Engagement Rings — Sometimes the Value Isn’t in the Price

The Diamond Debate: everyone and their mother is talking about engagement and wedding bands these days. Some people are convinced that the diamond industry is corrupt and has been corrupt from the very beginning, while others value their diamond rings more than their firstborn child. The question is, what’s really driving this debate in the first place?

A story recently appeared on Fox Business proclaiming that “your wedding ring is a terrible investment,” first based on the argument that around half of all American marriages end in divorce, and then stating that “used” diamond rings only depreciate in value, and then really summing things up by attacking the diamond industry as a whole for deluding the American public for decades that diamonds are worth anything at all.

The author of this Fox Business article seems to have overlooked the multitude of news stories that pop up every day about people who go to great lengths to retrieve wedding rings. A Californian woman who thought she had lost her engagement ringin a house fire last week told her local news station that she and her family were overjoyed to find the ring in the rubble because of how “expensive and special” it is to her. Another woman from Maine has recently been profiled in her local news when she her engagement ring fell off her hand, dropping straight to the bottom of a lake. Her neighbor surprised her in an email the next day saying that he found her ring after scouring the lake bottom for 40 minutes in his scuba gear. And these two stories are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to people who have gone to great lengths to recover wedding and engagement rings.

So, if diamond rings are such a bad investment as the author of the Fox Business article claims, why are people so attached to and proud of their rings? And why does the public even want to read about these stories? Why are these stories worthy of being reported as “news”?

The answer is that diamond rings are significant because of what they represent.

Certainly the diamond debate will only continue, with advocates for each side bringing up new arguments. But one thing is important to remember throughout this debate: that in the end, the only person who needs to be concerned with a ring’s value is the person wearing it.