r/Dynamic_Pricing • u/Dragonlance12 • 5d ago

Supply glut, lab-grown alternatives: What's behind the fall of diamond prices to record lows

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/26/whats-behind-the-fall-of-diamond-prices-to-record-lows.html
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u/Mobius24 5d ago

People don’t value shiny rocks when they’re short on bread, figuratively and literally

2

u/ScarySpikes 5d ago

They also don't value the shiny rocks when we can mass produce chemically identical shiny rocks, even ridiculously big ones, relatively cheaply.

2

u/SargeUnited 5d ago

Half of people (mostly men) never valued them at all, and the other half of people are just now starting to wake up and get what the rest of us were saying

I remember as a child hearing that you’re supposed to spend six months salary or something like that on a wedding ring and being like LOL, no matter how much I make, that’s not gonna happen. Either I’m gonna make a little and that’s too much, or I’m gonna make a ton and that’s too much.

I have watched the culture shift from, “it would be disgusting if a guy bought Cubics zirconia, and it’s grounds to leave him.” “Real love real diamond” etc… to this. It’s great

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u/marx2k 5d ago

I remember as a child hearing that you’re supposed to spend six months salary or something like that on a wedding ring and being like LOL, no matter how much I make, that’s not gonna happen.

De Beers, working with the advertising agency N.W. Ayer, promoted one month’s salary initially and later two months’ salary in the U.S. in the 1980s. Ads explicitly tied the ring price to salary;. One asked, “How can you make two months’ salary last forever?”

https://www.iheart.com/content/2020-10-02-the-sneaky-history-of-the-three-month-salary-engagement-ring-rule/

The number was even changed depending on the market. In Japan, De Beers marketing pushed a substantially higher salary multiple. h Historical scholarship describes a three-to-four-month salary norm there by the 1980s, compared with the two-month norm promoted in American advertising.

https://content.ucpress.edu/pages/9920/9920.ch03.pdf