I have to admit something here. I don't like diamonds and never have. If someone gave me jewellery with diamonds in, I'd look at them oddly and know they didn't really know me very well. I don't like their flashiness, the way size is so important or the adoring cult that's grown up around them. Diamonds weren't particularly valued before the 19th century. The jewellers of the middle ages and Renaissance loved coloured stones: rubies, sapphires, emerald, garnets, amethysts. The ring on the right here is at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It's made of carved gold with a somewhat misshapen sapphire, and I think it's a thousand times nicer than anything you can buy from a high street jewellery shop. It's individual, made with care and the imperfections in the stone make it unique. The problem with diamonds is that the ideal diamond is colourless, flawless and perfectly cut. Perfection is slightly creepy, I've always thought. It's like the Stepford Wives - so perfect you think something must be wrong.
Diamonds are very tough, it's true. They rate a 10 on the 1-10 Mohs Scale and are therefore unlikely to be damaged if you bang your ring against something. But corundum (if it's red it's a ruby and any other colour is a sapphire, as long as it's transparent) rates a 9, which is hard enough even for rough everyday wear. To give you some idea of how tough that is, hardened steel is 7-8.
The reason diamonds are so highly regarded now is mostly the work of an extremely good marketing campaign. De Beers, started by Cecil Rhodes (never the most likeable of characters), made a deal in the Victorian era to supply diamonds in limited quantities so as to keep the price unnaturally high. They also came up with the line "a diamond is forever", one of the most successful (and corny) gimmicks there has been. They created an image of a stone and had enough money to make sure that it stuck. It's commonly thought that an engagement ring should have a diamond and that to be properly worthy of the girl in question it should cost a month's salary. I'm not sure where that idea came from, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were another piece of marketing from the diamond companies. It's a ridiculous idea that a romantic gesture must have a proportional cost. You can get a beautiful and unique handmade ring for less than that. Just go to your local galleries, or to Etsy, and see what is available.
Because of the idea that bigger is better when it comes to diamonds, it's become a snide way of showing off to flash your ring and talk about how many carats it is or the clarity rating. It's sad that that's the way a relationship is judged, by the size of the rock on her hand.
The single most horrible thing about diamonds is the way they have been used, over and over again, to fund wars. If you like diamonds and you have a conscience, please, please make sure you know where your stones have come from. Thanks to the Kimberley Process, there are far fewer conflict diamonds being traded now. It's only a few percent. Just make sure that the sparkler you want isn't one of them.
I can perfectly accept that some people may disagree with how I see diamonds. I think they're tacky and boring. The sparkle doesn't interest me, because usually that's all there is to see on a diamond ring. There's little thought given to proportion or elegance in the design. I'm sure there are good designers using diamonds out there, but I so rarely see diamonds used well. It'd be nice to be proven wrong.
It's funny really. Unless you know what to look for and how to look for it, it's pretty hard to distinguish (for example) gold and diamond from some random yellow metal and glass.
ReplyDeleteAnd let's face it, when Big Rab buys the lovely Senga a white gold and genuine diamond ring from Argos.. neither of them is likely to be able to tell whether it's really made of precious stone and metal or steel and glass. It's the price which makes the ring or whatever special for a lot of people.
A nicely designed/made ring on the other hand is more clearly special, and you're paying for something that -is- nice, not something that just costs a lot.
And heck, if someone can't tell the difference between diamond and glass themselves - why not just save all that money and buy a ring with a bit of glass in it. Easier to replace if it falls off, and money could be spent on something where you can tell a difference in quality yourself.
People often equate how much something costs with how much meaning it has. It just seems very shallow to me.
ReplyDeleteSome people do buy rings with glass or man made stones, such as synthetic moissanite, which look very like diamonds. It's not a new thing to use imitation stones, either - here is a ring from the V&A which is from fifteenth century and uses paste!
I think people have this idea that semi-precious stones or things made from less precious materials are not to be desired. It's a shame, because they're instantly cutting out a huge portion of things which are very beautiful and unique, unlike so much jeweller which is made of high value materials, but without any originality.
I blame the Industrial Revolution.
ReplyDeletePeople know they want the good stuff, not the bad stuff. That seems to me to be a universal human urge.
But, in the modern world, pretty much all the stuff there is is actually OK for any reasonable purpose. If you need a fork or a coat or a TV or a car, you will probably suffer no real problem if you get a cheap one. An expensive one will be better, but only a little bit better. Basically, it's all good. And, where there *is* a difference, it is often not very apparent. A good mountain coat doesn't look all that different from a bad one, and you wouldn't know which you have till you are getting rained on.
So, the primal urge to search out the good stuff has to be satisfied by looking for more abstract kinds of goodness, and people are not as confident as they might be about their judgement of goodness.
Hence, the success of (for example) Nike and De Beers, and the tendency to judge jewellery by price.
That makes a lot of sense: people know they want quality, but don't know enough to know that quality isn't always reflected by price (you're unlikely to find good quality stuff very cheap, but you might well find bad quality that's expensive).
ReplyDeleteI think this is why I like the Arts and Crafts movement especially: it was based on trying to make sure everyone got good quality goods made by proper craftsmen. It didn't work in exactly the way they wanted, of course, but it did start the revival of crafts that were in danger of being lost. At least now we *can* buy beautiful handmade things.
Actually, I bet just about everyone knows that price doesn't guarantee quality, but they just don't have any better metric available.
ReplyDeleteI'm with you on the revival of craft. Not because I want things that are made by proper craftsmen, neccessarily, but because things made by people are stranger and more interesting. And they generally come with a back-story, too.
such a thoughtful posting! i too am not in to diamonds, and certainly not into jewelry that comes off of a conveyor belt...i want something that was warmed between hands while it was born.
ReplyDeleteI do, however, have a diamond in my wedding ring, and it's very small, but it was passed down from my husband's grandmother's ring, so it's very special to me. I'm sure it was huge by the standards in the forties when it was originally purchased, but now it's a bit shy next to all the bling of today. :)