I’ve pre­vi­ously men­tioned, in pass­ing, how the con­cept of the dia­mond wed­ding ring was man­u­fac­tured. I’ve now been reminded of this upon redis­cov­er­ing Edward Jay Epstein’s com­pre­hen­sive 1982 arti­cle in The Atlantic chart­ing the story of how De Beers cre­ated the entire mar­ket for dia­monds through supply/demand manip­u­la­tion and PR.

De Beers proved to be the most suc­cess­ful car­tel arrange­ment in the annals of mod­ern com­merce. While other com­modi­ties, such as gold, sil­ver, cop­per, rub­ber, and grains, fluc­tu­ated wildly in response to eco­nomic con­di­tions, dia­monds have con­tin­ued, with few excep­tions, to advance upward in price every year since the Depres­sion. Indeed, the car­tel seemed so superbly in con­trol of prices — and unas­sail­able — that, in the late 1970s, even spec­u­la­tors began buy­ing dia­monds as a guard against the vagaries of infla­tion and recession.

The arti­cle has numer­ous quotes from the strat­egy doc­u­ments of the adver­tis­ing agen­cies involved in the PR: N. W. Ayer and J. Wal­ter Thomp­son–the for­mer class­ing their assign­ment as “a prob­lem in mass psychology”.

It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing phe­nom­e­non set to become even more inter­est­ing now that the tech­nol­ogy to mass pro­duce flaw­less dia­monds in a lab­o­ra­tory is becom­ing afford­able: Wired looks at the rise of the man­u­fac­tured dia­mond.