Diamond
DESCRIPTION:
Solid carbon with a crystal structure, which can be clear or colored depending on impurities within
COMPOSITION:
Carbon (C)
METAPHYSICAL PROPERTIES:
A symbol of strength and endurance, as well as love and fidelity. A stone to use when wishing to attract perfection.
In South Africa there is a cave full of more diamonds than humanity could ever want or need. You won’t get the chance to see most of them; few are flawless enough to enter the jewelry market. As the stones are excavated, carved, and judged by the four Cs—color, carat, cut, clarity—they are whittled down until only the most perfect remain. For color, white is optimal. For carat, or the size of the diamond, the bigger the better, usually. Cut depends on taste, but whatever you choose should be precise and symmetrical. A perfectly clear diamond is so rare “that it’s possible to spend a lifetime in the jewelry industry without ever seeing one,” writes the Gemological Institute of America, one of the organizations responsible for making sure no sullied stones poison the market.
Only about twenty percent of mined diamonds are of gemstone quality, and of those, a significant portion still have visible “flaws” or discolorations. Based on these statistics and these rigorous criteria, the diamond you might be inclined to think of, the one shimmering in the window of Tiffany’s or on a newly engaged woman’s hand, indeed seems rare. After all, it’s the perfect stone, meant to represent the perfect relationship. How often would that come along?
“Perfect” diamonds may indeed be less common than their colorful, pockmarked counterparts, but diamonds are abundant. The criteria used to keep some from market was created to serve the diamond industry and changes whenever there’s a need to unload product (think of every celebrity who has sported a yellow or pink engagement ring instead of a white one). The “carat,” what so many have scrimped and saved to attain, is based on the size of a carob seed. Their brilliance is only revealed by precision cutting. And most people can’t tell the difference between a real diamond and something like cubic zirconia anyway. A diamond’s perfection and rarity, two things defined by their rigidity, wind up being arbitrary.
The story, and the myth, of the diamond is inextricable from the story of the diamond industry and the way the diamond has been advertised to the world since the 1930s. But that wouldn’t have worked if the diamond didn’t already mean something. These were the stones of aristocrats, and to have one meant to own a piece of light that could briefly lift you out of your station. And metaphysically, diamonds can do almost anything. Various sources cite them as a stone of love, psychic and physical strength, creativity, courage, and invincibility. Diamonds are a symbol of perfection, and having one promises you’ll be made that much closer to perfect.
Perfection, too, feels special because it thrives on the illusion of rarity, especially when it comes to relationships—the very thing diamonds are meant to endorse. A singular person can achieve moments of perfection: a 100 on a spelling test, a just-cleaned house, even teeth, a just-cut gem. But even then, as soon as it’s attained, it’s dulled by the end of the pursuit, or overtaken by the anxiety of maintaining it. Perfection is harder to affix to a relationship, like a paper label sliding down an oily jar. If perfection is defined in part by its transience, then it seems anathema to something as permanent, and common, as marriage. The perfect diamond is a promise of the perfect relationship, because love is supposedly rare and so is this stone. The diamond’s beauty is not in itself, but in that it beat out so many others to be here on your finger. And diamonds are still diamonds because we want to fall into the brilliant lie, no matter how contrived we know it is. We want the story that tells us our relationship is special. And we don’t want to accept that rarity isn’t all that meaningful.
Until the nineteenth century, diamonds were rare. They were found mostly on riverbanks in India and polished until they shone, partially because of a taboo against cutting diamonds, which was believed to harm their spiritual potency. Tools to cut diamonds were first developed in Asia in the thirteenth century. In 1375, the first guild of diamond cutters was founded in Nuremberg, Germany, and the point cut was developed. Still, diamonds these methods produced were dark and dull, valued for their metaphysical properties rather than visual brilliance. As diamond-cutting technology advanced, so did the diamond’s allure. At this point, diamonds looked valuable. Their popularity began to grow in Europe in the fifteenth century, with Agnès Sorel, mistress of Charles VII of France, wearing them around the French court, defying the sumptuary law of the time that regulated private expenditures. Mughal and Persian rulers collected massive diamonds, trading them among families, naming them after themselves and adorning their thrones.
The Koh-i-Noor diamond is a 105.6 carat stone stolen by the British East India Company and ceded to Queen Victoria. When you look it up online, what you first see is a set of glass replicas. Such replications of famous diamonds—the Hope diamond, the Pasha of Egypt, the Shah—were popular in the late nineteenth century as a way for the middle class to enjoy the beauty of diamonds without the cost. On an episode of Antiques Roadshow, one such set was appraised at up to $12,000 at auction. “It’s quite a bit of money for glass,” cracked the appraiser. Just the proximity to diamonds made it worth more.
The Koh-i-Noor has a history of being underwhelming. When it arrived in England in 1862 for an international gem exhibition, the Daily News was skeptical. Though the stone was “first and foremost in historic celebrity, if not in actual value,” the News recalled how many people were “grievously disappointed” upon seeing the stone the last time around in 1851. “In its original Indian cutting, and taken out of its setting, none but a professional eye could judge of its hidden splendor.” The Indians, who regarded the stone as the “prince of talismans,” were apparently not good enough cutters for the Europeans, who deemed that their handiwork had ruined the stone’s brilliant potential. But in 1852, the stone was recut according to European standards, reducing it from 191 carats to 105.6 carats. Some were horrified, but the consensus was that it was made more perfect. Yes, the stone was always impressive in size, but only by cutting away the flaws (and appealing to the sensibilities of a Western white audience) could it be made beautiful.
Diamonds like the Koh-i-Noor could draw crowds because, depending on who you were, you might not have seen a diamond before. But by the late 1860s, diamonds were at risk of becoming ordinary. Huge diamond mines were discovered in South Africa, flooding the market, making the gem available, and slightly more affordable, to anyone who wanted one. This was no way to run an industry that relied upon rarity, so the major investors created De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd., a group that took control of the diamond trade to ensure “extensive price stability for the exporting countries and trusting companies.” This is a nice way of saying they owned every aspect of the industry, including how many diamonds were allowed on the market, in order to perpetuate the illusion of diamond rarity—and keep prices high.
“Diamonds had little intrinsic value—and their price depended almost entirely on their scarcity,” wrote Edward Jay Epstein in his seminal 1982 article for the Atlantic, “Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?” In it, he outlines how De Beers orchestrated a dual lie: that the diamond is rare, but also that the diamond is a symbol of commitment and love that no relationship should be without. In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, diamonds were seen as a luxury, and most women thought it absurd to spend money on one when so many more practical things could be had. De Beers hired ad company N. W. Ayer & Son’s, which explicitly set the goal of creating “a situation where almost every person pledging marriage feels compelled to acquire a diamond engagement ring.” The diamond ring, which was not a thing, became a thing. The slogan “A diamond is forever” became fact, and by 1951, eight out of ten brides in the U.S. were the recipients of diamond rings.
The campaign started with the assumption that the bigger the diamond, the better, and that two months’ salary was a fair trade for the necessary privilege. But in the late 1950s, a glut of small diamonds was found in Russia, and De Beers had to change its sales strategy in order to control production. Suddenly, teeny diamonds on an “eternity band” for older women became a must-have. According to Epstein, “sentiments were born out of necessity: older American women received a ring of miniature diamonds because of the needs of a South African corporation to accommodate the Soviet Union.” At this point, their ad campaigns focused on perfection at any size and emphasized that having a diamond at all was the important thing. In the 1980s, De Beers started a “He Knows How to Wear His Diamonds” ad series marketing diamond rings, bracelets, and cuff links to the sophisticated man who cared about his appearance and status. It featured tough men doing tough things—cowboys, skiers, stock brokers—aided by chunky diamond-and-gold accessories. It was a representation of a man’s taste, his paycheck, and his ability to spend it on himself and not some woman.
In 2003, there was the “Raise Your Right Hand” campaign, encouraging independent women to buy diamond rings for themselves and reversing their traditional depiction of women as dependent consumers and men as providers; now, women should be celebrated for being independent enough to buy diamonds for themselves. The campaign featured women sitting with their legs splayed, staring straight into the camera, a diamond ring casting a flare so bright you could no longer see their hands. The left hand was for “we,” De Beers said, but the right hand was for “me” and deserved to be spoiled on its own.
As I write, Le Vian’s has been running an ad campaign for “chocolate diamonds” (aka brown diamonds typically reserved for industrial purposes), which promises the stones are “rare but affordable,” creating a market for something that heretofore had been unworthy. Jewelry store ads now feature same-sex couples, couples with kids from other relationships, and other “modern” partnerships, which is almost enough to make most Americans forget about blood diamonds and bad press. The advertisers hope that you’ll hope that your relationship, no matter what it looks like, will be good enough to warrant a rock someday.
The phrase “A diamond is forever” implies that a diamond’s perfection is immovable and that it is up to the consumer to become worthy enough of one. The four Cs aren’t just what make a good diamond; they are an eternal, objective standard. But De Beers knows that diamonds are only worth what they mean to the buying public, and De Beers’s advertisers have chased those shifting goalposts as much as anybody, marketing them at any size, any color, any quality, as long as there’s someone out there who thinks they’re worth it. Diamonds may be in crisis again. Americans are waiting longer to get married, and progressive social politics have opened up the idea of who can get married and made people question whether or not marriage need be the end point of a committed relationship. The recession once again spooked a generation out of such an impractical investment. De Beers knows, maybe better than we do, that perfection is a moving target.
Natural diamonds only exist because they have to. In the mantle of earth, where temperatures exceed 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit and the pressure is more than 725,000 pounds per square inch, the conditions change pure carbon’s molecular composition into a different pattern. But you have to imagine that carbon, could it move, would. There is no path of less resistance for the carbon to slide toward. It becomes a diamond because there’s nowhere else to go. It’s romantic, if you squint. It’s freedom from choice. All the carbon has to do is accept that it will now be perceived as rare and beautiful. That’s what’ll make it special. Otherwise it’s just dirt.
Diamonds may be stones for aristocrats, but to be a business they had to be both available for the masses and still rare, never reduced to being common. But it’s hard to feel like the diamond carries that aura of rarity when your TV is flooded with ads from Jared and Kmart advertising diamond earrings for $59.99. Diamonds can now be made in a lab, cutting out the mythical and romantic origin stories. If the abundance of mined diamonds didn’t kill the notion of rarity, the fact that humans can make them does.
I was convinced I was going to marry my first college boyfriend. I said “I love you” to him after a month, in awe that the first person I hooked up with in the dorm was someone for whom I felt this strongly. We can all have a hefty laugh now and say my love was more likely a combination of hormones and headiness from my newfound collegiate freedom, but when I close my eyes and take myself back to that moment in my twin bed in the early morning light, after having spent the night on my roof in the rain because of misplaced keys and miscommunications, shivering and wet and pressed together and finally about to get some sleep, saying “I love you” felt as real and true as saying it to my spouse.
When I said “I love you” I meant marriage, however far away. I fantasized about our life together. Though we were at college in New Orleans, we were both from New York, so it would be easy to move back and set up a life there. He was an economics major, and I was going to be a writer, and we’d live in an apartment with big windows and drink scotch (his favorite) and go to shows, and he’d finally quit smoking, and we’d combine our multicultural families and get a dog and maybe have one kid. For the next two months I held to this fact when my friends seemed unimpressed by him, when he sided with my roommate during a petty dispute, and when he told me he didn’t love me anymore after we had sex. And when he dumped me, I cried, because now the plans I had made had nowhere to go.
Here’s how you get a diamond for your beloved, or your ruler, according to stories told during the Tang Dynasty, which traveled from China to Cyprus. Go to the Valley of the Diamonds, a dangerous, sublime place, the type of place that could be considered beautiful now that we have the technology to not face certain death in the wilderness. Bring meat with you, either by killing an animal at home or finding one to kill along the way. (In fact, the latter is probably better so the scent of a fresh kill will be stronger.) Once you reach the valley, throw the meat down so it is pierced by the precious stones below. Circling eagles will, theoretically, be attracted to the scent of your kill and swoop down for the meat, carrying the diamonds with them back up to the cliffs. The myth doesn’t specify how the prospectors were to wrestle the diamond-laden meat from the eagles. There’s another myth that only goat blood could be used to cleave diamonds. Even in myth, diamonds were always a bloody business. Till death did they part, I guess.
According to Saint Hildegard, diamonds rise from the viscous matter of mountains and leave them split and weaker than they were before, apparently stealing all the mountains’ strength. The stones could ward off evil, especially if they’re ingested. Some people “have a harsh look” when they speak, she wrote “and at times they nearly go out of their mind, as if propelled by madness” before returning to normal and acting like nothing happened. The solution is to put a diamond in their mouth. Other scholars and philosophers across Europe and Asia credited the diamond with being both a poison and an antidote, a carrier of magic, a cure for bladder problems, a betrayer of inconstancy, and a destroyer of love if Saturn is in the right position.
(Maybe the diamond engagement ring is a secret trap, its power so overwhelming that it wrings the awful truth out of whoever is presented with it. A final test before forever sets in. I trust that our lives will be fulfilling together, it says, especially in the presence of this sparkling threat.)
“Diamonds make fools of the human eyes. Glassy and unappealing, unshaped and rough, diamonds can barely be distinguished from normal pebbles,” say Eduard Gubelin and Franz-Xaver Erni in Gemstones: Symbols of Beauty and Power. “Only human rationality and technology can transform a diamond into a work of sparkling light.” Almost a normal pebble, but not. Nearly unbreakable. Hard yet so clear as to be nothing at all. Of course every culture mapped their anxieties and ideals onto diamonds. They can be whatever you want them to be. The diamond’s lasting myth is just that—it evokes fantasy. It’s the stone to drape oneself in when gliding around in a red satin dress, men in tow. It’s what heist teams heist, if only for the moment of opening a velvet-lined box to reveal piles upon piles of icy bits of light. And it’s what gives power to a euphoric and terrifying question of marriage, and the fantasy that the term perfect could ever apply.
No perfect diamond exists without the work of a bunch of diamonds that were told they weren’t enough.
I gave my partner a diamond ring and told them I was ready to get married. But it wasn’t a proposal. The diamond had been passed to me by my aunt, which was passed to her from my great-grandmother—a bit of luck since we were the eldest or only granddaughters of our generations. My aunt had it re-set in a yellow-gold ribbon-esque setting, too big for me, but it sat in my jewelry box, ready for me to do whatever I wanted with it.
There was no first conversation about marriage with my partner. It had always been there, the assumed outcome from the moment we got together for the third time. The first time was in high school, so it didn’t count. The second time, at twenty-one, I felt the weight of forever bearing down on my shoulders. It seemed obvious that this would be the ending, and I didn’t want to go down that road yet, so I left on one of those around-the-world trips that’s supposed to stuff you with enough “life experience” in six months to let you skip over the hard work of growing up. They left a key for me for when I returned, and I waited in their bed, eating boxed cookies they had left and listening to a playlist they had made, until my eyes rolled shut. I woke to them sliding into bed and enveloping me, and to the thought that I would never have to do anything else. Maybe I was like one of those chickens that needs a new chicken to be introduced to the coop while they’re asleep, otherwise they’d be too aware of change and run away. But by morning we both knew where we were going.
When I gave them the ring years later, it wasn’t that I had to tell myself I wasn’t proposing to uphold a heteronormative idea of what a proposal should be. It didn’t even occur to me that this was what I was doing when I walked over to their side of the bed, ring outstretched, and said that I wanted them to have this for whenever they were ready, because I was ready. My action seemed to be a practical prelude to the real thing. They needed a diamond to propose, and I had one. And as the woman, there was no way my ask was the real one.
Over the next few months I joked that if they didn’t propose soon, I would, as if that was the most absurd outcome of our relationship and as if I hadn’t already done so. A proposal—the right kind, the one in which I was being asked—would not change our relationship or our commitment to each other, but I wanted it all the same, and was deeply uncomfortable with that knowledge. I wanted something beautiful and special, and now I was scared I wouldn’t get it, or that it wouldn’t be as wonderful as I had been led to expect.
We’ve coupled love to marriage and we’ve coupled marriage to diamonds, and all three thrive on the assumption of rarity. What would it mean for love to be common? For marriage to become irrelevant as the benefits are made available to all in any combination? I say this as someone in love and in a marriage, who gets fiercely defensive of those things. But I could easily have married my college boyfriend if the terroir were right. I could have married anyone, which is not something I’m supposed to think about. We know love is not perfect, that it’s arbitrary and common, that if we grew up a state away or spoke a different language we might not have fallen in love with the person we currently love, and in fact if we met them in a different context we might loathe them. But to admit that would be to break the spell and rebuild our relationships on…what exactly? Rarity is typically what makes something worthy, and I don’t know how to value things if they are not unique. I don’t know how to care about something if it’s not special, and though I feel like my relationship is the only one of its kind, I don’t know why that is.
Relationships become status symbols in their own right. Our entire economic structure is built on the idea that people will marry, and will produce children, and when those numbers start to go down people panic. Though it never would have occurred to me to say it, I had checked every box. At the time Matt identified as a man, and we lived together and had been together long enough that marriage seemed thoughtful and considered and not rushed out of lust. Our relationship, our love, qualified, and still I’m a woman who was proposed to with a fucking diamond ring. Just the way De Beers wanted it.
A proposal isn’t necessarily a bad thing to want. As silly as the presentation of a diamond ring could be, occasion marks intention in a way a series of small conversations just doesn’t. Asking someone to say yes or no in a life-changing situation grants the other person an awesome power. They’re not being asked to go along with a suggested plan; they’re being asked to decide. But as soon as a relationship becomes about living up to a set of outside criteria, it is divorced from its actual worth. It is no longer about serving and nourishing the people in it, morphing to their needs. It’s about what counts and what doesn’t count—what is of quality enough to be presented to the world and what must be hidden away so as not to taint reputations.
“Bad” diamonds are still good; they have use far beyond their potential beauty. They can grind down rough surfaces to smoothness. They can be made into thin membranes to cover openings in X-ray machines or enhance high-quality speakers. They are also used to cut the good diamonds, to form them into the perfect things ready to be loved and cherished by everyone. No perfect diamond exists without the work of a bunch of diamonds that were told they weren’t enough.
The trick of the original myth of the diamond is that it says it’s about rarity when it’s actually about effort. The valley was full of diamonds. A diamond is valuable because it requires a hike to a remote valley and the serendipitous arrival of the eagles. It’s not just that they exist, but that they inspire such planning and daring to aquire. The trick of the current myth of the diamond—that they are singularly, objectively beautiful—is that it takes effort to make them so. It is in the hands of a master diamond cutter that a glassy stone becomes a radiant heirloom. It is the action that makes it special.
In his memoir Once More We Saw Stars, in between the harrowing narrative of the death of a child, author Jayson Greene describes the moment he met his wife, shocked that he remembers it at all. He says it wasn’t necessarily love at first sight, but more as if an outside voice came down to him and lit him up, an immaculate conception of love telling him, “This is important. Pay attention.” I was furious when I read those words, because I’d used the exact ones to describe the moment my partner and I met, both in oversized black band T-shirts, me squinting slightly in the sun, knowing I should also introduce myself to the guy next to them but unable to stop looking at their face. This is someone to remember, I thought, find them again. I wasn’t ready to be presented in such plain terms how average my feelings were.
Diamonds are, if anything, stones of order. Their structure is a forced, rigid tetrahedron, and its rigidity is what makes its beauty possible. Their magic is a logic puzzle: if you find the right river stone and if you treat it a certain way then you will have a diamond; solve for love. But turn your typical love story—the world aligned so that we met on this day, at this spot, in these moods, and we knew we could never be apart—upside down, and it turns to chaos. Because a minute later, a different first sentence uttered, a different outfit or attitude, and you very well could be married to someone else and perfectly happy about it. It didn’t have to be my spouse. I could have spoken to someone else first and heard that disembodied voice. The pattern that led to us was forged after the fact; we could look back and say that from the beginning it was always forever. Love just sounds better when it’s written as preordained, because that way, if you don’t have it, it’s because it’s an impossible thing to have. The Koh-i-Noor is easy to judge from a distance for its imperfections—you’ll never own it. It’s something reserved for the perfect and rare who somehow have all of their shit together enough to invest in the feeling. There must be order and scarcity, something else controlling all of this, otherwise what’s your excuse? Abundance has never guaranteed equal distribution, but things as deep and strange as love or wealth or identity are not of the realm of “deserving” or “earned.”
I have told myself my marriage is different—unlike everyone who crows about it in Instagram captions, we are actually best friends, we actually have been through thick and thin and know more about each other than we know about ourselves. Surely, all other married couples must be kidding on some level. They must have something to go through the rigamarole of staying together for so long, but no one has what we have. With my parents divorced, you’d think I’d only view marriage as a lie. But because I never thought it was necessary, I figured it was something to do only if it were truly worthy of my time. Why do anything unless it’s the best version of it? We are the only ones who got it right.
Your marriage will never transcend the institution, but you want it to feel like it will. Marriage is special, so special, but also so common, and to reach the state where it starts sounding like a good idea and not a prison, it has to feel different from the mere idea of marriage. It has to feel like the two of you cracked something open and are scamming the system, and yes, you’re technically getting married, but clearly this is something grander and deeper than the law ever scratched. There’s no way, you tell yourselves, this thing you’re doing, that billions of people have done before, is ordinary. And getting to that point takes effort, not happenstance and coincidence.
The love that you build a marriage on is lying at the bottom of every valley, at the back of every cave, amply dull, waiting for someone brave enough to make the journey and bring the right tools. Diamonds, the perfect stone, are not scarce, and neither is love. It can show up in any size, hidden under any mantle, forged in the worst and weirdest conditions. The point is the choice to make the journey. What if diamonds were more special the more we had, and seeing one on someone else only confirmed to both of you how wonderful your shared accessorizing was? I’m trying to let my diamond make me as common as it is, part of a world in which caves overflow with unimpressive pebbles just waiting to be shined up and sold. I do not want my sense of self to be based on what others do not or cannot have. I want to be as abundant as perfection.
