Everyone is "trying" to be less stupid. But selling my wife's diamond rings and buying cubic zirconia replicas at this point feels like a very stupid move even though I know I will net a bunch of money up front, I hear divorces are very expensive.

She's better off holding onto them because selling the won't actually net you "a bunch of money upfront," the resale market for diamond rings is incredibly poor.

Personally, I just didn't even bother buying an engagement ring (or wedding ring for that matter) because it's a "tradition" that means literally absolutely nothing to me. My husband doesn't care that I don't want jewelry and he prefers to not wear a wedding ring too. So I guess we are happy being "less stupid."

I used my (deceased) grandmother's engagement and wedding bands. I paid a few hundred bucks to get them repaired and cleaned up (they needed work after ~60 years of wear) and am very happy. They're about 1/4 the size of my wife's friends rocks, but they got a big rock and we got a lot closer to a down payment on a house.

> won't actually net you "a bunch of money upfront,"

Even if its a "charitable gift" on the seller's part, it saves one family from the suffering of buying a diamond.

> it's a "tradition" that means literally absolutely nothing to me.

Please preach to all the impressionable young women you know.

Sorry, I don't really "preach" (at least unsolicited) because people don't generally like being preached to and this is a topic that is incredibly emotional for some people for some reason.

The idea someone would worry replacing expensive trinkets with cheaper but similar looking trinkets might damage your marriage is extremely foreign to me! I can say that much at least!

Plus I don't know many impressionable young women these days because I'm approaching 40 and the majority of my friends are already married or no longer impressionable. :)

Ha, I thought we were the only ones. My wife and I have never worn our rings as it just seemed stupid and also I found it uncomfortable.

Our engagement ring was an heirloom. Additional gemstone jewelry has mostly been synthetic corundums, as I find the superior hardness and refractive index of diamond to be flawed by its 4 planes of perfect cleavage. And also, we wanted to poke the DeBeers cartel in its eye, by not giving them any of our money, ever. That was explicitly a concern about diamonds.

The synthesis process for the giant corundum boules used to make lenses and windows and such is pretty cool, too.

> "Synthetic diamonds, which can be produced in about 500 hours, share the same physical, chemical and optical characteristics as natural stones. But they are not nearly as valuable."

This "article" is an advertisement. This bullshit statement seals it. Value is demand driven. The only way for DeBeers to force mined diamonds to sell for more than grown diamonds is with relentless marketing to make people think there is a meaningful difference. And there is. Mined diamonds have historically resulted in a lot of human misery to bring the stones to market, whereas grown diamonds use some electricity and can come from any industrial park.

Same here, going on 10 years of marriage. We bought very cheap rings (< $100) basically because "Maybe we'll need these some day?" but so far haven't found a reason to wear them consistently.

I understand the value of an heirloom that symbolizes one's progenitor's marriage. Presumably, that is how the ring tradition originated, and why the durability of diamond is a significant selling point for that use case. But I don't think rings are well-suited to this purpose now and would rather leave some other trinket behind, well aware that the true legacy of the progenitors lives on through the posterity.

For our second anniversary I got my wife a Moissanite stone to replace the relatively poor (I1) diamond in her engagement ring. It's larger, much more flawless, more attractive all around, and cheaper. She's happier having a beautiful stone without me wasting a bunch of our money on a diamond. (Wouldn't have bought the diamond in the first place, but it came with the ring, which we both loved.)

Even though most jewelry and gems are seldom capital-efficient investments, moissanites likely retain more value as a percentage of retail purchase price than do diamonds. The main reason diamonds are expensive is demand, manufactured by shrewd marketing by De Beer’s since 1938. It could’ve been opals or rubies chosen to represent “what every bride should have.”

If it's any solace, I understand the secondhand market for diamonds to be quite weak.

Purposefully weak, to my understanding, to discourage a secondary market.

I remember an article years ago that went into detail about De Beers' manipulation of the market, and how change from "larger is better" to "clearer is better" happened just as a large mine outside of De Beers control opened that had quite a few large diamonds coming from it on a regular basis. That same article made some assertions about the secondary market being somewhat manipulated, IIRC, but this was close to a decade ago, so sourcing it might be hard, and I'm also unsure how accurate it was at this point. I think it was about how modern incarnation of idea of giving rings for marriage was also largely manipulated by De Beers.

I believe “Have you ever tried to sell a diamond” (1982) https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-yo... is what you’re thinking of - it’s a great article and feel ahead of its time in style/composition.

I saw that, and it could be, but I have a (possibly false) memory of some orange-ish toned world map which showed the locations of major diamond exporters and the times they started exporting. Or maybe it was blue-ish? I think I've reached the point in trying to remember this where any additional details I might think I remember are more likely just cross-contamination of memories. :/

Could it be this one from 2013? http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/45768546804/diamonds-are-b...

You can't put the horse back fully in the barn. I applaud you for trying to help some poor sap trapped in demands made by his fiancee's adveristing-brainwashed mind, but as you note, not "everyone" is "trying" to be less stupid -- your wife isn't letting go of her cartel (and possibly blood) diamond.

This issue is squarely in the women feminists' court, and (for the most part) they haven't taken up the cause to stop supporting this evil system that hurts both men and women.

I agree. You wouldn't net all that much, as diamonds give really poor RoI (unless you're in the >~ 3 ct range). And divorces are expensive. Plus, if you have a daughter and she can use your wife's wedding ring in her ceremony, you'll enjoy a goodwill factor big enough to cause emotional buffer overflow.

Diamonds have little resale value because of high retail markups, on top of previous De Beers monopoly price controls. If someone paid $3000 retail for a ring, good luck getting $700 for it.

If that is true, where can I buy second-hand diamonds for a fraction of the cost?

I've looked and I can't find any.

Hmm I cant seem to find any listings that include the colour or clarity so I assume those are all pretty low value diamonds anyway?

Pawn shop?

I don't know if they actually do this but I imagine if you sell your ring to a jeweler they can send it off for the band to be melted down the stone to be polished and re-set so the resulting ring is resold as "new."