Diamonds are a strange combination of miracle, marketing, status symbol and cultural hypnosis. They sit somewhere between geological royalty and the world’s most successful sales pitch. We treat them as sacred objects of love, wealth and eternal devotion, even though they are, quite literally, carbon that got very stressed a very long time ago.
Ancient carbon with a dramatic origin story
Geologically speaking, diamonds are not as common as people think, but they’re also not as rare as the jewellery industry wants you to believe. You could dig straight down for a very long time, and all you’d achieve is a personal tunnel, some lawsuits and possibly spontaneous combustion.
The trick is where they form and how they reach the surface. Most diamonds used in jewellery today are between one and three billion years old and are created from pure carbon around 90 to 150 miles beneath the Earth’s surface, in the mantle, under extreme heat and crushing pressure. Humans cannot dig anywhere near that deep. The deepest hole ever attempted, the Kola Superdeep Borehole, reached just 7.5 miles before the rock began behaving like hot plastic and the project had to be abandoned.
So the only reason diamonds are accessible at all is because ancient volcanic eruptions acted like high speed geological freight lifts. These eruptions blasted material from deep in the mantle upwards through kimberlite and lamproite pipes, bringing diamonds along for the ride. Without those billion year old volcanic elevators, every diamond on Earth would still be far beyond human reach.
Rare… Until you realise the industry hides half of them
For most of the twentieth century, De Beers operated a near global monopoly, buying up rough diamonds from mines across Africa and Russia, putting them into stockpiles, and controlling how many entered the market. This kept prices high, stable and satisfyingly profitable. Even today, major producers still carefully manage supply.
Marketing made diamonds romantic, not nature
The entire tradition of diamond engagement rings exists because, in 1938, De Beers hired an advertising agency suffering from too much creativity and not enough scruples. The result was the infamous tag line “A diamond is forever.”
It worked. Within a generation, diamond engagement rings went from rare to mandatory. Hollywood reinforced it. Magazines reinforced it. A cultural myth was born, one so strong that people still feel guilty proposing with anything that does not come in a small velvet box.
They sparkle because physics is sexy
Diamonds bend and split light in a dramatic way. The sparkle, the flashes, the rainbow shards of light, none of it is magic. It is optical physics, precision cutting and a natural ability to reflect light at ridiculous angles. Humans are basically magpies with mortgages, so of course we flock to the shiniest thing in the shop.
Lab grown diamonds, identical twins, cheaper rent
Lab grown diamonds have changed the game entirely. Thanks to modern high pressure technology and chemical vapour deposition, we can now create diamonds in a laboratory that are chemically, structurally and optically identical to those pulled from the earth, with the same hardness and brilliance. The only real differences are their origin and their price, lab grown stones are cheaper, often purer, free from geopolitical baggage and carry tiny trace markers so gem labs can tell them apart. In every meaningful sense they are real diamonds, they have simply skipped the billion year pressure cooker and the mining industry’s habit of adding unnecessary drama.
Why do we pay so much for something that grows in the ground?
It is a fair question. Diamonds form naturally, in abundance, beneath the Earth. But through supply control, marketing, cultural tradition and shiny object syndrome, we have collectively agreed to treat them as priceless symbols. They are expensive not because they must be, but because the story around them is. They represent love, status, permanence, commitment, wealth, indulgence, and occasionally poor financial decisions.
The real reason, diamonds endure
It is not just sparkle. It is not just age. It is not even the hardness. It is the story. Diamonds have been wrapped in layers of myth, aspiration and expectation until they became more idea than mineral.
They are the supposed girl’s best friend, the forever stone, the ultimate mark of devotion. But beneath all that cultural weight sits a simple truth, diamonds endure because we want them to. They are luxury distilled to its essence beautiful, unnecessary, expensive, and marvellously good at convincing us that they matter more than everything else in the jewellery case.
And honestly? For a billion year old piece of carbon that survived the Earth’s deepest pressure cooker, maybe they have earned the right to shine.
