Stoned: Jewelry, Obsession, and How Desire Shapes the World

Diamonds aren’t forever. Diamond engagement rings have only been a “necessary luxury” for about eighty years. We take the tradition of a diamond engagement ring for granted, as if it were as old as marriage itself. It’s not. In fact, it’s only about as old as the microwave oven.

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Gemstones are, in fact, just colorful gravel. They’re just rocks that we’ve given special names. True jewels are things that are beautiful and scarce. We want them because few others can possess them. We want them even more if they are from some very faraway, exotic place. Their value is, and always has been, 90 percent imaginary.

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Real, it turns out, is just as flexible a concept as value.

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when Mary died a few years after their wedding, Philip wasn’t exactly broken up about it. He was so unfazed, in fact, that he immediately proposed to her much younger sister. (In terms of taste, that’s nearly on par with beheading your wife, then marrying her illiterate, nymphomaniacal teenage cousin. Keeping it classy, Tudors.)

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But the Roman finger rings of antiquity were something new. While the symbolism of a circle is obvious, a tiny finger shackle was entirely Roman. And just like us, they wore their wedding rings on the fourth finger of the left hand. In fact, that’s the origin of our modern tradition. They believed there was a special vein, the vena amoris, or “vein of love,” that led from that particular finger directly to the heart. Brilliant, guys. One expects better science from the people who invented concrete and indoor plumbing. Someone

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Diamonds are intrinsically worthless, except for the deep psychological need they fill. —NICKY OPPENHEIMER, CHAIRMAN OF DE BEERS     Advertising

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Reality, like value, is determined by mob mentality, and just being deemed genuine—or fake—was enough to make it so.

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He called me a very clever girl and gave me a pat on the head. Then he sternly forbade me from doing so and explained that being too clever would be a quick way into federal prison.

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So, what do you do when you’ve invested heavily in an endeavor and then begin to realize that you may have backed the wrong horse? Simple. What did Rhodes and Oppenheimer of De Beers do after they cornered the market on diamonds, then realized they’d found so many that the stones were practically worthless? Lie. You lie and you try to make that lie real by making everyone else believe it. It’s called PR. Whether the story is about the alleged scarcity of diamonds or the boundless treasures of the New World, it’s all about good old-fashioned spin.

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For humans, scarcity creates value. Value creates wealth. And both scarcity and wealth can be a good thing or a bad thing: a poison or a medicine. Too much money is as dangerous as too little, and can build or destroy economies.

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Diamonds are not only brittle, but they’re also quite thermodynamically unstable. Right now, as you read this, every diamond you’ve ever seen is slowly converting to graphite. The process is just so incredibly slow at room temperature that human beings will never live to see it. So . .

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they “suffered worst from the combination of institutionalized incompetence and authoritarian rigidity.

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