The Lure of the Engagement Ring

by Kelly Bare

According to a recent DeBeers study, four out of five brides receive diamond engagement rings. National Jeweler’s 2003 survey found that more than 40 percent of customers planned on buying a diamond one carat or larger. And the 2002 American Wedding Study (sponsored by Condé Nast) revealed that the average engagement ring costs $3,576: more than 16 percent of the average wedding budget.

No one can deny that we’re in a “wedding moment” right now—and an expensive one, to boot. But the “timeless” symbol that kicks off many a frenzy of chocolate fondue fountains and sushi stations and ice sculptures is actually a fairly new development in wedding-paraphernalia history.

“It’s hard to talk about exactly when these traditions started,” says Vicki Howard, adjunct professor of economics and women’s studies at Hartwick College. “Before the 1870s, diamonds were rare. People were wearing diamond engagement rings, but it wasn’t yet a mass thing. In the late 1800s, archival evidence and etiquette books suggest, a wide variety of engagement and wedding band styles, including different stones, were considered proper and desirable.”

Howard—whose upcoming book, The Business of Brides, details the rise of the wedding industry between the 1930s and 1950s—explains that the modern engagement ring’s story really begins with the discovery of vast quantities of diamonds in South Africa in the late 1860s. Diamond jewelry of all kinds became more and more popular in subsequent decades, but the industry fell on hard times in the 1930s, due to the Depression and its accompanying plummeting marriage rate. Soon the DeBeers diamond cartel had a surplus. “So they tried to promote the diamond engagement ring,” she says. DeBeers put New York’s N.W. Ayer advertising agency on the case, and in 1948 they hit pay dirt with the slogan “A Diamond Is Forever.” This hypnotic mantra has seduced America ever since, calling out from magazine and television ads, billboards, and bus shelters.

The Ayer agency came up with other ways to get couples’ attention. “They created short films about diamond engagement rings that they would show before feature films, at women’s clubs, churches, high schools, colleges,” Howard says. “It was kind of like you couldn’t escape it at that point. I have a 1955 statistic from the ad agency that said that between 75 and 85 percent of brides had diamond engagement rings.”

We’re still hooked. The diamond jones has become part of our cultural DNA. The number we buy, the amount of money we spend (or cause to be spent), and the size of the stones we favor all have increased steadily. It appears this is one accessory that will never go out of style. Jewelry and fashion expert Michael O’Connor will tell you, however, that brides-to-be definitely are affected by trends that mirror the emotional state of our culture.