Regarding the wedding ring, I can understand slightly better how someone would put a bit more money into that, considering that you wear it for life. But there are so much better options than buying a shiny rock. Why not go to a goldsmith and pay 1000$ for a workshop where you forge your own rings? That will result in a lasting memory of a nice event, for a fraction of the cost, instead of throwing thousands of dollars out the window for a shiny rock that you simply buy at the store. Or maybe you don't even need gold? In my opinion, silver, titanium or maybe something like steel combined with carbon fibers looks better anyways.
Although one tip I'd give to anyone getting married, get a pair of $18 rings for travel and what not. If one slips off while swimming in the ocean, it's ok.
Perfect for construction work, travel and sports like lifting, climbing etc
It's all thanks to more than 100 years of marketing campaign and tight control of supply of diamond by De Beers. People did not buy diamond rings before De Beers' "A diamond is forever", and the supply of natural diamond is practically unlimited. I have to give it to the ingenuity of De Beers - they got Soviet Union to agreed to a supply deal after Soviet Union found huge diamond mine that could have supplied the market with dirt cheap diamonds for hundreds of years! So, I'm very happy that Chinese entrepreneurs do not give a shit about De Beers and managed to figure out how to mass produce lab-made diamonds cheaply (yes, the process was invented and greatly improved by the west, but it was China, specifically the manufacturers in Henan Province, that didn't succumb to De Beers' heinous control, and gave De Beers a huge middle finger).
It's funny that the traditional diamond industry started to argue that these lab-grown diamonds were too pure and lacked the impurities that natural diamonds have. And what is the response of the Chinese manufacturers? They laughed, as adding impurity to a lab-made diamond can be easy and precise.
Personality, I hate the kind of consumerism and irrationality driven by De Beers. I'm very happy to see De Beers destroyed.
I guess they're doing that because humans have a long history of idolising old times and old imperfections. We praise analog photo grain, or analog audio noise. Industries from clothing brands to guitar manufacturers release artificially aged products.
Then again, adding imperfections in "post production" seems to be the status quo.
I think this is the cultural distinction you're missing -- married American women typically wear both their engagement and wedding ring their entire lives, and the engagement ring is usually the more ornate/expensive one (which might be due to the De Beers marketing throughout the 20th century this article discusses).
It's not even culture that somehow organically came from the needs or habits of people. It's literally just a marketing scheme.
(De Beers are still the big baddies though)
Also, there is a deep body of economics and psychology literature describing how individual spending decisions are sometimes suboptimal in predictable ways, particularly that we under-value experiential purchases.
It doesn't contradict general "live and let live" principles to think that cultural emphasis on positional goods is bad, nor that individuals might be better off if they made different consumption choices.
If you just finished your college, sit on a big pile of student loans, work in your first job and then spend several months of income on a shiny rock, then that is a bad financial decision, no matter whether you love diamond rings or not. (And from what I hear, this situation happens a lot, due to social pressure and "desired social status".)
Externality exists. The 40K$ diamond ring goes to some of the worse people in our society.
Anyone trying to hook up will look for a ring as part of the non-verbal social clues.
Rings being expensive or not is a different matter.
Lab-grown diamonds, however, can be had for as low as 20% of the price of natural diamonds (for large sizes), often less than Moissanite, and absolutely look the part. You simply can't tell the difference between a lab-grown diamond and a natural diamond without highly specialized equipment because they are, well, the same thing and differ only in minute growth "marks" in their fine structure. If I'm not mistaken, there is regulation preventing companies from calling competitors' lab-grown diamonds "fake diamonds", and retailers can call them "real diamonds" (but NOT "natural diamonds").
I got my wife of 15 years a large lab-grown diamond ring from Ritani for ~2K and she loves it. She won't take it out. Everybody is blown away by it because an equivalent natural diamond ring would go for ~10-15K.
Wow, you can get a 3 carat, VVS1/VVS2, ideal cut, colorless for $3,000. That's a huge stone and very high quality.
That would be a $15,000+ diamond if natural.
I feel the same way. Moissanites are basically TOO good. They reflect light in so many carnival colors, and they shine so brightly, that they frequently look like fake carnival jewelry.
But alright, subjective opinion. I'm just enjoy my affordable shiny rocks over here.
Yeah, same. They have too much bling and look exactly like something the nouveau riche would parade around. To make things worse, moissanite jewellery usually has too many gems, something you couldn't afford with diamond.
That is a bit hilarious. The fact that you couldn’t afford it with diamonds makes it worse? Am I misreading you there?
What's the point then?
It all depends on what your partner wants obviously. If it's important for your partner to get a diamond ring and you value your partnership more than the cost of a diamond, then buy a diamond. If your partner wants a "I'm married" sign (as my wife did), just buy a simple wedding ring without a stone. If it's not that important for her, don't buy a ring.
A ring doesn't have to be expensive: you can get a nice titanium ring for under $100. And unlike some other rings, it has some major benefits: 1) it's super-lightweight, so you can barely feel it (gold is heavy), 2) it's hypo-allergenic, in case you might have a sensitivity to anything in other rings, and best of all, 3) if you're stuck in an undersea oil rig that's flooding and one of the automatic flood doors is closing and about to trap you inside, you can stick your hand with the ring in the door and prevent it from closing, so you can escape.
Another interesting approach is to reframe it as a Hobson choice with opportunity cost: Would you prefer a modest ring that's exciting for all of a week and is easy to lose, or a lifetime of memories of 3 weeks on a languid, secluded tropical island with surreal, warm white sand and ocean-to-plate candlelight dinners?
Very few advantages, if any, for most people (only big exception I'm aware of is for citizenship status).
Residency as well, not just citizenship. Other benefits (here in Germany) include: Better adoption rights, no visiting issues when your SO is suddenly in the hospital, tax benefits, and a bunch of other small benefits that you have a decent chance of encountering in your life.
While we mainly got married for her residency, it’s worthwhile to get married for a multitude of reasons. My sister and her husband also decided to get married for the 2nd child, as they also encountered issues being unmarried.
When I was still in the dating game, I wasn't one of the desperate ones who needed to f*k desperately at all costs. Rather I was every single time looking for potentially working relationship, so evaluating compatibility and if I found obvious or already-known showstopper I finished it quickly. But how do you evaluate that when initially people automatically wear layers of politeness masks? Some of them even after years.
Well just wait for first conflict and misunderstanding to happen, and how the other side reacts when emotions are high. Masks are off, raw personality comes forward in bad situation. You just have to be realistic and also think how it would look like if tables turned.
Or don't, but I prefer to at least try to bring some smart into this highly emotional game, I mean divorce rates hanging uncomfortably around 50% come from something (my wife doesn't have any natural bloody diamond on her ring, we talked about it like mature people beforehand and both agreed we won't go that way)..
https://twitter.com/missmayn/status/1612892354624786444?lang...
(This is not to say you can or should ignore the suffering caused by the diamond industry)
Synthetic diamonds have already destroyed the big shiny rock as a display of wealth, but the marketing continues.
I don't really want to advocate for diamonds here. I hate that it's mined at the expense of human welfare. I just want to point out that this article is 17 years old and not much has changed since it was written. Maybe it's not a compelling take?
Yet, the world would be better if the same amount could be burnt on something with better externalities. If jewelry, then hand-made one.
> 3. A diamond is an illiquid asset, not an "investment". Don't believe me? Try to sell a second-hand diamond ring on eBay or at a pawn shop. Do you really think you'll get anything close to what you paid for it?
Yes you'll get close to what you paid for it if you buy it the same way jewelers buy it. There's an ultra liquid market for diamonds: a friend jeweler showed it to me. He needs a diamond to make a ring? He goes on a website where diamonds are sorted by their four Cs (clarity/cut/color/carat) and their price and all guaranteed legit. And he buys it at market price.
Of course if you overpay 3x the price by buying the diamond as part of a complete ring, you're sorry out of luck.
Now the diamond market may crash too, but that is another topic.
If your wife/fiance really insists on having a diamond: find a reputable jeweler and tell him you want to pick the stone with him, on such a site. And that you're willing willing to pay for the ring and his craftmanship but that you don't want to pay the stone 3x the price for what is actually two clicks for him.
Heck, you can even bring your own stone to the jeweler (I did it, with a family heirloom diamond). You can even bring a picture of a famous brand and say you want the same shape of ring: they're not supposed to do it but they'll gladly copy the famous ring (I didn't do that but I know someone who did).
BTW while you're at it buy a diamond that comes with a certificate.
And if you want to pay 1/5th of the price: then buy a lab-grown diamond instead of moissanite for 1/10th of the price. To me moissanite is a bit too shiny.
While a lab-grown diamond or a "real" diamond are the exact same thing.
See user glimshe 's comment in this thread.
... rethink whom you are marrying and maybe the practice of marriage itself.
I’m curious, how would you know the diamond you gave the jeweler was the same diamond they put into the ring, as a layman?
https://www.whiteflash.com/loose-diamonds/compare/?lidnos=26...
When I was a teenager in the 1990s, and moissanite came out, I listened to my older cousin go off on how she would dump any man who tried to pass off a moissanite to her.
Then my mother kept confusing moissanite with cubic zirconia, and kept telling me stories about cheap men who bought their fiancées rings that broke.
I bought my wife a moissanite, but I was so afraid that she was just saying that she wanted a moissanite to merely humor me. What I did was give her matching moissanite earrings a month before I proposed to her. She loved the earrings, so I knew she'd love the ring.
It is not supposed to be the best day of your life. It would means all goes downhill from there which is the opposite of what you want your marriage/life partnership to be.
Also, it only cost about 25% of my salary at that time. Spending 200% monthly salary on a ring makes absolutely no sense.
And this is my favorite https://www.stagandfinch.com/product-page/paraiba-teal-yag-2. ... And is what what my partner's stone is.
Here in France a single diamond ring is quite rare. Sapphire, emerald, ruby, etc rings are very very common. They are usually lined with tiny diamonds around to add a bit of sparkle around a large gem. However due to Americanization of the cultures, people start to do it the american way (we call it a "solitaire", solitary diamond).
Three couples in my friend group got engaged recently, all three had colored gems on their rings. Diamonds were in support of the main gem to enhance it, not the star of the show. That's a sample of N=3, but very much part of the French culture.
While DeBeers and Madison Ave. crafted a tradition to artificially inflate the value of this specific gem, create a monopoly cartel around it, and established it as a material standard of love and "suitability" for marriage, it's been subsumed by culture as much as children demand Christmas such that the odds of escaping this manufactured foolishness are scant. For example, what % of women would date a man if they heard he was a Cornell grad vs. a self-employed electrician?
The individual has a Hobson choice to either follow a convention, pretend to follow it, or ignore it altogether. Without being subject to these peer pressures, I would prefer to allocate to coin to investments and reducing debt, and instead carve a ring from a wax blank to be cast in a metal like platinum or silver.
The non-salaried working man trying to enter marriage with the demands of a large wedding party and an expensive diamond ring bought on credit would be economically foot-gunning themselves. It still happens everyday and keeps the diamond business in business.
Gold on the other side, is impossible to reproduce and is a very rare metal that will have many fine uses. You can do anything to it and it won't lose its value. I will never understand why some women require worthless diamonds. It's a crystal, it reflects and will lose its value if broken.
Marketing, it's a cleverly crafted fashion statement long-ingrained in culture by monopolistic cartel member De Beers.
The artificially high prices maintained by the diamond cartel must end, diamonds are too valuable to industry for industrial purposes than to let these bastards run the show.
> Man-made diamonds are forged from the will and brilliance of man.
> Millions of years of loving relationship have lead up this point and have been distilled into 2 carats of sparkling magic,
> brought forth from the ether of the universe by man's desire to express his love.
>
> Or you could dig up some dirty rock from the ground, like an animal would do.
In any case. She's extremely happy. I'm happy. My wallet is happy. It's honestly the best decision.
The YAG stone is bright blue-green, and just as shiny as diamonds.
And on the upside, the local jewewer made it from the 3d printed wax cast, and the stone was grown by scientists.
No slave labor or child labor was used in any way.
Then there’s designer brands, which openly sell products of inferior quality. And with success too.
I guess diamonds are similar to both.
I fully agree that spending two months' gross salary on an engagement ring is way too much though, and I would never ever get into debt for that. But, similarly as I enjoy wearing a relatively useless but expensive watch daily, I didn't mind dropping approx. 2/3 of a month's net salary on my fiancé's diamond engagement ring, which she got to choose and now cherishes and admires every day.
I don't buy the flawless argument in the article. I think people look for some flaws in diamonds. A perfect rock would look "fake".
The big change since 2006 when the article was written is that there are manufactured diamonds now.
In modern cultures I would assume the couple already knows each other and their financial situation before marrying. So why waste money on richness signaling especially if you are not rich?
I guess some things are not meant to be optimised. She mentioned that you can buy a lab-grown diamond for much cheaper, and keep the same shine as a "real" diamond.
B: So, how do you expect it to have the magical power to keep your love?!
If you want to buy something useful instead, that's much better.
