Relax. Everyone Loves Diamonds

De Beers just released its 2019 Insight Report. As usual, the report is chock-full of information that will take some time to digest.

In the downstream section, the company's research shows why we need to flip how we look at the traditional diamond market. In fact, if there's one thing I took away from the report it's how much we need to throw out the word traditional to bring our thinking much more in line with reality.

Yes, there is still a strong diamond market for the long-established gifting opportunities of life - engagements, weddings, anniversaries, birthdays, and so on. But there have also been huge changes in who is doing the gifting and why, leading to the development of new reasons to give diamonds of which the industry should be aware.

Here are three nuggets from the report that stood out for me:

1. The gifting of diamonds by a partner before and during married life, often to mark a relationship milestone or to celebrate love, is a bigger market than commitment diamond jewelry.

2. Seventy-two percent of couples in a same-sex relationship view diamonds as important in celebrating "life's special events."

3. And they are also important for cohabiters, who are younger and have lower average household incomes than married couples. Even so, nearly half of the diamond jewelry cohabiting women acquire comes from a boyfriend/partner to express commitment.

As Diana Mitkov, senior insight and analytics manager at De Beers says in the report, "We should stop talking about bridal and talk instead about love and commitment."

Absolutely. Whatever your opinions on the world as we know it, it's changing faster than we could even imagine and sticking with the old notions of why and who give diamonds is a recipe for going backwards, not forwards.

A case in point from the report and perhaps one sign of the changing role of diamond jewelry - and the changing role of relationships and gender roles - is that brides are spending more of their own money on engagement rings. 

This isn't a sociology paper, so I will not delve into gender politics, but it seems that some women are no longer willing to be passive participants in the engagement process, despite what tradition expects. And De Beers has the figures to back that sentiment up.

Apparently, the proportion of brides-to-be buying their own engagement rings has increased and they spend more than men on this special piece of jewelry. 

The Insight Report reveals that the proportion of engagement rings financed by brides alone doubled between 2013 and 2017 to 14 percent of rings. While the average amount future grooms spend has come down 13 percent in that period, women's average spend has increased by 19 percent. 

To put that into a monetary amount, in 2017, brides who reported financing the ring themselves spent an average of $4,400, while grooms spent $3,300 on diamond engagement rings. 

This, says De Beers, emphasises that growing purchasing power among women is a

factor to be reckoned with in the commitment space and not only for self-purchasing diamond jewelry.

It's all a far cry from the "Right-Hand Ring" campaign days when women of the world were told to "Raise Your Right Hand." 

These days, it seems, they're raising their right hand, and their left hand.

Have a fabulous weekend!