Why do engagement rings have a diamond in the first place?

The diamond engagement ring is a 1940s invention dressed up as an ancient tradition, and the reason engagement rings have a diamond in the first place is less about love and more about a marketing campaign. The slogan that sold it was written in 1947 by a copywriter named Frances Gerety, and it was four words long. She wrote “A Diamond Is Forever” late one night at N.W. Ayer, the ad agency De Beers hired in 1938 to solve a very practical problem: diamonds were piling up in vaults, and the American public did not care.

Before that, engagement rings were whatever a man could afford. Colored stones. Birthstones. Plain gold bands. Sometimes no ring at all. A diamond was one option among several, and not the most popular one.

The earliest famous diamond engagement ring, the one every listicle cites, was given by Archduke Maximilian of Austria to Mary of Burgundy in 1477. What gets left out is that it didn’t start a trend. It was a single aristocratic gift, mostly forgotten until the marketing teams needed a pedigree.

Then came South Africa. The Kimberley mines opened in the 1870s and flooded the market with stones that had been genuinely scarce before. De Beers, founded by Cecil Rhodes in 1888, consolidated that supply and spent the next fifty years trying to convince ordinary people that a diamond was necessary equipment for marriage.

I have no problem with diamonds. I set them all week. What I dislike is the idea that a diamond is the only legitimate choice, because that idea was purchased, not earned.

The campaign that changed the math

Gerety’s slogan caught on because it tied a physical object to an abstraction. Diamond is hard, so the logic went, and marriage is permanent, so a diamond must mean permanence. That leap is not geology. It is poetry, paid for by the company that controlled the supply. The campaign put diamonds in Hollywood films, on movie stars, and in magazines aimed at women who had never asked for one.

The “two months’ salary” rule that still makes people panic in my consultation room appeared in De Beers advertising in the 1980s. Before that, the suggested spend was one month. Then it became two. The diamond didn’t change. The marketing budget did.

What engagement rings looked like before all that

Last spring a client named Priya brought in her grandmother’s engagement ring from 1928. A sapphire center, two diamond accents, 18k yellow gold. She was worried it didn’t look like a “real” engagement ring, because the center wasn’t a diamond. I pulled up photos of dozens of rings from the 1920s and 1930s. Almost none of them had diamond centers. Hers was normal. The diamond solitaire is the outlier.

What I tell clients

If you want a diamond, buy one. Not because history demands it, though. Buy it because you actually like the stone in front of you. Before 1940, women wore colored sapphires, rubies, emeralds, birthstones, or simple gold bands. Some wore no engagement ring at all. The idea that a proper proposal requires a diamond solitaire is newer than nylon stockings and less useful in daily life.

The diamond did not create the tradition. The slogan did. And a slogan can be ignored.