Diamonds, like most material things, are not forever. They can chip, shatter, burn and fade. But the slogan that declared them eternal — the work of a never-married female copywriter hired by the diamond giant De Beers — managed to elevate the perception of the rather common gem to the apex of longevity and symbolic value.
Nearly half a century after its founding in southern Africa by Cecil Rhodes in 1888, De Beers found itself challenged by the Great Depression. Demand for luxury goods disappeared in Europe in the 1930s. In Nazi Germany, mass emigration — often urgent — created a thriving black market in diamonds, a valuable and mobile asset.
By the end of the decade, the American market looked increasingly attractive. State laws allowing women to sue men for breaking engagements were repealed throughout the ’30s, and expensive engagement rings gained greater currency. Jewelry substituted for a monetary settlement, even if it continued, albeit more discreetly, to emphasize that a woman’s marital status and virginity had monetary value which declined if she was rejected, especially if she had sex during the engagement, as many women did. The ring was also a way for men to secure wives, just as dowries once secured husbands. (Beyonce’s hit song “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” attests to the endurance of this view.)
To break into the U.S. market, in 1938 De Beers hired N.W. Ayer & Son, the oldest advertising agency in the U.S. Ayer already represented AT&T and the U.S. Army, among other large concerns. As journalist Edward Jay Epstein explains in his 1982 book, “The Rise and Fall of Diamonds,” Ayer’s task was to reinforce and popularize the link between the diamond and the marriage proposal — and all that theoretically accompanies it, like eternal love and fidelity. Industrial users aside, diamonds were an unusual sell. They were no rarer than most other gems, and there was no brand name or particular retailer, though De Beers was certainly the supplier. Furthermore, the buyer was almost never the wearer; men bought the vast majority of diamonds for women.
Ayer’s campaigns over the next 30 years aimed to convince men that buying diamonds was a rite of passage, a commitment to one of life’s major decisions and a sign of worldly success, all of which was measured in carats. The ad agency simultaneously sought to shape female preferences for larger stones. Most importantly, it asked fashion designers, society girls and royals to wear diamonds.
During World War II, De Beers suffered some controversy when its head, Ernest Oppenheimer, a German-born Jew, was accused of refusing diamonds to the U.S. war effort. Yet Ayer helped convince American women that buying jewelry aided the Allied cause by funding industrial mining.
By 1948, the ad agency decided that images of glittering gems were no longer enough. It needed a tagline. So Ayer turned to Mary Frances Gerety, a high school graduate who had been on the job four years. She was one of the agency’s few female copywriters, and that spring, she struggled to distill the symbolic meaning of the gemstone into a single sentence. As Tom Zoellner describes it in “The Heartless Stone,” his 2006 book exploring the global diamond empire, the words finally came to Gerety one night after working almost until dawn. She asked a higher power to send her a line, and before falling asleep, she scribbled a few ideas on a pad and left it on her nightstand. When she woke up and reread what she’d written, she knew she had it: “A Diamond is Forever.”
As Gerety later recalled, no one at Ayer greeted the slogan with particular enthusiasm, though the agency did use it immediately. But within just a few years, those words became the official motto of De Beers and remain so today (barring a brief switch in the 1970s to “A Diamond Is for Now”). De Beers translated the slogan, apparently with little diminishment of its spell, into more than two dozen languages. U.S. sales rocketed, propelled by the postwar boom in marriage and consumerism. And diamonds got bigger as De Beers began suggesting in ads directed at American men that spending two months’ salary on a ring made perfect sense. The company inculcated buyers that “forever” also meant diamonds should not be resold, gutting the secondary market that would have cut into profits.
By the 1950s, the diamond myth had galloped into popular culture with less of a direct push from advertising. In 1953’s “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” Marilyn Monroe, in pink satin gown, dripping with diamonds, compared the stones favorably to kisses, lawyers, bull markets and mankind in general, since, unlike diamonds, “we all lose our charms in the end.” Grace Kelly and Cary Grant, epitomes of elegance, seduced each other with and were seduced by diamonds in 1955’s “To Catch a Thief.” A James Bond book the next year adapted Gerety’s slogan for a title — “Diamonds Are Forever” — and had the famously commitment-phobic 007 falling in something like love with beautiful, damaged smuggler Tiffany Case (yes, named after that Tiffany). After Monroe, Kelly, Grant and Bond got through with them, diamonds were no longer just symbols of romantic love, church weddings and class status — they had a power that demanded possession.
By the time Gerety passed away in 1999, diamonds had acquired a genuine dark side. They funded wars across Africa and De Beers was tainted by association. In 2003, the diamond industry created the Kimberley Process, an international certification scheme. While Kimberley seemed for a time to ensure that brides around the world didn’t have blood on their ring fingers, it was discredited last year by the leading nongovernmental organization fighting resource-related conflict, Global Witness. This criticism constitutes a major blow, as does Kimberley’s recent certification of diamonds from Zimbabwe.
Pop culture seems to be catching on to the problems with diamonds, notably in the 2006 movie “Blood Diamond” starring Leonardo DiCaprio. But for every critique, there were more celebrations of the diamond, more loaned bling around starlets’ necks, more songs about ice, and more wedding announcements that mentioned carat size. Diamonds may not be forever, but their image and the slogan that created it — no matter economic lows, supply spikes or bloody controversies — still endure.
Swati Pandey is a writer in Los Angeles.