Would you tell people you've hired the diamonds you're wearing?

Well, would you? This question occasionally comes up as we chat to our customers, and we hear a range of responses.

Just last week we asked a customer about this because his wife wore a diamond necklace with matching earrings (pictured, right) to a family wedding.

Now the retail cost of this jewellery would be around £12,500 – probably rather more from a fancy Bond Street boutique – and our customer told us that their fellow wedding guests admired the diamond jewellery and asked about it.

So did they tell those admirers that they didn’t own the jewellery, but that they had hired it for the evening?

No: they said that the jewellery was a ‘gift’ and left it at that.

Well we want people to enjoy wearing our diamonds on special occasions such as weddings, so whether they come clean about the fact that the jewellery is not theirs is – to us – quite immaterial.

For us it’s about the experience of the moment – the evening, the wedding, the party – rather than the commitment of ownership or the symbolism of a gift of love.

They say that ‘A diamond is forever’ – well, of course, it will last forever, but you’ll only get to wear that diamond for a tiny fraction of eternity, and frankly, an evening or a weekend is not so very different to a human lifetime when set against the geological, eternal, forever-ness of a diamond.

Anyway, it got us thinking…

When we first had the idea for Diamondthrills a couple of years ago, we did worry that renting diamond jewellery would be a bit infra dig [from the Latin infra dignitatem, literally - 'beneath (one's) dignity'].

And that therefore people might not want to do it, or if they did, to not talk about it, in much the same way that a chap might go to a smart black tie function but would be reluctant to admit that he had hired the dinner jacket he’s wearing.

But as we did more research and talked to more women, and especially as the gathering storm of the recession set in, it became clear that for many people the idea of hiring jewellery would be seen as smart and savvy, a clever way to accessorise with stunning diamond jewellery for a special occasion, but without the high cost and commitment of ownership.

So, far from clamming up and not wanting to talk about it, we found that lots of women would actually boast about how clever they were being by hiring diamond jewellery!

Well, that’s music to our ears, of course.

And for those – like our customer last week – who don’t want to broadcast the fact that those diamonds they’re wearing are on loan, well that’s fine too. Your secret is safe with us.

What about you? Would you tell people that the sparkling diamonds you’re wearing have been rented for the occasion?

Original post here.

www.diamondthrills.co.uk