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【shards】告诉你钻石恒久远的他，现在开始卖人造钻石了｜英语每天学

鲁达发布于 2023-08-25

上海图书馆每天为头条号的读者提供优质的英语阅读

导读

钻石珠宝常常被视作爱与承诺的象征，但现在，这个价值800亿美元的市场面临着新的威胁。面对更加便宜、更加清洁的人造钻石，天然钻石的生产商感到了从未有过的不安。

#Diamond and marriage#

PEACOCKS strut; bowerbirds build lovenests; spiders gift-wrap flies in silk. Such courtship rituals play an important role in what Charles Darwin called sexual selection: when the female of a species bears most of the costs of reproduction, males use extravagant displays and gifts to demonstrate their “reproductive fitness” and females choose between them. For human males, shards of a crystalline form of carbon often feature. A diamond engagement ring signals a man’s taste, wealth and commitment, all to persuade a woman that he is a good bet.

This particular courtship gift was dreamed up by an ad agency for De Beers, the cartel that sold almost all of the world’s diamonds throughout the 20th century. In the 1930s it started to promote a link between diamonds and marriage. Diamonds’ unmatched hardness would symbolise love’s endurance and their “fire”, or brilliance, its passion. Two months’ salary, the firm suggested, was what the ring should cost—a good investment since, as the admen said, “A diamond is forever.”

Now, that promise is dimming. Though a growing Chinese middle class will probably prop up demand for a while, millennials in Western countries seem keener on memorable experiences than on bling. Diamonds’ image has been blemished by some being mined in war zones and sold to pay for the fighting. Meanwhile, laboratory-grown “synthetic” diamonds, long fit only for industrial use, are becoming good enough to compete with gems from out of the ground.

But the long-term threat to diamonds’ lustre is more surprising: that their price could plummet. In recent years regulators (and market forces) have undermined De Beers’s cartel by limiting the share of other producers’ stones that it can buy. Now responsible for just a third of global sales, the company can no longer manage supply by stockpiling gems when demand turns down. It is spending less on advertising, since it no longer gets the lion’s share of the benefits. But the very value of diamonds lies in being scarce and coveted—that is, costly. In the jargon, they are “Veblen goods”, named after a 19th-century economist: prestige-enhancing trinkets for which a higher price encourages buyers. With most products, lower prices increase demand; with diamonds, they could kill it.