Issue date: 2/22/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Fred Lambuth [Click to enlarge]

In America, little girls grow up dreaming of the day when their knight in shining armor will get down on one knee and present them with a big, shiny diamond ring. Eighty percent of American brides receive diamond engagement rings, which average $3,000. Though the widespread popularity of diamond engagement rings may imply some sort of long-established cultural tradition, it is a relatively new custom based on expert marketing. For consumer culture to function, it is necessary that people be willing to spend money on things they do not need, and perhaps do not even want. Their willingness to do so depends on how successful manufacturers are in creating meaning for their products by equating some abstract human experience or reality with the consumption of a certain product. There is no better example of this than the diamond engagement ring.

A diamond is forever; or, at least, it has been for the previous 70 years. The exchange of diamond rings does not come from some ancient tradition, but rather became widely popular because of brilliant advertising by De Beers.

In the 1930s, De Beers executives were faced with a tricky challenge: extending the demand for expensive jewels. As so many people get engaged at some point in their lives, equating diamonds with engagement, and thus love, presented an excellent opportunity to do this. Now infamous ads implied that diamond gifts are not just pretty jewelry, but declarations of love. Additionally, because diamonds are expressions of the love they represent, size matters. Successful ads sought to convince Americans that a man who doesn't sacrifice enough to get the biggest diamond he possibly can fails to adequately love his fiancée. The best way to get some poor sap to shell out a few months' salary on a rock is to persuade women that he should.

A De Beers ad displaying a gargantuan diamond engagement ring alongside the caption "She already knows you love her. Now everyone else will too," embodies the consumption that motivates such an irrational expenditure. Another De Beers commercial in which a man screams, "I love this woman!" in a crowded street before presenting her with a ring further drives home the point: nothing shows the world the extent of your love like spending an exorbitant amount of money on a lump of crystallized carbon; the bigger the better. By manufacturing a relationship between love and diamonds, corporate interests have generated a compulsion to legitimize and consummate love through the presentation of diamonds.

Continued...

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