It’s a curious question, posed for me by an article that I read earlier this week.

I went and looked up the word mojo, just so we know exactly what we’re talking about.

Online dictionaries come up with various definitions, but they all revolve around ideas such as: voodoo, amulets & charms that cast magic spells, personal magnetism, magnetic qualities, supernatural powers, witchcraft… you get the idea.

So diamonds are (were?) capable of some sort of magic, of casting a spell, of bewitchment, of a magical magnetic attraction.

Have they really lost that power?

Where was this claim made? It came from a piece written by Tim Cohen in the South African business paper: BusinessDay. And that’s relevant because it tells us that this story was written from a (mostly) business perspective, and also from a South African perspective, where diamonds are often seen as a precious natural resource before they are seen as a luxury consumer product.

The background to the story is really all about the internal workings of the diamond industry: its secrecy and obliqueness, its mysterious internal markets and networks and methods of selling rough diamonds, its lack of transparency in pricing, its inefficiencies and its indebtedness, and so on.

Does this matter to ‘real people’ outside the diamond industry, to the people who might ultimately buy the diamonds?

Well, the diamond industry has always had these sorts of issues, and yet diamonds have remained magical for the women who are adorned by them, thanks in part to the marketing of De Beers and others, but also because of the long tradition of diamonds being used as gemstones for adornment – a tradition that goes back to antiquity, to the ancient Greeks and Romans, and further back to people in India thousands of years ago – long before De Beers came along.

A few years ago De Beers made a nice video which summed up what they called the ‘Myth and Magic’ of diamonds (they didn’t call it mojo); it’s on YouTube and we’ve embedded it for you here:

Is that magical mojo ebbing away?

As I said before, those industry issues have always been around, and in fact if anything the issues are now being addressed as new efforts are being made to make the industry more transparent and accountable.

But consumers are becoming more demanding, asking more questions, and people in the real world change their attitudes rather more deftly than large old-fashioned industries can change their practices.

And in recent years diamonds have faced new challenges: from ‘conflict diamonds’ over the last decade to Zimbabwe today, from diamond simulants to the ability to grow in laboratories synthetic stones with exactly the same properties as diamond, from bushmen in the Kalahari and ‘First Nations’ in the Arctic to demands for sustainable mining, and most recently to something of a backlash against conspicuous ‘bling’ consumption as a result of the financial crisis over the last year or so.

So the diamond industry is in flux, mostly out of sight of the people who buy the end product, but some of this stuff gets through and is capable of taking the shine off diamonds as a luxury product.

But “Diamonds lose their lustre” is a headline that I’ve only ever seen in a business context, and the diamond habit acquired by women over thousands of years is not going to evaporate overnight – in fact that habit is becoming more widespread and entrenched as it takes hold in new markets like China and the growing middle class in India.

At diamondthrills we’re certainly not complacent about the attraction of diamonds — our business depends upon it, and we do what our very limited resources will allow to shore up the myth and the magic of diamonds, including of course having responsible buying practices so that we know as much as possible about the journey that our diamonds have taken from the diamond mine to reach us and then you, our customers.

We take our beautiful diamondthrills jewellery on the road to wedding fairs and of course we deliver it to our customers all the time, and we love the reaction that we get when we produce one of our pieces out of the box: “Oooooh! Diamonds… Wow! how lovely!”

For our customers, that mojo is still there.