My then-gf (now wife) and I watched a movie together about an African man whose village got raided, him put into slavery to search for diamonds and his son becoming a child soldier by the same people and their struggles to get free, and finally pawn off a pink diamond to one of the largest diamond companies in London. At the end of it, she finally came to realise that the diamond trade was really quite shitty. And we had a long discussion about the whole thing, as well as the growth of the synthetic diamonds industry and how they’re much better on the supposed 4C properties as well as on price.

Yet in the end she still wanted to get a ring from one of the big names because that’s what she grew up with and what she had always dreamt of since young.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My wife too. She’s a jewelery buyer for national retailer, she was well aware, even has visited mines and seen the conditions first hand, admitted how good lab grown was for ethics, etc. yet- her inner 5 year old princess wedding dream won her mind and she couldn’t envision anything other than a natural diamond for her wedding set.

Similar story here. Goes to show how effective brainwashing kids as an advertisement technique is.

So she wanted a real diamond because it's more expensive than a synthetic diamond.

The irony is that as synthetic diamonds become indistinguishable from naturals, the price will plummet over time.