Perfection, like in Diamonds, Comes at a Steep Price.

I was watching the Sociology Channel History Channel the other night, and after my guilty pleasure American Pickers ended, this new show called, God, Guns & Automobiles followed.  It, like most highly scripted reality television shows, has its moments; but it won't be on my watch list because the main character, Mark Muller, is way too intense; and the premise of a show about selling cars is uh, too inglorious to be interesting.

At one point Mr. Muller was sitting at the dinner table, blaring to his three adult kids that he expects "perfection" from everything they do.  He tells them that "anyone who doesn't win first place is a loser." Yeah, well good luck with the rebellion that type attitude is going to instill in your kids.

If you're close to perfect you just
might be sainted.  

Anyway, perfection is a nice dream. Jesus was good at it. Gandhi, Buddha, Thomas Aquinas, MLK, and Mr. Rodgers all did pretty good. The rest of history's characters? Not so much. We humans are flawed. We like partially broken characters. We like damaged goods. As they say on American Pickers, we like our "stuff with a little patina on it."

This Mark guy's expectations of perfection reminded me of ring shopping.

Yeah, keep following, I'll explain.

My wife and I just celebrated our ten year anniversary, but it seems like only yesterday I was shopping for a ring.  I probably spent seventy five hours looking for the perfect ring.

I don't know a ton about women now, and knew even less then, but I did know that the wedding and the ring were pretty important--even when women say things like, "It doesn't have to be expensive, I just want it to be from the heart."

Women say things like that, and when we (men) don't meet their expectations, they compartmentalize our failures it into a part of their frontal lobe called, "future argument starters / antagonisms."

Anyway, I learned right away that I don't like diamonds.  This was right before the whole blood diamond debacle, yet it wasn't the dirty way diamonds are obtained that made me sour on that stone.  It was that there are so many levels of "perfection" when it comes to diamonds.

Most people know about the four C's of diamonds: color, clarity, cut, carat, (some have added conflict-free or certification as a fifth element) but most people just trust the salesman will steer them in the right direction when it comes to actually purchasing the ring.  If you know me at all from my blog, you know I'm cheap, and I don't like salespeople, (beings that I was one) because most are more concerned with their own commission than actually helping the customer find the right item. Plus with engagement rings, there's the whole DeBeers myth/adage of spending "two months salary" on the ring.  Yeah, not going to happen.

So I researched the heck out of diamonds. I found websites where dealers (and pretending laypersons) can buy wholesale stones; I found people selling diamonds taken from dead people's jewelry; I found dealers telling me that their stones had patented "sparkle patterns;" but the most annoying aspect of buying diamonds is that every jeweler is trying to sell "perfection."

Recently sold at auction for 23 million dollars.
I guess my bid for 24 million was invalidated?  

Most people know that a flawless diamond is clear.  Clear as in, the color is completely transparent. D color is the clearest color available, (whereas anything from n-z is yellowish in color) and almost no diamond is actually "flawless" in clarity.  Most diamonds aren't VVS1 or even VS1 (very, very slightly included or very slightly included).  99.8% of diamonds are flawed.  Chocolate diamonds (or LeVian) diamonds are really just heavily included (carbon or other minerals) that cloud the opacity of the stone. Before they were called chocolate, they were called industrial...and they were worth a whole lot less.  

Yet even with the near impossibility of the physical changes necessary to produce a perfect diamond, nearly every diamond retailer was trying to sell me "flawless" diamond rings.  Salespeople told that I needed D color, VVS1 clarity, on top of a huge carat stone for her to really like it...it was all so...greedy and materialistic.  Most of these quality rings were over $5000 dollars in the half carat range!

I eventually found a stone that wasn't perfect. You'd have to take an eye lube to see its flaws, and it isn't  as translucent as a bottle of Fiji water, but you'd have to be gemologist to see its actual issues. I got such a good deal on the stone, that the lady who sold it to me later got fired (in my defense, I repeatedly asked her if she was sure she was giving me the right deal). I took that slightly flawed diamond and had it set next to two sapphire trillions in a custom platinum ring that I designed and had made by a  Portland company called Tradeshop.com. It appraised for over ten times what I paid for it.

From Tradeshop.com's website.  Mine (or rather, my wife's) is the one on the right.
I added the sapphires to give it some pizzaz.  

Anyway, the point I'm making with this whole article is that nobody likes perfection. Perfection is hard to achieve, and often at an awful price.  Look at Lance Armstrong, Mel Gibson, Tiger Woods, Justin Bieber...it's tough to be at the top of your game. Maybe it's better to have a few unsightly issues than to be so rigid that you fissure due to perfection pressure.

We all have inclusions and colorful events that dirty us up a little. Maybe instead of looking at each other with eye lubes, trying desperately to find faults in each other, we could see the other ways we've adorned our lives. Its funny how I love variance, variety, and chaos in nature, yet expect humans to be some robotic form of perfection.  Thank you, God, Guns and Automobiles and diamonds, for making me see the ugliness of perfection, and finding the beauty of imperfection.