I didn’t want to give a longer diamond spiel, but I’m going to.
I’m a dude, but educated, and to help educate you, here you go. Men artificially inflated the price of diamonds somewhere around 800%.
Diamonds are neither rare nor highly valued by women compared to other things (like purses and shoes). Marketing by men (look up De Beers) created a market for diamonds that didn’t exist before. Dynasties and empires traded in Gold for hundreds of years when diamonds could have been used, they just weren’t.
Our diamond market has evolved so much since the beginning that we (men and women) will pay considerably different amounts of money for indistinguishably different diamonds that to the naked eye, look the same!
I’m not talking 10s or 100s of dollars, I’m talking 10s of thousands. If you’ve never shopped for diamonds, or cared to learn more about them, I can understand how all of this is confusing or new.
Most have little clue about diamonds, their values, the why or what or even how; fortunately, you have the internet to help you learn more and dig yourselves from the oppression of ignorance! (insert cheer and TMYK GIF with the frizzy hair dude with a rainbow shirt).
While it does seem like women are the recipients of a lot of diamonds, you just don’t see women wearing a mouthful of them, and to be honest, I see more dude wearing large rocks on their ears than women on their hands - because, lets all be honest, most folks can’t afford what are considered ‘nice diamonds’, and that’s how they get a lot of people. Keeping up with the Joneses is a real issue fueled by marketing and the corporations of the world.
Diamonds are generally valued by the 4 C’s. Cut, Color, Clarity, Carat. Usually, people only care about Carat (size of the ring by weight used in gemstones - 1 carat is about 200 milligrams). The other C’s are where the expenses start stacking. I bought a $9,000 diamond. That’s just the diamond, not the ring, and I’ve bought a few diamonds at less than $1000 total. Total weight of the single diamond was 1.22 carats. The smaller diamonds were more in weight, but less in color, cut and clarity. The cut is another big differentiator of price. Different cuts require different tools and precision, and they also allow the diamond to show more reflected light than refracted or filtered; Cuts can also be of different quality. Clarity is how free of occlusions and imperfections the stone is. The naked eye can arguably not tell the difference between VS on up (the scale is Semi, or SI, and that has ranks SI1, SI2, then VS, then VSS, then IF then F), and this is where the color and cut really make a difference. VS and VSS are generally at the high point of what you’d find in a store that specializes in diamonds. IF (Internally flawless) and F (Flawless) are really rare, as diamonds are all founded in carbon and dirt. Realistically, you need a microscope or loupe to be able to find the differences between the VS-VSS and IF-F.
There also is no comparison in value with “usefulness”. That term and frame of thinking is how poor people stay poor. Usefulness doesn’t make money; hustle does. If you can sell salt to snail, and your conscience is relatively indifferent or non-existent; you’re likely to make a lot of money (think wolf of wall street). Also, gemstone usefulness is vastly different in application than metals. This is basically the difference between geology and chemistry. Might as well be comparing the value of wood to vanilla bean ice cream.
As far as hardest material type utility - wurtzite boron nitride and lonsdaleite (newer materials in the past decade) are the hardest. Diamond has a hardness rating of 10 for a compacted material, and tungsten has the highest tensile strength.
Diamonds have a value because men created the space for them to, and then convinced (mainly Americans) to value them so highly. Diamond values weren’t really a thing until well into the 1800s, but the biggest jump was when the De Beers organization (which had the monopoly on diamond mining, not the warlords, until about the 1980s, when they started selling parts of it off) created the market and campaigns to socialize how important this unimportant gem was.
An organization of men that created the first “Bedazzled” mad rush.
I have always appreciated diamonds. The ability for a gemstone to create such light and shine when perfectly crafted. A diamond is more of a status symbol than actual valued item of trade. It’s like the original Superman comic book. Only someone interested would value it that high. If you don’t value diamonds that high, then that’s good for you! Most of the world does because men created the market for it and the sheeple followed.
Thankfully, we’re overstocked globally with diamonds AND De Beers hasn’t been a monopoly for a few decades now. Prices are dropping and with manufactured diamonds made of the same material but coming in perfect (and to color of choice), it’s becoming more obvious how much better manufactured lab diamonds are than mined (both are REAL diamonds).
