The Diamond Industry Goes Platonic

As marriage rates decline, the diamond industry is turning its eye to platonic relationships.

“It is one of my love languages to gift,” she says, looking lovingly at the woman to her right, after wiping a tear from her eye. The two are filmed in black and white, and one is wearing a diamond-pendant necklace that shines particularly brightly in the muted setting. Usually the giving of diamonds is associated with lovers making the leap into marriage. But here, in an ad for Jared jewelers, two long-lost sisters describe how, after meeting for the first time, they chose to honor the occasion with diamonds.

Jared and other diamond merchants have similar ads. In another from Jared, a different pair of sisters speak of how they share an inherited ring, before a voice-over asks you, the viewer, to “express your extraordinary love” with diamond jewelry. A recent Brilliant Earth ad features a mother and a daughter showing off their jewelry, with one saying, “You are never too old to play dress-up.” Hallmark has a landing page that suggests that you buy diamond jewelry for your friends, to “show appreciation for a relationship that brings so much joy.”

Ever since the diamond industry invented the concept of the diamond engagement ring in the 1940s as a necessary precursor to marriage, diamonds have been associated with romantic (and, until recently, exclusively heterosexual) love. The idea was that diamonds were rare and thus valuable, just like your love—never mind that it was a false scarcity instituted by diamond-mine owners to drive up prices. But diamond sellers have also tried different tactics over the years to expand their reach. There was the “Raise Your Right Hand” campaign from De Beers in 2003, which encouraged women to buy diamonds for themselves. Another campaign in the 1980s tried to persuade women to buy diamonds for men. And the rebranding of brown diamonds—typically used for cutting or as an abrasive in industrial settings—into “chocolate” diamonds a decade ago was an attempt to move an oversupply.

Read: Diamonds aren’t special and neither is your love

So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that a new marketing strategy is upon us, one in which women are being encouraged to buy diamonds as a show of friendship and sisterhood. The style magazine The Kit recently ran a story on “why buying your best friends diamonds is a feminist act.” In that article, Eva Hartling, a marketing strategist, says, “Women used to say, ‘I can’t buy my friend a diamond ring because it should be her husband buying her that.’ The change of mindset came from consumers and now the industry has caught up.” But maybe it’s the other way around.

The diamond industry has succeeded in associating diamonds with marriage. But marriage rates have steadily declined in the U.S. since the ’80s, even accounting for a post-lockdown blip in 2021. And according to the diamond-industry analyst Paul Zimnisky, though the total number of diamonds purchased in the bridal space has remained steady over the past decade because of population growth, that per capita decline is something the diamond industry has noticed. As a result, he has observed the industry attempting to diversify its marketing strategies to associate diamonds with more than just engagement rings.

Zimnisky also told me there has been a steady rise in women buying expensive jewelry (diamond and otherwise) for themselves. “Twenty-five to 30 years ago, bridal represented upwards of half of global diamond demand. It’s probably a third now, and that self-purchase category was probably less than 10 percent [back then], and now that’s another third,” he said So, as with the “Raise Your Right Hand” campaign, diamond sellers today are trying to reach women who want to buy diamonds on their own.

From 1982: Have you ever tried to sell a diamond?

The rise of lab-created diamonds has also broadened the perceived consumer base for diamonds. Though the Natural Diamond Council (basically a group of diamond producers invested in keeping natural-diamond sales strong) stresses that “only natural diamonds” will do, lab-created diamonds have become more and more popular—they’re a perhaps more sustainable product that is molecularly identical. And because they can be created in a lab, they are much cheaper. “If you just go back to 2015, a lab diamond [cost] maybe 10 percent less than a natural diamond; now it’s 90 percent less,” Zimnisky said.

Loretta Volpe, the chair of direct and interactive marketing at the Fashion Institute of Technology who has worked in diamond-industry marketing, says the relatively lower price of lab diamonds make them seem like a more reasonable and casual gift for a friend. For all but the wealthiest, a diamond has long been a grand, once-in-a-lifetime gesture—something it’s been said you shouldn’t even think about unless you’ve saved up two months’ salary. But again, given that the formula (your monthly salary, multiplied by two, equals what an engagement ring should cost) was made up by De Beers, now it just doesn’t have to be as big of a deal.

Marketers have probably picked up on the shifting conversation around friendship too. In recent years, experts have been stressing the importance of social connection, and there’s a growing recognition by the media that friends and chosen family should be acknowledged and celebrated as much as romantic relationships.

That conversation may have inspired more people to think about showing their appreciation for nonromantic relationships with gifts. And a friendly gift of jewelry is far more likely to be given and received by women: Jewelry is still mostly seen as a feminine object. “I think it’s more permissible now” to express multiple kinds of affection with diamonds, Volpe told me, though more so with something like a diamond pendant. Zimnisky agrees: “I think there probably was a stigma at one point around doing something like that, and I think that’s probably been eroded at this point.”

Read: The 6 forces that fuel friendship

Perhaps buying a diamond necklace for your best friend is a genuine gesture of love and appreciation. But also, the idea that a diamond is the best way to symbolize your love for your sister or your friend or any other important relationship in your life is probably coming from the people who want to sell you diamonds. “I mean, it’s a business,” Zimnisky said. “It’s not about a tradition; it’s not about anything other than doing what they need to do to make the most money.”

Consumers have changed their mindset. Friendships have become something to celebrate, and diamond purchasers don’t always need to be men buying for their future wife. But then again, no one ever needs to buy a diamond at all. Whatever society’s priorities are, whether it’s friendship or romantic love or pride in self-accomplishment, marketers will try to attach products to those feelings. The push to remind women that they can buy diamonds on their own, for themselves or for other women in their life, is just the latest strategy from an industry that has long tried to convince the public that its product is more valuable than it really is. So buy your friend a diamond if you want. But the friendship is the rare and beautiful thing, not the diamond.