How Taylor Swift’s Engagement Ring Is Changing the Diamond Game

In the antique-jewelry scene, the reveal was the equivalent of a Super Bowl victory. “I think I cried,” Marion Fasel, the author of “The History of Diamond Engagement Rings,” told me. “My vintage-jewelry world was so excited—they lost their minds.” Historically, old-mine-cut diamonds have been a niche obsession. Compared with the ubiquitous round-brilliant cut of today (think: diamond emoji), old-miners tend to have large, chunky facets and taller profiles, with thick crowns and long pavilions. Fasel was able to classify Swift’s ring as an old-miner because of the small, dark circle, or “open culet,” visible at the center—unlike many popular diamond shapes today, which taper to a point, old-miners have flatter bottoms.

At the time these stones were fashioned, light was often provided by candlelight or gas lamps and lapidaries, or gem cutters, did everything by hand, meaning that their work was not always perfectly symmetrical. Compared with modern cuts, which are often described as “sharp,” “intense,” and “quick” for the way that they refract white, or “brilliant” light, old-miners manifest a different kind of romantic fantasy, with a warm glow that calls to mind the sepia of an old Hollywood movie. “I just watch it like it’s a TV,” Swift said, of her ring.

At the Sim Gems USA showroom, Mehta gestured at a table that had been laid out with dozens of shimmering, round, brilliant-cut diamonds worth millions of dollars. “These are regular,” he said, shrugging. “People know what this is. But after what happened”—he glanced at Lubeck—“people are looking for something different.”

The natural-diamond industry, which, with the advent of lab-grown gems, has been experiencing a prolonged and costly identity crisis, was thrilled by the ring, too. “What a diamond!” Al Cook, the beleaguered C.E.O. of De Beers Group, wrote in a LinkedIn post, which restrained itself to only one awkwardly interjected Swift lyric. (“Bejeweled!”) Cook became C.E.O. in 2023, not long before the business’s majority shareholder announced its intention to divest from the company. Later that year, De Beers cut prices across the board by more than ten per cent—a historically large reduction, according to Bloomberg. “Taylor’s ring might be extraordinary in its size and rarity,” Cook wrote. “But it is a reminder that every natural diamond is a unique and ancient treasure from the Earth.”

De Beers was formed in the late nineteenth century, when its reviled founder, Cecil Rhodes, consolidated the operations of a network of mines in South Africa, securing near-total control of the market there. Since then, the history of diamonds has essentially been a history of De Beers’s marketing campaigns. The company spent the better part of the twentieth century convincing Americans that the most valuable diamonds were heavy, brilliant, colorless, and free from internal flaws or external blemishes. But achieving this sort of purity is precisely what lab-grown diamonds do best.

In 2016, according to one industry analyst, a high-quality one-and-a-half-carat lab-grown diamond could sell for about ten thousand dollars—seventeen per cent less than the cost of a similar-quality natural diamond. Today, amid a glut of competition from labs in China and India, the price difference can be as high as ninety per cent. At Walmart, which started selling diamonds in 2022, a one-carat, lab-grown, round-cut solitaire engagement ring might retail for a hundred and fifty dollars. The natural-diamond industry seems to be betting that this price collapse will deter customers who want their rings to cost a meaningful amount of money. (There is still a prevailing belief that a diamond ring ought to cost a man two months of his salary—an idea that came from an old De Beers ad campaign which has taken on a life of its own since.)

But Americans love a good deal. A recent survey by the wedding-planning website the Knot found that more than half the engagement rings purchased in the U.S. featured lab-grown diamonds, a forty-per-cent increase from 2019. Last year, when the Natural Diamond Council put up fly posters in midtown Manhattan that featured blown-up photos of identical-looking diamonds labelled natural—“the OG”—and lab-grown—“the dupe”—it seemed only to underscore that we live in a society in which even wealthy women are buying Wirkins. Swift’s engagement ring might have set Kelce back something like a million dollars. But at Vrai, a lab-grown brand favored by Swift, fans can buy their own elongated, cushion-cut diamond for a thousand dollars or so.