Diamond heist
It’s still a mystery to me how I ended up running the fine jewelry and watch unit of a major luxury house, in what seems like a lifetime ago. I was living in Hong Kong then, heavily pregnant with my second child, and not necessarily itching to go back to full-time employment after many years. No doubt the solid recommendation provided by someone well-known in the sector (full disclosure: she’s my best friend) tipped the balance in my favor a bit.
We all know, however, that at that level, a recommendation might get one stiletto-shod foot in the door; the interviews are but one of the hurdles to get past. There was past performance, experience, and to a significant extent, a measure of confidence in my abilities to consider—on my part as well as theirs.
How much confidence I projected at those interviews with my distended belly and plump char sui bao face, I can only imagine. But as fate would have it, I was offered the position the night before I went into the hospital, and showed up for my first day at work two months later, still swollen from nursing my newborn daughter.
While it wasn’t my first time working in the high jewelry industry, I’d never run an entire business unit; my corporate experience up until then was largely in PR, communications, and marketing.
In my previous job with another fine jewelry and watch brand, the numbers I had to work with were advertising budgets, column inches, catering costs, and guest attendances. Now, I had to do jewelry buys twice a year in Paris, set sales targets, compute sell-throughs, factor in merchandising costs and ad spend—in short, everything to do with growing a business, and a luxury business at that.
Tipping the scales
At such lofty heights, one understands instinctively that what one is selling is aspiration, illusion, heritage, timelessness, artistry, and exclusivity. It is what the luxury industry is built on, even if, in recent years, quality has been sacrificed for the sake of higher profit margins.
And with high jewelry, predicated around the romance, mystery, and scarcity of precious gems and metals, one could be said to breathe in a more rarified air, at least within the plush—and hushed—confines of the salon.
But that illusion is being shattered by lab-grown diamonds—artificial gems ostensibly cultivated to democratize the market. Such was the hype around diamonds, thanks to a massively successful decades-long marketing campaign by DeBeers, the behemoths of the diamond trade, that memorably pronounced that “a diamond is forever.” That women expected diamonds as proof of love, perhaps at times that could extend to mean ownership, while men were expected to spend double their salary, or some such formula, on a diamond engagement ring for their fiancées.
DeBeers shrewdly controlled supply by limiting sales of rough diamonds fresh from the mines—called “sights”—according to a strict calendar open only to approved “sightholders” who would then cut, polish, and bring these diamonds to market. Even as other players came into the scene, such as Russians, Canadians, and the odd Zimbabwean selling rough diamonds in plastic bags on the streets of Johannesburg, DeBeers remained the biggest diamond company in the world.
And then DeBeers forayed into fine jewelry retail, with its inaugural boutique on London’s Bond Street. Soon after, it began branding Zimbabwean and Congolese diamonds under the Forevermark label, minutely etched into the stone, to distinguish its offerings from what was known as blood, or conflict diamonds—asserting theirs were ethically and sustainably mined.
Are diamonds really forever?
But what happens to a diamond’s desirability when it can be easily manufactured in a lab in commercial quantities and no one can tell the difference?
Is the meaning of “forever” irrevocably altered when the myth of scarcity is revealed to be a cynical sales strategy? What role does ethics play when lab-grown diamonds are not extracted from a mine by young children, or indeed even adults who work deep into the bowels of the earth, their bodies scanned at the end of the workday to ensure that no gems were smuggled, ingested, or inserted into various crevices?
Does a diamond engagement ring still carry the same meaning when you can get a stone for a fraction of the price? It is just carbon formed over millions of years, after all.
While I enjoyed my former career working in some of the most fabled luxury houses—and I acknowledge my role in that ecosystem of hype, I confess an ambivalence towards jewelry, especially the sparkling, shimmering, splendid variety. Of course, I understand its significance as tokens of love and affection; many pieces of jewelry are imbued with such lore and magic, the stories of families and entanglements that a lab-grown diamond would never be able to replicate.
The most poignant lines I recall ever reading about diamonds come from a novel by the Spanish author Rosa Montero. “The Ridiculous Idea of Never Seeing You Again” is a meditation on grief by way of an examination of the Nobel Prize-winning Polish chemist and physicist Marie Curie’s life: “Aplastamos carbones con las manos desnudas,” she writes, “y a veces conseguimos que parezcan diamantes.”
“We smash carbons with our bare hands, and sometimes, we arrive at something that resembles diamonds.”
