It’s that feel good factor.
Diamonds make us feel good. They make us feel great actually. What is it about these tiny sparkly rocks that make our endorphin levels raise so quick and high?
I take it as a fancy champagne. The fancier the bubbly, the less we seem to know about it. Likewise, diamonds hold the illusion that the less we know about it, the more rare it becomes, ergo the perceived value shoots up way high. But just as a fine grape gets lost to a drunken pallet, so do diamonds.
If you were to give me a very expensive champagne from one of the most prestigious parts of France and did not tell me, I would take it to be just another celebratory bottle off the grocery store shelf. To us laymen, there is no distinguishing between the tastes of the grapes and the only main realization would come from the packaging or from that little knowledge dropped by that particularly pretentious friend of yours who thinks he is a connoisseur.
Diamonds have the same problem. People believe that “colorless” diamonds are the absolute way to go. They are some how a better diamond that a “near-colorless” ones. If I were to play a game and asked you to taste a few glasses of the nice champagne and then I switched it over to the crappy brut off the shelf, would you be able to tell the difference? Honestly..
Same way, if I were to set an F color diamond in a ring and showed you the ring and let you play with it for a day or so; then without you knowing, switched the same diamond out for a very similar cut, but this time an H color diamond; you would never be able to tell the difference. The hues are so close together on the color spectrum that you would have to use a Gemologist’s Color Shade Card to identify the differences. That too, the diamonds would have to be loose and unmounted, which in almost all cases, is never meant to be kept as so.
The truth is, color shades were created as a tool for professionals to separate diamonds in giant parcels and group like pieces together for large jewelry pieces or to sell as lot to other wholesalers to break down and distribute to retail chains.
Diamonds are just like fine champagnes. Difficult to tell the difference but when you want to act magniloquent in front of your friends and colleagues, you go for the high end price tag, even though you know the effects are the same as the $20 bottle off the shelf. You get drunk off love, be it a spirit or a beautifully sparkled gem.
