Diamonds become a best friend to more women

Purists may despise the invention of laboratory-grown diamonds, saying perhaps that what makes diamonds precious (or costly) is the billion years they take to form.

You know: dinosaur remains -- story and all.

Slowly but surely, simple logic seems to have started overriding the illusion of the value of mined diamonds, forged largely by the major mining firm De Beers, which crafted the "A diamond is forever" slogan.

The success of De Beers' campaign, which uses a celebrity couple marking their engagement with a diamond ring on the woman's left hand, has turned diamonds into a symbol of eternal love, thus spurring sales of the gem, especially in the United States and Japan.

The growing demand has caused diamond prices to skyrocket, making them more expensive than sapphires and rubies, which are a 1,000 times rarer than diamonds.

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