty three
percent of newly given engagement rings still feature a diamond. However,
sixty one percent of center stones are now synthetic. The
(10:38):
past four years have seen the retail price of natural
diamonds fall by forty percent. In the short term, this
is unfortunately causing more instability in regions that already struggle
with the supply of diamonds for international trade. It has
been a wild less than a century for diamond engagement rings. I,
for one, wonder whether the diamond bubble could be collapsing
(11:02):
or whether this new tradition could well be forever. Today's
episode is based on the article The True Story of
Blood Diamonds on HowStuffWorks dot Com written by Diana Brown,
and on an old brain Stuff video called why do
We put Diamonds on Engagement Rings? Written by Me to
(11:23):
hear my less polite opinions about the industry, check out
the episode of the podcast Stuff They Don't Want You
To Know called Diamonds the Conspiracy. Brain Stuff is production
of iHeartRadio in partnership with HowStuffWorks dot Com. Is produced
by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
BrainStuff News
Host
Lauren Vogelbaum
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