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Bigtoad3553 t1_iu20xqn wrote

Actually out of all the precious stones, diamonds are actually the most common and least valuable.

Their perceived value dates back to an old marketing campaign that was so effective, they have been considered precious ever since.

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9Lives_ t1_iu2pfz7 wrote

Yeah Marilynn Monroe saying “Diamonds are a girls best friend”

Their feedback from focus groups found that men didn’t know how much to spend on an engagement ring and rather than set a price they had characters in a movie say that the cost should be around “a months pay”

Then the de’beers family hoarded TONS of them to keep the price artificially high.

What baffles me is that the difference between CZ and genuine diamond in terms of appearance to the naked eye are minuscule yet the price disparity is like over 10,000 times the price.

Humans have a long history of collecting shiny rocks for ceremonial/cultural use, there’s evidence of humans during Neanderthal periods burying there loved ones with stones that they could only have collected by walking thousands of miles to obtain and I think that’s one of the reasons why it’s so easy to make people fork out large sums of money for what’s essentially nonsense, because it’s deeply embedded in our DNA.

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Bigtoad3553 t1_iu3m57l wrote

Yeah I mean we like shiny things, fair enough haha

But out of all the shiny things, we picked the least valuable one as the most valuable because of a marketing campaign. Like really?

Still, my other half likes diamonds so I sucked it up and bought a big ol' over priced rock for her engagement ring 😂

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Path_Fyndar t1_iu2qlw9 wrote

In all fairness, though, they are incredibly strong, and can be used to make it easier to cut things that are also incredibly strong, like diamond blades.

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