Walmart is selling real diamond earrings for $12. Not a typo. Half-carat lab-grown diamonds, same carbon, graded by the same labs that grade the stone in your engagement ring. A jeweler can't tell them apart without a machine. And that $12 price tag is why the company that invented the engagement ring is about to get sold for scrap. De Beers ran the diamond trade for over a century. At its peak it controlled up to 90% of the world's rough supply, and when demand dipped it just locked diamonds in London vaults until prices came back. The slogan "A Diamond Is Forever" came from their ad agency in 1947. So did the rule that a ring should cost two months of your salary. Before that campaign, most American brides never got a diamond at all. The whole thing held for 80 years because there were only so many mines. Then China started growing diamonds in reactors, and there's no vault on earth big enough to hide a factory's output. Lab-grown wholesale prices have crashed roughly 96% from their peak, down to around $100 a carat. The Knot says 61% of engagement rings sold in 2025 had lab-grown center stones, up 239% since 2020. Even De Beers' own average selling price fell 32% in a year, to $105 a carat. So Anglo American, which owns De Beers, has written it down by $6.8 billion in two years and is now in talks to sell the whole thing for about $1 billion. This is a company that was valued over $18 billion in 2001 and $13 billion as recently as 2011. The stones coming out of the ground are the same as ever. The only scarce thing De Beers ever owned was the marketing, and marketing doesn't survive a $12 price tag at Walmart.