Two Christmases ago in Amsterdam, my parents and I went to House of Gassan — a diamond house that runs tours through its old polishing works, walking you past the rough and the planning and the cutting, before delivering you into a room where they sell you, well, obviously, diamonds.
I tried some on. My hands — long fingers, should-have-been-a-pianist fingers — looked a-ma-zing.
My father said: do you want one? He says this often. He is extremely generous.
My mother said: nope, not this time. She runs the finances in that house, for reasons I don’t need to explain.
But the interesting thing is what went through my head. It was an easy, breezy thought, with total confidence and no supporting evidence whatsoever, given that I was and remain single:
No need. My future husband will obviously buy these for me.
Plural. I thought it in the plural.
In August, the chief executive of Swarovski told the Financial Times that cheaper lab-grown stones are “enabling self-purchase for women” — where before, he said, “in most instances it was a man offering a ring to a woman.” Now a woman comes into the store, tries something on, and says: you know what, let me get it for myself, I’ve earned this.
“We find that,” said Alexis Nasard, “very endearing and encouraging.”
Encouraging, sure. A woman buying herself something beautiful for a promotion, a birthday, a year she got through in one piece: I love it.
But endearing? Endearing is what you say about something slightly cute. A child insisting on carrying her own suitcase. A dog bringing you its toy. There’s real affection in it, and also a tiny asymmetry: I am observing you doing this adorable little thing.
So the undertone becomes: aw, look at women buying themselves their own diamonds now. Good for them.
And underneath the compliment there’s a script that seems to say:
Great news! You can now court yourselves. 💕
Um, no? But thank you.
But this is where it gets interesting.
That script assumes that women are making do. Second prize-ing. He didn’t do it for her, so she did it for herself. Buy your own flowers, buy your own diamond, and sing to it, Miley Cyrus style (gotta admit, it’s a catchy tune).
But making do requires a substitution, and as it turns out, there hasn’t been one.
Look at what — and, importantly, where — women let themselves buy diamonds.
Cocktail rings, tennis bracelets, studs. Everything except the left hand.
And because nobody spends this kind of money anymore without asking the internet first, there is a record, in their own words, of women doing exactly this.
One woman, describing the ring she had just bought herself:
“This ring is a gift for me from me; it is NOT my engagement ring. (I hope that it won’t repel potential suitors.)”
She wanted the ring. She was worried it might accidentally say she didn’t want the other ring.
A divorced woman in her fifties, considering a five-stone ring for her right hand, put the same fear to the forum more bluntly: “Will it send a message that I wish I were married and make me look pathetic?”
Another woman commissioned her own. She chose it, she paid for it, but:
“I did ask for my husband’s input on budget, and showed him the final drawings before the ring was made. I just wanted to feel like he was part of the process.”
Which is a very particular sentence.
She wanted to buy herself the diamond. She also wanted some trace of him inside the buying of it.
And then there is the woman selling a 1.91-carat lab-grown oval she had bought herself — roughly ten thousand dollars in, listed for three and a half.
“I’m selling because it’s too nice. Seriously. It completely outshines my e-ring and it’s mKing me feel so guilty as I bought it for myself it’s not my e-ring!”
Too nice.
Not too big. Not impractical. Not a financial mistake.
Too nice to wear next to the one she’d been given. The one that counts.
And my favorite, perhaps, because it is so wonderfully unsubtle:
“I told myself if I didn’t get a proposal before the end of 2022 that I’d buy myself something sparkly.”
That is not substitution.
That is a deadline.
She can buy the sparkly thing whenever she likes. What she cannot buy is someone deciding to give it to her.
And women seem perfectly capable of holding both thoughts at once.
I can buy my own diamonds.
And:
I still want that one from you.
Which means my thing — the thing I assumed was my own private inconsistency, the woman who buys herself the trip and the dinner and a spa costing an amount I will not be typing here, and still wants the diamond given — is apparently not my own private inconsistency at all.
It’s a fairly common position. We just seem to hold it apologetically.
I hope it won’t repel potential suitors.
Will I look pathetic?
Nobody says it without flinching first.
So let me say it without flinching.
When it comes to diamonds, I want to be wanted.
Not because I can’t buy one. I obviously can.
But because, if I’m being honest, what I want is never just the diamond.
It’s the someone choosing it for me. Someone making a wildly unnecessary gesture and meaning me by it. Someone wanting to give me something excessive and beautiful because I matter to them.
You can buy the thing.
You cannot buy that.
Marcel Mauss, the French anthropologist who wrote The Gift a little over a hundred years ago, argued that gifts are never merely objects. Something of the giver remains attached to them; the object carries a relationship with it.
Which sounds very academic until you meet a woman prepared to lose two-thirds of what she paid for a perfectly good diamond because the one she bought herself had somehow become too nice beside the one she had been given.
The stones were both hers.
One did it for her, the other did not.
Which is, I now realize, exactly why Old Mine diamonds do it for me.
I said on Instagram a few weeks ago that I love them for being hand-cut and flawed, made before anyone had decided what “correct” was.
Here’s a second thing I love:
You cannot really order one to spec.
A modern brilliant can be filtered down — carat, color, clarity, cut — until somebody finds you something remarkably close to the brief. That is what the modern diamond market is built to do.
An Old Mine is different. Because they are antique stones, cut by hand before modern technology standardized diamond shapes and proportions, no two are quite alike. You can say what you’re hoping for. You can ask for a size, a shape, a certain warmth.
But then somebody has to go looking.
What turns up will almost certainly be a little wrong. A little smaller. A little warmer. Older than expected. Wonkier. More beautiful in some way you had not thought of.
Nobody goes through that kind of effort to find a stone for a woman he’s just fond of.
You do that when you’re falling into a damn beautiful rabbit hole of a woman’s universe, and boy oh boy, do you wanna keep on falling.
In other words, when you want the hell out of her.
Which is also, I suspect, the answer to the obvious objection — that I only want the diamond given because a century of effective marketing trained me to read a man’s spending as proof of love.
Maybe. But then look at what I am actually asking for.
Not the biggest one. Not the flawless one. Maybe not even the most expensive one — I said on Instagram that if somebody handed me a diamond as an investment, I would sell it without blinking.
What I want is special. A unique, slightly wonky stone that somebody had to go hunting for.
No campaign in history has tried to sell me that. (Well, maybe except National Geographic, with the penguins.)
And then look at where the diamond market has gone in the other direction.
The modern brilliant already gave us precision: choose the specs, find the match.
Lab-grown takes that promise further. More size. More availability. More predictability. Less money. Less waiting. And increasingly, the person doing the choosing and the buying can simply be you.
The promise is almost the exact opposite of the Old Mine one:
You don’t have to wait for anybody, or for anything special to turn up.
Which in a way, I must say, is liberating. But it is not the same feeling. What made the Old Mine worth having was the evidence attached to it — that somebody wanted you enough to spend months looking for something that might not exist.
The thing whose whole value was that it couldn’t be manufactured. Manufactured.
And I suppose that’s what I’ve been circling this whole time.
Being wanted isn’t only about being desired — desire is generic, anyone can generate it, it costs nothing. Being truly wanted is being known, accurately enough that somebody can choose an object and be right about you.
It’s what I want from a stone. And it turns out to be what I want from a man.
And here’s perhaps the most surprising part, and my favorite one.
The ritual — a man going out, choosing a diamond, and asking — isn’t dying. But (and I actually love this but) the road toward it is becoming less traveled. More intentional. And not only because men stopped walking it. Among American twelfth-graders asked whether they want to get married someday, boys moved two points between 1993 and 2023. Girls fell twenty-two, and crossed below them.
And it isn’t only the seventeen-year-olds. Ask me, or most women I know in their thirties, and you get that same word back: special. Freaking special, if we’re being precise about it. Decent enough no longer settles the question.
Which is not, by the way, one gender complaining about the other. Fewer and fewer of us are willing to take the one that merely meets spec. Most of us — dare I say all of us — are holding out for the one that couldn’t have been ordered.
When the road is uncommon, arriving on it means something it could never mean when everybody took it automatically. Nobody ends up there by drift. If a man ever does go looking, for a long time, with me in mind — and if I say yes — we’ll both know exactly why we’re standing there, because neither of us needed to be.
Now that I find endearing. And encouraging.
I hope he’s out there looking.