And now back to shiny
things…
Because the story I am
writing involves the theft of a fabulous ruby necklace, I have been reading books
about jewelry. One very entertaining book, Stoned: Jewelry, Obsession, and How Desire Shapes the World by Aja Raden, focuses
on the role of gems in history.
I had heard the story
about DeBeers and “A diamond is forever” before—even before my daughter
informed me that Adam, who Ruins Everything, had ruined diamonds for her. Stoned provided more details: the
relative unimportance of diamonds early in our history, the difference that
improved cutting techniques made, and the way that DeBeers turned them into
something everyone wanted with clever advertising and choke-hold on the supply.
I hadn’t heard the story about Spain flooding Europe with New World
emeralds and drastically reducing the value of their own crown jewels. Nor had
I realized just how scarce, and prized, pearls once were.
The relationship between
scarcity and value is interesting. I
am sometimes amazed at the things we can create now—the materials, the
finishes, the new techniques. Beautiful things are widely available to us. In
fact, we fail to notice quite how many treasures we have because they are so very available and cheap.
For example, I have a
bracelet I like--stretchy, silvery, and glittering. Now, my mom isn’t into
jewelry. She has very little of it herself and no idea what is currently in
stores. She saw me wearing the bracelet and asked when I’d gotten it. From her
tone, I think she expected to hear that it was a special anniversary present.
Instead, I said, “Six dollars at Walmart.”
Someone more familiar with
today’s little girls would have recognized the style right away… but does that
make the bracelet any less beautiful?
It’s not a rhetorical
question. If you glance at it, think “cheap costume jewelry”, and look away…
certainly you appreciate it less. But I think
it’s fabulous. I hold my wrist up to the sun and watch it glitter. It isn’t
durable (I’ve broken the stretchy cord on several already) but it is pretty. And what attracted humans to
gems in the first place, if not their color, translucence, and sparkle?
And the bracelet is just
the beginning! Little girls’ wardrobes are full of sparkle and shine that I
would have begged for as a child, had it been available. (I did have shiny
black patent leather shoes…)
We also now have the ability to synthesize precious stones—rubies, sapphires, diamonds. They are no
less attractive for having been made in a lab, and there are many more of them
to go around. Apparently some fancy watches have a crystal (the glass front of
the watch) made of colorless synthetic sapphire! Imagine that—they can make a cylinder of synthetic sapphire wide enough
for a watch face, and then slice off pieces of it. What else can they do?
Well, they can make a
diamond ring. That is, a ring made of diamond, not a ring set with a diamond. It sounds like the
sort of thing you’d find in a Richie Rich comic book. I couldn’t find out
whether the diamond was natural or synthetic, but it seems like an odd and
perhaps even wasteful way to cut a large diamond, which makes me think maybe it
was synthetic.
It isn’t just gems that
are shiny and beautiful and increasingly available. When I was in my teens, I
bought postcards with what we would now call “holographic foil” on them at a
science museum. I paid at least four times what regular postcards cost—maybe it
was more than that. They were special! I taped them up on my wall for my
friends to admire. Now I throw away used
Christmas wrapping that would put those postcards to shame.
I could
give further examples, but you get the idea. We have shine, glitter, and vivid
colors enough for old-fashioned royalty.* Do we feel like royalty? Apparently
not—everyone else is just as shiny, glittery, and colorful as we are. And yet…wow.
Just…wow.
Till next
post.
*Admittedly,
we’re a little short on actual gold—never found that Philosopher’s Stone—but we
have a lot of really good gold-colored paint and foil.