Museum of Diamonds Shares the Stories Behind the Stones

"Every diamond has a story," reads the come-on for the Museum of Diamonds, originally launched in Colorado in 2015 as the only World Federation of Diamond Bourses-approved diamond-naming registry The founders found that the busywork involved with registering stones doesn't touch many people, while the stories behind giving and receiving diamonds do "Our premise is that every romantic relationship that ends up as a marriage has an interesting, often funny anecdote," explains Jacques Voorhees, co-founder of the museum as well as Polygon, a concept he created in 1983 at the dawn of the Internet era, which became the diamond industry's first online business-to-business marketplace.

Stories have certainly added cachet to a few legendary diamonds, some with dramatic and terrible histories The museum write-up of the Hope Diamond ends with a quip that since the United States took possession of the cursed diamond, the country has been beleaguered by five wars and untenable debt The site is a collection of meet-cute tales and funny anecdotes, Harlequin romance-type stories for a generation accustomed to brevity in social-media posts and the occasional Twitter thread.

The museum will even help people put their stories together with what's essentially a free, paint-by-numbers approach to the craft of storytelling, Voorhees admits, but it helps people who aren't natural writers to share their story with family, friends and curious strangers "I'm atoning for my sins," he explains, adding that he shares some of the responsibility for the commodification of diamonds: As Internet sales increased, the personal touch decreased and diamonds were reduced to virtually just numbers for size and quality. . Source