the hot girls are hoarding cheap lab diamonds from Tiktok shop

First off, how did we get here? Because I thought diamonds were so expensive.

Now how come we're bidding on them on TikTok starting at a dollar? The idea that a diamond is supposed to be expensive, rare, and the only acceptable engagement stone was a marketing campaign.

In 1947, De Beers was seeing their sales fall after World War II, so they hired an advertising agency, which then came up with the tagline, A Diamond Is Forever.

Before this campaign, there was no unified engagement ring tradition.

It wasn't like it is now when someone gets engaged, we're like, oh, I want to see your ring, like, what did he get you, you know? When we think of engagements, we think engagement rings.

Back in the old days, rings featured all kinds of stones like colored gems, small diamonds, and pearls.

Eventually, the diamond did make its way to becoming the engagement stone because the tagline, a diamond is forever, was in the magazines and they even did celebrity endorsements So by the 50s, it was set in stone literally that the diamond is now the engagement stone.

And by the 70s and 80s, De Beers had gone a step further and started telling consumers how much to spend.

First, they were telling people it was one month's salary, but then obviously they want to make more money.

So they started telling the guys that actually it's two to three months salary.

I mean, in a sense, De Beers was kind of a girl's girl.

So way back when, people used to ask how much should an engagement ring cost and how many months of a man's salary should an engagement ring be.

And that's just not really the conversation now.

Nowadays, the

question really isn't how much should a ring cost, but rather

how big should a ring be?

What's the appropriate size for an engagement ring? I would say about 5 carats.

Now that lab-grown diamonds have entered the market, most carat sizes have become more accessible, so this old adage that a ring should be a multiplier of a man's monthly salary has been rendered quite obsolete.

Lab-grown diamonds are chemically, physically, and optically identical to mined diamonds.

They have the same carbon crystal structure, and really, the only way to tell them apart is with specialized equipment.

According to a diamond industry analyst, lab-grown diamond prices dropped roughly 85% between January 2015 and January 2025.

Today, a lab-grown stone typically sells at around 90% of the price of its mine equivalent.

Also, mine diamond prices are down 50% since 2022.

The Knott's 2026 real wedding study found that more than half of the engagement rings purchased last year featured a lab-grown center stone.

Even with diamond prices falling, the average total engagement ring price only dropped about 6% from 2023 to 2025, landing around $5,200.