“A diamond is forever.”

That’s the De Beers slogan as well as the title of a James Bond movie.

Think engagement and the picture of a diamong solitaire comes to mind. Think wedding and the picture is replaced with that of a diamond-studded wedding band. Think 10th, 15th or 25th wedding anniversary and an eternity ring dazzles inside one’s head. The romance associated with diamonds is not the only reason why these brilliant pieces of crystallized carbon are prized possessions. For some people, they are investments–some sort of an insurance against the inflation of money.

What if someone told you that the association with love and romance is a carefully calculated advertising campaign engineered by the company that monopolizes the diamond industry? A campaign that has been successfully implemented for the past half century? What if someone told you that the “rarity” of diamonds is an illusion created by the same company and there is an oversupply of diamonds that we do not know of? That the “value”of diamonds is nothing more than a carefully orchestrated series of tricks with created demands and control over supplies?

The women in my family have a thing about diamonds. From my grandmother to my mother to myself. And I was looking forward to bequeathing mine (definitely nothing Imeldific) to my own daughters. And then I read this lengthy, comprehensive and very disturbing article about diamonds in The Atlantic Online. My brain stopped functioning for a few seconds. Seriously. Afterwards, I thought, no wonder the Chinese buy gold instead.

It all started in September of 1938 when Harry Oppenheimer, the 29-year-old son of the founder of De Beers, traveled from Johannesburg to New York City to meet with Gerold M. Lauck, president of N. W. Ayer, a leading advertising agency in the United States.

Although it could do little about the state of the economy, N. W. Ayer suggested that through a well-orchestrated advertising and public-relations campaign it could have a significant impact on the “social attitudes of the public at large and thereby channel American spending toward larger and more expensive diamonds instead of “competitive luxuries.” Specifically, the Ayer study stressed the need to strengthen the association in the public’s mind of diamonds with romance. Since “young men buy over 90% of all engagement rings” it would be crucial to inculcate in them the idea that diamonds were a gift of love: the larger and finer the diamond, the greater the expression of love. Similarly, young women had to be encouraged to view diamonds as an integral part of any romantic courtship.

Since the Ayer plan to romanticize diamonds required subtly altering the public’s picture of the way a man courts — and wins — a woman, the advertising agency strongly suggested exploiting the relatively new medium of motion pictures. Movie idols, the paragons of romance for the mass audience, would be given diamonds to use as their symbols of indestructible love. In addition, the agency suggested offering stories and society photographs to selected magazines and newspapers which would reinforce the link between diamonds and romance. Stories would stress the size of diamonds that celebrities presented to their loved ones, and photographs would conspicuously show the glittering stone on the hand of a well-known woman…

Toward the end of the 1950s, N. W. Ayer reported to De Beers that twenty years of advertisements and publicity had had a pronounced effect on the American psyche. “Since 1939 an entirely new generation of young people has grown to marriageable age,” it said. “To this new generation a diamond ring is considered a necessity to engagements by virtually everyone.” The message had been so successfully impressed on the minds of this generation that those who could not afford to buy a diamond at the time of their marriage would “defer the purchase” rather than forgo it.