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

In the antique jewelry industry, this discovery was the equivalent of winning the Super Bowl. “I think I cried,” Marion Fasel, author of “History of Diamond Engagement Rings“, he told me. “My vintage jewelry world was so excited it went crazy.” Historically, old mine cut diamonds were a niche obsession. Compared to the ubiquitous cut of round diamonds today (think: diamond emojis), old miners tended to have large, chunky facets and taller profiles, with thick crowns and long pavilions. Fasel was able to classify the Swift ring as an old miner's ring because of the small dark circle or “open culet” visible in the center—unlike many popular diamond shapes today, which taper to a point, old miners have a flatter bottom.

At the time these stones were cut, lighting was often provided by candles or gas lamps, and lapidaries or gem cutters did everything by hand, meaning their work was not always perfectly symmetrical. Compared to modern cuts, which are often described as “sharp,” “intense,” and “fast” because of the way they refract white or “brilliant” light, Old Miners embody a different kind of romantic fantasy with a warm glow reminiscent of the sepia of an old Hollywood movie. “I just watch it like it's TV,” Swift said of her ring.

In the Sim Gems USA showroom, Mehta pointed to a table covered with dozens of sparkling round brilliant-cut diamonds worth millions of dollars. “It’s common,” he said with a shrug. “People know what it is. But after what happened,” he looked at Lubeck, “people are looking for something else.”

The natural diamond industry, which has been facing a long and costly identity crisis since the advent of lab-grown gems, was also excited about the ring. “What a diamond!” Al Cook, the embattled CEO of De Beers Group, wrote in a LinkedIn post that contained just one awkwardly inserted Swift text. (“Bejeweled!”) Cook became CEO in 2023, shortly before the company's majority shareholder announced his intention to exit the company. Later that year, De Beers cut prices across the board by more than ten percent—a historically large reduction, according to Bloomberg. “Taylor's ring may be unusual in size and rarity,” Cook wrote. “But it is a reminder that every natural diamond is a unique and ancient treasure of the Earth.”

De Beers was founded in the late nineteenth century when its reviled founder, Cecil Rhodes, consolidated the operations of a chain of mines in South Africa, securing near-total control of that country's market. Since then, the history of diamonds has essentially become the history of De Beers marketing campaigns. The company spent much of the twentieth century convincing Americans that the most valuable diamonds were heavy, lustrous, colorless and free of internal and external defects. But achieving such purity is exactly what lab-grown diamonds do best.

According to one industry analyst, in 2016, a high-quality one-and-a-half-carat lab-grown diamond could sell for about ten thousand dollars—seventeen percent less than the cost of a natural diamond of similar quality. Today, against the backdrop of intense competition from laboratories in China and India, the price difference can reach ninety percent. At Walmart, which began selling diamonds in 2022, a one-carat lab-grown round solitaire engagement ring can cost one hundred and fifty dollars. The natural diamond industry appears to be betting that this price collapse will drive away customers who want their rings to cost a significant amount of money. (The prevailing belief is still that a diamond ring should cost a man two months' salary, an idea born out of an old De Beers advertising campaign that has since taken on a life of its own.)

But Americans love a lot. A recent survey by wedding planning website The Knot found that more than half of the engagement rings purchased in the U.S. feature lab-grown diamonds, up 40 percent from 2019. a society in which even rich women buy Virkins. Swift's engagement ring could cost Kelsey about a million dollars. But at Vrai, Swift's lab-grown brand of choice, fans can buy their own extra-long cushion-cut diamond for about a thousand dollars.