Komii)EPISODE 10 De Beers: The Company That Invented Romantic Love

The Diamond Myth

Before nineteen thirty-eight, the diamond engagement ring was not a tradition. It was not rare, exactly—it just was not what most people did. Within about forty years it had become close to universal in the United States and had spread to countries with no cultural connection to it whatsoever, including Japan.

Now, before you jump to the obvious, this did not happen because diamonds are rare, as they are considerably less rare than the price suggests, nor did it happen because of some deep human instinct about carbon. It happened because a diamond company hired an advertising agency in Philadelphia and handed them a brief unlike almost any other in commercial history: not to sell more diamonds or beat a competitor, but to make people believe something they did not currently believe.

Then in nineteen forty seven, a copywriter at that agency wrote four words that have been called the greatest advertising slogan of the twentieth century. And those four words did something so quietly ruthless that once I understood it, I could not look at a jewellery shop window the same way again. The machine that built this is coming apart right now, and the thing dismantling it was grown in a laboratory.

The Stakes

This is not a jewellery story, but the single most successful demand creation project ever executed. Consider what was actually achieved: a company took an object with limited practical use, established it as the compulsory symbol of marital commitment across multiple continents, and attached a price rule to it that people repeated as though it were ancient custom—two months' salary, or three in some markets. That number did not come from anywhere except an advertising department.

And it worked so completely that for decades, a man who did not spend it felt he had failed at something.

Quick thing before we get into how: most people who watch these all the way through still are not subscribed. If you like knowing where your own assumptions actually came from, hit subscribe, because this next part is genuinely uncomfortable.

The Mechanism

In nineteen eighty three, a British historian named Eric Hobsbawm edited a collection of essays called The Invention of Tradition, a book that permanently changes how you look at things. His argument was that a great many customs we treat as ancient are surprisingly recent, created deliberately for specific purposes by identifiable people. Many ceremonies we assume are centuries old turn out to have been designed within the last two hundred years, frequently by someone with a reason.

And the key move in an invented tradition is always the same: you do not present it as new, but as a recovery of something always true that people had simply forgotten. Because a new custom can be argued with, whereas an ancient one cannot.

Now hold that against the diamond ring. Nobody was ever told this is a new idea we would like you to adopt; it was presented from the very beginning as what people do and what people have always done. Hold that, because the moment you see how this tradition was assembled, you will start noticing others, and there are a lot of them.

The Rise

The supply story comes first, because without it the marketing would not have worked. In eighteen sixty seven, diamonds were found in South Africa, and the discoveries that followed were so enormous that they threatened the entire basis of the diamond's value, since a gemstone is only worth what it is worth if there are not many of them.

The response came from Cecil Rhodes, who consolidated the South African mines into a single company, De Beers, founded in eighteen eighty-eight. And the strategy from that point was not to sell as many diamonds as possible, but the exact opposite: control the supply, release a limited quantity, and hold the rest back. For most of the twentieth century, De Beers controlled the overwhelming majority of the world's rough diamond supply, using that position to keep prices stable and rising.

But controlling supply only works if demand holds, and by the nineteen thirties, in the middle of a global depression, demand was collapsing.

The Crack

In nineteen thirty-eight, De Beers approached the advertising agency N.W. Ayer in Philadelphia with an extraordinary brief. The campaign was not to sell a brand, since most consumers would never buy a product with the De Beers name on it, but rather to buy from a local jeweller. The objective was to strengthen the entire category and change what people believed a diamond meant.

And the strategy they built was not really advertising as we understand it, but cultural placement. Diamonds were put into films, stories about engagements were placed with newspapers, lecturers were sent to schools to talk to teenage girls about engagement rings, and the size of the stone worn by a famous woman became a matter of public interest reported as news. The point was to make the diamond appear everywhere except in something that looked like an advertisement.

And in nineteen forty seven, a copywriter named Frances Gerety, working late and reportedly close to giving up, wrote a line for a layout: a diamond is forever.

The Self Inflicted Wound

Look at what that sentence actually accomplishes, because it is doing two jobs at once, and the second one is ruthless. The first job is romantic: the stone is permanent, therefore the commitment is permanent, meaning the object stands in for the promise.

The second job is commercial, and it is the reason that the campaign was worth billions. If a diamond is forever, you never sell it. And that solves the deepest problem in the entire business: diamonds do not wear out, and every ring ever purchased still exists. If a meaningful proportion came back onto the market second hand, that resale supply would compete with new sales, and the price structure the whole industry depends on would collapse.

So the slogan does not merely encourage purchase, but discourages resale, converting every diamond sold into a diamond permanently removed from circulation. Four words create demand and destroy supply at the same time. But the entire structure rested on one claim—that diamonds are scarce. And the scarcity was never geological, but managed, which only works as long as you control the supply. Over recent decades, De Beers did not maintain that control as major sources came online in Russia, Canada, and Australia, driven by producers with no interest in a system designed to enrich a competitor. Then came the thing that no supply agreement can address.

The Exception

Laboratory-grown diamonds arrived—not simulants or cubic zirconia, but chemically, physically, and optically identical diamonds produced in machines in weeks that require specialist equipment to distinguish from mined stones. Prices for lab-grown stones have fallen dramatically, and the gap against mined diamonds has become impossible to hide.

And here is the self-inflicted part, almost beautiful in how grim it is: for eighty years, the industry told consumers that what mattered was the stone—its permanence, its brilliance, its foreverness. So when a stone arrived that was identical in every measurable respect and dramatically cheaper, the industry had no argument left, having spent a century teaching people to care about exactly the properties the new product also had.

If you know somebody who is about to spend two months' salary on a ring, send them this before they do. Send it to three people, because this is the kind of thing you only benefit from knowing beforehand.

The Counter Case

Now consider the other side, because there is a real one. The industry's response is that a mined diamond and a manufactured one are not the same thing because origin and rarity are part of what is being bought—which is not absurd, as it is the same reason an original painting is worth more than a perfect reproduction.

There is also a serious development argument: diamond mining is a significant employer and revenue source in several southern African countries, and Botswana in particular has used diamond revenue to fund national development to a degree that is genuinely unusual. A collapse in mined demand has consequences for real people who had no part in any of this.

On the marketing itself, a fair point is that nobody was defrauded, as the campaign never lied about what a diamond is, but instead attached meaning to an object, which is what almost all marketing does. The uncomfortable question is whether there is a difference between attaching meaning to an object and installing a belief so deeply that people mistake it for their own tradition.

The Final Verdict

So here is the live test happening right now in real time: if people keep paying substantially more for mined stones, then De Beers did not merely sell diamonds, but installed a belief so durable that it survived the arrival of a perfect substitute. If they do not, then the whole thing was a price supported by controlled supply that lasted exactly as long as the control did. We will know within about a decade.

And I want you in that experiment, so comment one word: MINED or LAB. If a lab-grown diamond is chemically identical, would you accept one? One word, that is all. I genuinely want to see where this audience lands, because I do not think there is a right answer.

Back to nineteen forty seven, and a copywriter at a desk in Philadelphia late at night trying to finish a layout: Frances Gerety wrote "a diamond is forever" and reportedly was not particularly impressed with it. She worked on that account for decades afterwards and never married. And those four words went on to reshape what engagement means across most of the world, set a price on love that people repeated as though it had been handed down, and made a category of object almost impossible to resell—not by lying, but by deciding what a thing would mean and then saying it everywhere for eighty years until everybody assumed it had always been true.

Which leaves one question I cannot stop thinking about: if they did it with diamonds, what else in your house was somebody paid to make you believe? Because there is one more, located in your kitchen cupboard right now, owned by a family worth over a hundred billion dollars who have never given a single interview and who have kept a secret about their own product for four generations. Subscribe, and I will show you next week. Leave MINED or LAB in the comments. See you there.