In 1947, a copywriter named Frances Gerety wrote four words that rewired how the entire Western world thinks about love: "A Diamond Is Forever."
She wrote it late at night, half-asleep, and almost didn't include it. De Beers almost didn't use it. It won Advertising Age's slogan of the century.
Before that campaign, diamond engagement rings were a niche luxury. Sales were declining. De Beers hired the advertising firm N.W. Ayer to solve the problem - not by selling diamonds, but by selling an idea. The idea: that a man's love could be measured in carats. That the size of the ring reflects the depth of feeling. That anything less is settling.
It worked. In the years after the campaign, diamond engagement rings moved from aspirational luxury toward cultural expectation across North America. Later campaigns exported the same emotional logic to the UK, Europe, and Japan, where diamond engagement rings went from unusual to mainstream within a generation.
The genius wasn't the product. It was the emotional framework they built around it. They didn't say "buy diamonds." They said "diamonds are timeless, and so is your love - one reflects the other."
The two-months-salary rule? Also invented by De Beers. A guideline quietly introduced in the 1980s to reset expectations upward.
None of this makes a diamond ring less meaningful. What you feel when you give it is real. What it represents to the person receiving it is real. But it's worth knowing that the tradition you're honouring was engineered by a marketing team - and it was so well-crafted that it became indistinguishable from culture itself.
That's either impressive or unsettling. Possibly both.
