De Beers lab-grown diamonds are for anything but marriage

Already the world's leading diamond miner, De Beers is making its synthetic diamond debut with some of the cheapest lab-grown gems on the market, pricing its wares from $200-$800 based on carat, and assuring customers that they are perfect for things like "Birthdays and beach days and just because days." Not only did De Beers invent the idea of the diamond engagement ring to keep selling it, it has spent the past several decades trying to suppress the synthetic diamond industry De Beers's diamond debacleDe Beers has been selling diamonds it's pulled from the ground for over 130 years, and up until May it was hell-bent on convincing customers that only diamonds borne from the earth were worth wearing In addition to lobbying against synthetic stones since their conception in the 1950s, De Beers and other mining behemoths in the Diamond Producers Association launched the "Real is rare" campaign in 2016 to persuade millennials to pony up for natural diamonds even if they aren't interested in marriage.

While the effort didn't radically reverse dimming diamond sales, it may have, ironically, convinced De Beers to finally give synthetic diamonds a shot It's betting on single people and accessories, a move that has already knocked down the cost of synthetic diamonds from its existing markdown of 32% down to 45%.A diamond is forev-just kidding, it's just for you girlWith Lightbox, De Beers wants to unravel the cultural significance of the diamond engagement ring, a concept that it spun in the 1940s De Beers copywriter Mary Frances Gerety coined the phrase "a diamond is forever" in 1947, and the rest is history: Over the next few decades sales of the company's wholesale rough diamonds shot up, jumping from $23 million in 1939 to $21 billion in 1979So it remains to be seen if De Beers's dramatic entrance into the synthetic space spells doom for the iconic diamond engagement ring. Source