99% Invisible - Diamonds: Articles of Interest #11

Episode Date: May 29, 2020

Diamonds represent value, in all its multiple meanings: values, as in ethics, and value as in actual price. But what are these rocks actually worth? The ethics and costs of diamond rings have shifted with society, from their artificial scarcity perpetuated by DeBeers to their artificial creation in labs. Articles of Interest is a limited-run podcast series about fashion, housed inside the design and architecture podcast 99% Invisible. Launched in 2018 by Avery Trufelman, the show encourages people to rethink the way we look at what we wear and what it says about us.

I had it in my mind that I wanted to propose to Sean during the trip. You know, we've been together like three and a half years, and we're going to Vegas. What more romantic place is there? Last June, my friend Courtney decided to propose marriage in the world capital of spontaneous marriage proposals. And I was like, yeah, but I don't know how I'm going to do it. I have, you know, I have the thing with me, but I don't know how I'm gonna do it. I have, you know, I have the thing with me, but I don't know when or where.

Courtney waited and waited for the right moment until it was the last night of their trip when they were hanging out in Caesar's Palace. We're sitting at the bar and we got a couple drinks and we were kind of just killing time before a flight. I reached into my bag and I pulled out this small leather box that I'd been holding onto all weekend. And I'm like, will you marry me? Like, I think those are the words that I said. It all was kind of a blur. But inside of the box wasn't a ring. It was a Pokemon game

cartridge. Courtney and Sean love Pokemon, and they've been wanting to play two versions of it called Ruby and Sapphire. Things that were very special to us, and they're both gemstones. Why not a ring? For a lot of reasons, I was just like, I don't think that a ring is that important. I think that something important to both of us,

that'll be really meaningful. But what I didn't realize about my like flawless plan to propose with something more meaningful than a ring, was that it's not understood on the surface as a proposal. At first, Sean wasn't sure if Courtney was serious. And I have to admit, when I saw a picture of Sean holding up a Pokemon cartridge with the caption, I said yes, I absolutely thought it was a joke. People were texting us like, are you actually getting married? Is this real or is this like a joke? And I was like, yeah, of course it's real.

Real. As real as this 2018 Diamond commercial. I will spend my future with you, and I will be honest with you. And it will be wild. It will be kind, and it will be real. And as it fades to black, a tagline across the screen reads, real is rare. Real is a diamond. But reality and rarity are subjective.

It matters of love, definitely, and certainly in the matter of diamonds. ["Diamonds"] Articles of interest, a show about what we wear. Season two. People don't realize it's fantasy. It's always this thing that you have to work extra hard to get. Mm. And that's so good. No one dresses like a king anymore.

How do you make money? That's how we make money, love. There are lots of things that we take for granted that would once have been considered luxuries. I'm walking down West 47th Street. I mean, come on. What kind of radio producer would I be if I didn't start a story about Diamond's exactly where you'd expect?

Manhattan's Diamond District, baby. I am not the mess. Are you shopping or something? Oh, I'm just looking around. I'm just wondering how it's like very store to stores. Yeah. Not really that much of a difference. It's not everybody basically has the same freaking day. Julian is out here in front of his diamond shop, Just Hustlin. He's been working this storefront for 20 years. In the diamond district, it's all a crazy game

with everyone just trying to beat each other's prices. So I'm gonna say, I'm up there, I sold for a thousand, okay, I give it to you for 950. $50 is gonna make a difference for you. Fine, I don't even want to try. How are sales? It's a little too long, it's a little too long. We work in a smaller profession than ever be for you.

This new generation of marriage age people makes diamond sellers nervous. A lot of us millennials are encircling debt and we're struggling to pay exorbitant rents. And we really don't have a couple thousand dollars burning a hole in our pocket that we want to spend on a diamond, especially given the bad associations they carry. Blood diamonds.

No, like really not. Just in a cartoon evil villain, boy. I grew up hearing a lot of the same stories that Courtney did about how the diamond industry is exploitative and horrible. So blood diamonds or conflict diamonds are diamonds that come out of war zones where war and groups have been fighting over the alluvial fields where the diamonds exist in order to raise cash for their effort, which is violent. Rochelle Berkstein is the author of Brilliant and Fire, a biography of diamonds.

And then when they were getting the diamonds, they were sending them into the marketplace and diamond companies like DeBieres and other traders weren't really asking questions about where they came from. And they could easily have been funding devastation and violence and horrible things and no one was really thinking that much about it. That was until the late 90s,

when a torrent of news and long form reporting came out about conflict diamonds and how they were used to fund insurgencies and warlords and all this attention eventually led to stricter protocols and tighter regulations within the diamond industry. Almost 90% of diamond supplies produced by very large corporations and they're very heavily regulated and they're very transparent. That's Diamond Industry, analyst Paul Zemniski, and he says now these big Diamond companies are not funding human rights abuses, although there are still conflict diamonds out there.

I think it represents a very, very, very small part of supply, but it can create a PR problem for the industry. Listen, I'm not trying to give the diamond industry a pass here. The ethics of diamond mining are complicated. Like, diamond mines might not be funding armies of child soldiers anymore, but in a lot of cases, the working conditions are not ideal, especially in countries without a lot of labor oversight, like the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I mean, mining is still a hard job. And just creating a mine at all, digging an

unfathomably huge crater in the earth, that is environmentally devastating, no matter how you slice it. But truly, diamonds aren't that different from other extractive industries. A lot of materials around us have been mined and manufactured in questionable ways, and we don't talk about them. Take, for example, cobalt. We use cobalt and testless, and we use it in our iPhones, and I mean almost all of that's produced in the Congo, and it's the exact same issue that the diamond industry has with diamonds producing the Congo. Diamonds are held to a different standard. I think people think that a Tesla is providing enough good or even for providing some bad by

trading demand for co-blot that comes there with the Congo. We'll kind of let that one go but since we don't need diamonds there's zero room for any illicit goods. We don't need diamonds. Even though it doesn't exactly feel that way, diamonds are almost culturally mandatory. They've become almost a requirement, if you want to get married, which leads to the other big thing

that made Courtney skeptical about diamonds. Maybe you've heard this too. That diamonds are a scam. The sort of bonkers inflation of the worth of a diamond, which is not actually that rare or valuable, but it was just like a gigantic marketing plate. Concerns about diamonds are concerns about value. These serons about diamonds are concerns about value. In both senses of the word, values as an ethics and morality and also value in terms of price. So let's talk about what these rocks are actually worth. A diamond industry and one of the things that I found so fascinating about it in my research

off the Rochelle Bergstein again. They're forever walking this tightrope, right? How do you convince people that diamonds are accessible enough that every woman should have one? But also keep them in the public imagination so rare and glamorous and special that you don't ruin it. Right. And that's what they've been working on forever. Diamonds were rare. Once, they were exceedingly rare. In the ancient world, diamonds were something only royalty could afford. And then suddenly, in the late 19th century, there was a huge supply of them. Diamonds became an industry when a whole bunch of them were discovered in South Africa, on a property owned by brothers Diedrich and Johannes De Beer.

They were farmers. Okay, so De Beer's actually had nothing to do with the De Beer's company. A massive diamond deposit was discovered on the De Beer's property, which you'd think would be a blessing, but it was too much of a good thing. The land became overrun with international mining interests, and eventually the British government would force the debirs to sell their property. The debir's mine turned out to be

one of the most productive mines in the area. The debir's brothers could have never known that their name would get adopted by the foremost diamond company in the world, which was run by a man named Cecil Rhodes. He was a sickly Englishman who followed his brother down to South Africa and down to the diamond rush. And there are funny pictures of him where he was like a dandy.

Very much in the bowbrum away. He's among all of these people digging and covered in dust and carrying buckets, and he's like sitting there on an overturned bucket in a white suit looking, you know, glowering. Maybe it looked like he was glowering, but Cecil was scheming on behalf of his motherland. He felt this really strong internal drive to elevate the status of the United Kingdom. He felt like the Queen's special envoy, even though she had not given him this job. Sessel Roads is like the archetypal colonizer capitalist.

You think of an old time of European guy in a pith helmet dressed from head to toe in khaki, with a mustache and a rifle at his hip, and that's Cecil Rhodes. He started by buying up all the little minds in South Africa and consolidating them. He grabbed up lands in Africa, left and right, and colonized.

Like in modern Zimbabwe, formerly named Rhodesia after Cecil Rhodes. He created the Rhodes Scholarship to instruct and elevate young men who might follow out his mission as well. Yeah, they should consider changing that name. Cecil Rhodes created a dynasty that grew and grew and grew, eventually buying up all the diamonds coming out of Russia and Australia until the Dabier's company had amassed more diamonds than had ever been thought possible. But come on, Rhodes didn't want the public to know that.

He realized that in order to preserve the specialness of the diamond, you had to somehow control the output. You had to find a way to make them feel rare, even if they kind of weren't anymore. So did that mean literally stop piling them somewhere? It did. When jewelers like Tiffany's and Harry Winston and Cartier, wanted to buy diamonds, they had to come to Debeer's stockpile in London. Roads intentionally limited the supply to jack up the price.

But even as he limited the supply at the same time, his company was pushing public demand. They were both a mining company and a marketing company. Debeer's wasn't allowed to advertise in the US because they were a monopoly in America and forced anti-trust laws back then. So as a workaround, Debeers decided to market the general idea of diamonds. After all, they mined most of the diamonds in the world anyway.

If Debeers could get people to buy diamonds from whatever jeweler, they'd still be making money. And so, debiers created the tradition of the diamond engagement ring. Because if you can't sell diamonds for millions of dollars to royalty, you can sell diamonds for thousands of dollars to everyone. Debeers created this idea that every single couple must buy a diamond. Don't get me wrong, wedding rings have been around a very long time, but diamond engagement rings are decidedly 20th century. Is this the very first diamond ad? This is the first.

Oh my god, it's sober boost. Looks like a page from a book. Okay, this is so funny. These early Diamond ads are not what I would call compelling. The beautiful flame of a diamond is unquenchable. However modest, your wife will never relinquish it to meet more affluent circumstances. That's one of my favorite lines. But then in 1948, Debiere's launched what is arguably the most successful advertising campaign of the 20th century.

Really incredible young copyrighter named Frances Garrity, she worked for NW Air and son the advertising company. And Frances Garrity was given the task of coming up with a tagline for the ads. Legend has it, Frances was really coming down to the wire the night before the tagline was due. She stayed up all night and she couldn't think of anything. And then at 5am, she scribbled out. Uh, Diamond is forever. She came into the office and said, here's what I've got. And the senior copywriter gave her a side eye and said, well, I don't even think that's grammatically correct.

But they run out of time, so they just rolled with it. But nobody, nobody for saw what this tagline would become. A diamond is forever. A diamond is forever forever forever forever. Visit a diamondisforever.com. And in this way, through engagement rings, debirs convince the world that diamonds are the rarest, truest, most valuable of the stones.

So aside from just generally convincing the customer that he should buy a diamond or that she should demand a diamond, these ads also had the intention of saying, these are the different cuts. This is how much they cost, things like that. In their ads and in pamphlets made for diamond sellers, debirs informed the consumer about exactly how much money they should spend.

And to a degree, this is still true for diamond engagement rings today. The person selling you the diamond is probably the one educating you about them. I mean, it's hyper just price. There's a lot of education involved, and it can be emotionally wavy. So we really want people when they're coming into the showroom to feel relaxed, like they're having fun. Brilliant Earth is a diamond retailer with six showrooms around the US. I'm Catherine Money, Vice President of merchandising and strategy at Brilliant Earth.

So you are not the person who will come to greet a couple? Typically no. Typically we have a jewelry specialist who's working with a couple and they're having this one-on-one interaction, very focused on education, sitting down learning about the four C's. The four C's is a shorthand created by debiers

to assess the rarity and therefore value of a diamond. It's still in use today. The four C's are cut. Cut measures symmetry, polish, and proportion, color. It's rated on a color scale from D, which is the most rare, and we will sell D through J. Carrot, it's a measure of weight and clarity. Clarity is determined under 10 times magnification

by a trained gemologist since most of the characteristics can't be seen by the naked eye. So that's the thing. If you can't see it with the naked eye, like if it's not for aesthetics, then what is this for? Is a rare diamond.

One that's got good color or cut or clarity or carrot, actually worth anything. Is it an asset? Is it like investing in a house or buying a piece of art? In fact, a diamond is much more like a car where once you've taken out of the lot, where once you've taken out of the lot, the value permits. Reshellbergstein's answer is, most typical engagement diamonds aren't worth much. Unless the diamond is exceedingly special, like it is ridiculously preposterously big, or was cut by Harry Winston himself, or worn by Elizabeth Taylor. Those are worth a lot. But for the most part, the value of a diamond ring comes from who wore it, or touched it, or cut it.

So unless you're a celebrity... You can't flip a diamonds. No one's gonna buy it back from you for the same price that you paid for it. Why? First of all, because you paid retail, and whoever you're selling it back to is not gonna pay that same retail mark and whoever you're selling it back to is not going to pay that same retail markup, you're going to take a loss. And second of all, if it's just your run of the mill diamond engagement ring with like

a decent quality stone, there are diamond dozen. And there are dozens more beautiful, brilliant diamonds being grown every single day This is the other thing that feels freshly ridiculous about the myth of diamonds Like how can we possibly think they are rare if you can grow them in a laboratory Real diamonds not knockoffs like cubic zirconia Stones that are chemically identical. There are literally Diamonds growing in that room with a sincecessant hallucination inducing hum that never stops. Are you okay?

Fine. What's wrong? He's getting over it. Jonathan Levine Miles is the CEO of J2 materials. John Seraldo is the CTO of J2 materials, and the fact that they're named John and John a thing is why they're called J2. They grow and sell diamonds used for engagement rings, but that's not why they got into the diamond business. They aren't particularly interested in rings.

They're interested in the way diamonds can be used in future technology. Every time we sell a gemstone, it will inevitably help fund our diamond semiconductor research. As computers get more and more advanced, Silicon might not be able to handle all their processing power. So diamond might become a good alternative material for computer chips. But this would require large plates of diamond that are perfectly clear and smooth. And John and Jonathan can't sit around and wait for the Earth's crust to produce that.

Which means it has to be grown in the lab. And so fundamentally that's what we are trying to do here. J2 materials is in a strip mall in the suburbs of Chicago. It's a kind of space that could just as easily be a dentist's office. But it's filled with reactors. The moment we turned on our first reactor as it, when it was just the two of us, it was on 24-7. It shuts down just long enough to take out the diamonds, to clean the chamber, and to start it up again. So we never shut down.

These reactors look like rice cookers blown up to the size of washing machines. And normally, we think of diamonds being created in the earth under a lot of pressure, but that's not what's happening here. An extremely simplified way to explain J2's approach is that they're taking small bits of carbon and growing them into full diamonds. Almost in the same way you would grow a crop, where some turn out beautifully and some are duds, like how some potatoes turn out hardy and strong, and others end up small or lopsided or heart-shaped.

It's not a mass-produced thing, it isn't art. It is a complicated thing. I'll probably put it a little more bluntly and say, I think there's, as a scientist, of course, big caveat. There's tremendous beauty in being able to take essentially cowfarts and converting it into this technologically advanced yet beautiful material. Diamonds have been synthesized in laboratories since 1950, but it used to be mostly for industrial uses, like for surgical knives or the knives used to cut aluminum for iPhones. It's only very recently, like in the last couple of years,

that laboratory-grown diamonds have started to look just as beautiful as the ones from the ground. Again, John and Jonathan didn't set out to make engagement rings, but businesses like theirs have put the traditional diamond industry on edge. We've definitely seen significant growth in lab diamonds. So consumer acceptance, particularly among millennial consumers, has increased.

We do. We do. Yeah. Catherine, money of brilliant earth told me that lab-grown diamonds are sold almost interchangeably with mind diamonds. They are also assessed for rarity using the four C's. The main difference is that they're cheaper. And generally, consumers are drawn to lab-created diamonds because they're beautiful, they're responsible,

and they're affordable. Lab diamonds do use a lot of energy to keep the reactors humming, but it's certainly less energy intensive than digging a massive crater in the earth. Lab diamonds seem like an ethical, attainable option, especially to a generation of marriage-age consumers who are broke and

were raised in the 90s and 2000s among whispers of blood diamonds. The diamond industry is still reeling from that blood diamond reckoning over 20 years ago. Back then, debiers was rightfully worried that people would boycott them and that the value of diamonds would plummet. So, debiers did something pretty drastic. They sold off a lot of their diamond reserve. They ended their own monopoly. Between, I would say, 2000 and 2004, debiers liquidated their stock fly-on. You saw other companies emerge in the space, other diamond producers. Debeers relinquished control of the global diamond supply.

Consequently, they stopped advertising for all diamonds. The beers went from being the only player in the industry to one of several. And as a result, the mind diamond industry has slowed down a lot. Almost nobody's exploring for diamonds. Nobody's voting new diamond mines. So I think we actually could run to situation where there's like a shortage of diamonds in the future.

Paul argues that in like five to 10 years, diamonds from the earth will become rare again. Because fewer mines are being cultivated, that scarcity that debiers faked through their monopoly might actually come true. So this means there's two kinds of diamonds in the market right now. Mind or natural diamonds, the kind that are getting rarer and more expensive, and lab-grown diamonds or man-made diamonds, which are proliferating and getting cheaper. The question is, can you tell the difference and does it matter?

So I think it's important to make the distinction that man-made and natural diamonds can be distinguished with certainty. Yeah, I mean, that's interesting that you're talking all this work and you didn't even realize that. Listen Paul, I can't see the difference between lab diamonds and natural diamonds. You can't with the naked eye.

And even with the official fancy equipment, some diamond sellers in the diamond district can't tell the difference either. When you're regular test, diamond test you say diamond book. When I visited the diamond district, I asked a couple jewelers to look at a pair of lab-grown diamond earrings. I know for a fact that these earrings are lab-grown. They were sent to me by a lab-grown diamond company. And these two diamond sellers, with booths across from each other, took turns testing each earring. And I am fairly certain that they both got it wrong.

What is he up to doing? One wanted. Yeah, I was going to go all the way up to the machine. That was actually a jackpot. He said that one's a jackpot. Because both jewelers told me that one earring was, quote, unquote, real. And the other was lab-grown. One diamond seller offered to buy the real diamond

for between $500 to $1000. $500 to $1000 is not... Nothing assays that. It's not chicken feet, right? And then the other one you'd sell in a very low price. Like what's a really low price for that one? Like $100, really? You can't tag both, but it's fake.

You know, it's not fake, but it's lab-grown. I don't know if you could hear that, but he said the lab-grown diamond would only be worth about $100. So one earring was supposedly worth 10 times more than the other. And again, I can't emphasize enough that this pair of earrings came from the same laboratory. We value diamonds for their perceived worth so much more than anything about the way they actually look.

I sell an age rate for $2,000. Did I go to Kedger rate for $2,000. Did I go to the kid's right or $8,000 or a price? Oh, I can't do that. I'm not doing that. You know, because they want to put that in front of the girl. You know, say I bought it at $8,000. I mean, it's kind of smart.

Oh, I always say if you're going to start a relationship that way. I'm not going very long. You know, I've got to buy a pair. Never mind. Not a good idea. Don't lie to your partner. But I guess it still just seems odd to talk about how much your proposal diamond costs if you can't see the difference.

I mean, it shouldn't matter, right? And the question is, would proposing to someone with a $100 diamond would have kind of the same impact? And this is, you know, something that's not practical or not rational. So I don't see a diamond as an investment and the material object, but it's probably an investment and a commitment that you're trying to portray. Catherine Money at Brilliant Earth

gave me pretty much the same answer that diamonds are valuable because they are tied to our deepest relationships. It's a representation of commitment and love and values. At the time I thought this answer was a bit of an evasive cop-out, but it's not! This is how real, tangible value has been created and assigned. By debirs, sure, and by all of us. By everyone, myself included, who wondered if Courtney and Sean were really

engaged without a ring. Without a diamond. I thought that I was better than that. But you're not. But I'm not! Look at this friggin' sparkly thing. Let me see it. It's so beautiful.

Courtney caved. I was like, okay, we can get rings. I give in. But we have to get them vintage. If you really wanted to get a diamond and minimize your impact, a vintage diamond is the way to go. Compared to digging a massive hole in the earth or a room full of humming reactors,

your grandmother's ring doesn't emit any fresh carbon. We went to the Alameda Fleet Market. Courtney's ring has not one, but two diamonds. And in the center is a ruby. Sean's ring has a sapphire. It ended up being ruby and sapphire. I ended up with ruby, which is the Pokemon game I'm playing. And Sean ended up with sapphire, which is the Pokemon game she's playing.

It's so cute. Their rings still fit into their nerdy little world. And even though Diamond Engagement rings are built on a bedrock of BS-concocted tradition, all traditions get made up somehow. And they become more authentic as they get ossified in time. Courtney and Sean love their rings rings because they love each other. It is not and has never been a rational thing. The pocket, the piece of paper Words from yesterday There's a portrait painted on the things we love.

Articles of Interest was written and performed by Avery Truffelman, edited by Chris Baroube with additional edits from Emmett Fitzgerald and Joe Rosenberg, scored by Ray Royal, fact-checked by Tom Colligan with additional fact-checking by Graham Haysha, Mixing Tech Production by Sharif Yusef with additional mixing by Catherine Ray Mondo. Our opening and closing songs are by Sassami. Special thanks to Alex Weinling, Jay Metta and John Fassil. Insight support and edits from a whole 99PI team, including Vivian Le, Sean Rial, Abby Madon, Kurt Colstead, Delaney Hall and Katie Mingle. And Roman Mars is the rare gem of this whole series. There's a portrait of painting the things we love.

With the invention of the engagement ring came the invention of the engagement period. A time where you have a ring on your finger but you're not yet a spouse. It was an invention of a new stage of life. The bride, the category of bride, and when I use that word, I'm really using it in the way that the wedding industry uses it, which is to say this young woman who's at this stage of her life and that maybe engaged and going through this process is an incredibly valuable proposition for all kinds of businesses. Author Rebecca Meade says, someone used to be a bride for a day, and now you're a bride for as long as it takes to plan your wedding, which has gotten more and more elaborate.

You know, I found an article that was published in 1939 called The Cost of Weddings in the American Sociological Review, and a third of the brides didn't have an engagement ring. Sixteen percent were married in clothes they already owned, a third of them married without a wedding reception in addition to the ceremony, and about a third of them didn't have a honeymoon. So these things that we think of as like absolutely core elements of what a wedding is, just one, necessarily core elements.

The wedding industry has emerged to convince brides that you're not really a bride without a massive cake, without a rehearsal dinner, without a lingerie set, without something old and something new and something borrowed and something blue. And we all know that no one needs a party that might cost tens of thousands of dollars. We live in a consumer culture, we're not ignorant of the fact that we're being sold stuff that we don't need. And you know, we all have some discretion and some sense of distance on that. But when you're being told this is how it's done. You just want to do it all the right way.

And if you don't do it like this, then you know, maybe you're not doing it properly, and if you're not doing your wedding properly, maybe you're not properly committed to your marriage. Your next articles of interest are wedding dresses. Thanks.