I'm genuinely curious why you bought a diamond at all then? Isn't the diamond itself a marketing gimmick, or do you and your wife honestly find them more beautiful than other stones?

It won’t wear. That’s what was the cool part for me. A diamond won’t scratch and if set in a platinum band, the band essentially won’t tarnish. It’s as close to a “forever” item as one can reasonably get. Oooo and very shiny.

>> When I shopped for an engagement ring

> I'm genuinely curious why you bought a diamond

You do know that engagement rings don't have to be diamond, right? Mark Zuckerburg bought his wife a $25,000 ruby ring: https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/pic-mark-zuck...

I bought Moissanite. It was a reasonable price, the ring is gorgeous, my wife loves it, and it helps with family / cultural pressure around diamonds.

(It also leads to interesting situations with people who don't understand Moissanite. My wife used to get a lot of "what does your husband dooo???" questions before people understood the changes in the jewelry market.)

On FM radio, Mervis Diamond Importers talks about how they offer both natural and lab-grown, but they make sure to mention that natural will "increase in value over time" (I assume because limited quantity + as lab becomes more common, natural becomes rarer). As cynical as I am, I'm sure they'd justify a high price for a natural diamond on those grounds, but also justify a similar high price for lab-growns because they're so environmentally conscious or something.

they will not increase over time, and there is a ton of market proof to show that, going back to the 1980s.

e.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-yo... (spoiler: it's harder to do than you'd think, and you won't get anything near what you pay -- and that in the 80s, before synthetic diamonds pushed the market down further)

Figures they were lying through their teeth.