The Heartless Stone

Over the weekend, I found myself paying more and more attention to the diamonds that adorned the people I saw. I took a quick trip to Philadelphia and on the plane flights, I was amazed at the vareity of diamond rings, necklaces, earrings, brooches, and trinkets people wore. The diamond (particularly as its used in engagement rings) seems to be a ubiquitous part of our culture, a tradition that has lasted for centuries.

But it's actually a quite recent phenomenon.

My focus on people's jewelry this weekend was a result of reading Tom Zoellner's excellent The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit, and Desire. Zoellner points out that our engagement ring "tradition" really didn't take hold until the 1940's. The influential diamond cartel, De Beers, launched an ad campaign aimed at "the public, particularly those millions in the middle-income group, who must be influenced in their thought, taste, habits and fashions, if the sale of diamonds is to be increased," according for confidential documents.

Zoellner explains that, "the key assumption of the campaign was that a diamond was an absolute requirement for any young man preparing to marry. It was not just one of his many, options, but the singular imperative--the only thing that would do. This was a brazen denial of three centuries of American cultural history, in which diamond rings were generally regarded as foppish extravagancies." Obviously, we know how influential and effective this campaign turned out. De Beers and the diamond industry repeated this marketing feat in Japan in the 1960's.

The Heartless Stone takes us to fourteen nations on six continents. From diamond smugglers in war-torn Africa, to geologists in the Arctic Circle, to luckless miners in Brazil, to chemists in Siberia, to business executives in Japan, to diamond sellers in London, and many more locations, the book is an illuminating, and in some ways frightening, look at the diamond industry that's well worth the read.