I can actually understand the no jewelry thing. The only jewelry I wore on a regular basis was my wedding ring when I was still married and, to this day, a medical alert bracelet.
The problem of jewelry is that it is expensive and purely decorative. Even a Rolex is functional, it tells time and date. An Apple watch is extremely functional. As long as you donât buy an Hermes double tour wristband for $489, it doesnât really qualify as jewelry.
Eh, this is more an opinion thing. Would it be jewelry if the whole apple watch was a ring or an earring or a necklace?
Everyone draws their line somewhere. I imagine even you would say an apple watch tongue ring would be jewelry. For me itâs apparently anything that goes on your wrist, around your neck or on your fingers or in any holes poked in your body.
Also, a family friend of mine is an executive at Omega, he basically says a timepiece (what he calls a watch) is the only piece of jewelry most men will wear. So while heâs not a spokesperson, it seems even the watch makers themselves think of their product as jewelry.
The semantic argument of what counts as jewelry is pointless. Semantics have no relation to morals.
Morally speaking, most things that we call jewelry tend to be harmful, or at least wasteful, A blood diamond is bad because it was dug out of the ground by slaves. Most diamonds in general are bad with their values largely inflated by a monopolistic cartel. Even a manufactured diamond is still a little bit bad because you are still being wasteful spending a lot of money on something that does nothing useful.
Iâm not saying that spending money on things with only an aesthetic purpose is always bad, but the proportions when talking about jewelry are out of control. Somewhere between getting affordable artwork to hang on your wall and paying thousands for some gold jewelry a line gets crossed where itâs really ridiculous.
A Rolex tells time, but so does a Casio F-91W for a lot less money. The price of the Rolex is mostly for the aesthetic part, and itâs an extravagant waste. You may argue the Casio is jewelry, but buying one doesnât really have the same moral problem of buying a Rolex.
The Apple Watch is insanely functional, and definitely justifies its price. If you had the same functionality in earring or necklace form, that wouldnât really change anything. Itâs already a bracelet.
If someone wants to buy an Apple watch made of platinum that costs 10x the normal price, but is functionally identical, that we can criticize.
I donât or I guess hadnât, until your comment, considered jewelry at all in a moral context. I only thought about it as a category of things. Rings, necklaces, watches/bracelets, piercings of all kinds == jewelry.
I donât judge people morally for wearing diamonds though maybe I should.
When I say I pride myself in not wearing any jewelry. Iâm not making a moral statement, I just mean the fact that I wear no rings, bracelets, necklaces and, piercings is something I take pride in. Whether they were made of plastic or diamonds.
Clothes are oppression. Gray tunics for all. Dye is sin. Colors are waste.
9 Likes
Wouldnât gray tunics for all also be oppression?
Thereâs a lot of gray area between the acceptable $25 t-shirt with your favorite licensed character on it and that obviously evil $5000 Universal Studios Versace.
The $5k handbag doesnât take more resources to produce, but efficiently extracts wealth from the overly rich. Taxing such things would provide an amble revenue stream for public works.
3 Likes
Sure, that would be great.
Too bad thatâs now how it works. Right now itâs just a rich person in one industry giving money to another rich person in the handbag industry. The handbag probably cost almost nothing to make. The people who made the materials or actually made the bag see almost none of that money.
Edit: my search came across this great image:
1 Like
I would argue watches, are not jewelry. Are never jewelry. They are accessories. Same as ties, umbrellas, bags, wallets, headphones, etc. Aesthetics and branding and function all play a part. You can have elaborate, engraved and bejeweled accessories, they still have design and cultural language and identity that roots with a form-follows-function heritage. Even if the function is faux or so nerfed as to be vestigal with the item worn purely as costume.
Meanwhile with jewelry, while some elements might in long ancient days have had some pragmatic purpose, in the modern awareness I argue their form is defined purely by the artist, and to some degree the wearer, and any real or vestigal utility that inspired your earring or necklace is no longer present in the design.
I would argue decorated and fancy hair clips, if they clip hair in some functional way, are accessories. If they simply pin into hair to look good, are jewelry.
Where we have an arguable crossover remaining is less often with watches perhaps but with things like necklaces that are also digital storage drives, or lockets with a photo inside, or earrings that perhaps are Bluetooth and glow to tell the weather. There are other examples out there.
In my mind those are all axessories that have appropriated the form factor and visual cachet of jewelry, but are nevertheless fashion accessories.
I would even allow that jewelry can fall in as a subset of accessories.
And, yes, our smart phones are as much an accessory as any watch or headphones would be. Even if itâs hidden, or entombed in a gross OtterBox case.
Iâm all for even a trivial wealth tax just so we can expose certain information and track it on a global scale.
Depends on the particular article of clothing and where you live. For example, Massachusetts has no sales tax on clothes under $175. You pay the full sales tax on the amount over $175. Iâm not sure where handbags count there, but even if all handbags are taxed, you pay far more sales tax on a $5k handbag than a $50 one.
I just want to put something to rest here. Pretty much all ânewâ diamonds in the US are not blood diamonds or conflict diamonds. All the major suppliers and retailers in the US do not get diamonds from known conflict/slavery areas, and often source from Canada or Australia. Source: My wife is a goldsmith and stays on top of this stuff. That said its still dumb to buy diamonds because conflict or not they are actually crazy common and its a sham.
2 Likes
Fun facts - we produce over 90% of the worldâs pink and red diamonds, and the majority of the Brown, champagne, and blue diamonds.
If youâre worried about conflict resources, be more worried about your phone - which makes it especially ironic that Scott is talking about how evil diamonds are, when heâs simultaneously repping product from a company that is known to use and has been penalized for using conflict metals - because a lot of tin, tantalum, tungsten, cobalt and coltan in various electronics, especially phones come from conflict areas of Africa.
Australia is also another source of these materiel, but a lot of companies use conflict metals instead, because itâs cheaper when you donât pay your workers, and also your workers are basically children and slaves.
1 Like
Yes, but phones do something.
Yes, they exploit enslaved children in Africa. And also you can look at funny gifs when youâre outside.
Youâre the one that tried to make a moral argument, donât complain to me when it turns out your example was more moral than the products you were recommending.
4 Likes
I feel like we just had this discussion in another thread.
Maybe. I donât think so, or at least, I wasnât involved, donât think Iâve spoken with you about conflict minerals for ages, if I have at all. I have razzed you about picking bad examples and making bad analogies before, though, that would be pretty normal.
1 Like
Apple can kinda suck it anyway, but, whatever:
We should be mining fucking space rocks.