There’s something strange about how we talk about diamonds. On one hand, we present them as tokens of love, everlasting beauty, perfect clarity. On the other, we whisper about their curses—how they bring death, madness, and ruin to anyone who dares to wear them. And we believe it, or at least part of us wants to. Not just for the thrill of it, but because deep down, we suspect that something so dazzling, so rare, must come at a cost. That’s the deal with cursed diamonds. It’s never just about the stone. It’s about what we project onto it—our fears, our failures, our hunger for things we probably shouldn’t want so badly.
Take the Hope Diamond. People love to talk about its size, its impossible deep blue, how it sits now in a Smithsonian glass box like a caged monster. But what keeps it famous isn’t just its looks—it’s the trail of misfortune people insist it left behind. Louis XIV, Marie Antoinette, jewelers, socialites—beheaded, ruined, lost. But do we really believe the diamond killed them? Or do we need something to blame when beauty and power end up costing more than we expected? When I visited the Smithsonian years ago, I stood there with a crowd of tourists, all of us peering at that gem as if it might blink back at us. A child asked, “Is it really cursed?” His mother answered, “Well, bad things happened to people who had it.” That was enough. We nodded, satisfied.
And that’s the thing—these aren’t stories we forget. They linger because they feel too poetic to be purely accidental. There’s the Black Orlov, a dark diamond supposedly plucked from a Hindu idol’s eye, a theft that, legend has it, cursed anyone who dared to wear it. A Russian princess allegedly flung herself from a building wearing it. Another owner met a grim fate. But for every tale of doom, there’s also a jeweler or collector who wore it just fine. So why do we remember only the deaths? Because they feel like part of a script we’ve rehearsed for centuries—take something sacred, and you’ll pay. The curse isn’t in the diamond. It’s in us.
I remember reading about the Koh-i-Noor diamond when I was a teenager, how it passed through the hands of conquerors, queens, and empires like a trophy—and a burden. Always taken, never truly owned. Eventually claimed by the British Crown, where it sits in the Queen Mother's crown, but never worn by a male monarch. There’s an old belief: any man who wears it will fall. Maybe that’s superstition. Maybe it’s guilt dressed up as folklore. The kind of guilt that comes with centuries of colonization and bloodshed. The Koh-i-Noor isn’t just a gem—it’s a mirror reflecting everything people are willing to do for power. And mirrors don’t always show us what we want to see.
My grandmother, who believed in omens, used to say that some things carry “hungry spirits.” Not ghosts, exactly, but energies that feed off attention, obsession, desire. “They like being wanted,” she said, showing me a tiny opal ring she never wore. “But they don’t like being kept.” I think about that when I hear stories like the Regent Diamond—stolen from a corpse, mounted in Napoleon’s sword, seen as a symbol of a cursed empire. It’s now on display in the Louvre, under lights, behind glass. Nobody touches it. We admire it from afar, as if we know better now.
But do we?
In 2006, a diamond called the “Sancy” went on display again in France. Like many of these so-called cursed stones, it had changed hands countless times—through theft, political intrigue, backroom deals. It wasn’t known for tragedy, necessarily, but for its vanishing acts. People said it “disappeared” for decades at a time, as if it had a mind of its own. Someone joked that the diamond “hid from war.” That joke stuck with me. As if a stone could be self-preserving, as if it knew when to leave. We give these gems stories so big they feel like characters in their own mythologies. They’re not just things. They’re protagonists.
But what if the real curse isn’t bad luck? What if it’s the way people act around immense beauty and value? I once saw a woman in a jewelry store break into tears while trying on a diamond necklace. “I shouldn’t want this,” she kept saying. But she did. And I understood her. Sometimes we chase after the things that sparkle not because they’ll complete us, but because they make us forget, for just a moment, how ordinary we feel. That might be the oldest curse of all.
Even in pop culture, cursed diamonds aren’t just plot devices—they’re metaphors. Think of Titanic. The “Heart of the Ocean” was fictional, yes, but that didn’t stop millions from believing it had some basis in reality. Why? Because it fits. Love, greed, loss, the depths of the sea—all wrapped in a glittering blue stone. And when Rose tosses it into the ocean at the end, it doesn’t feel like a waste. It feels like surrender. Like she’s finally letting go of everything it represented—tragedy, guilt, love too heavy to keep wearing.
And isn’t that what we want, too? A way to tell ourselves we’re not complicit in the uglier parts of desire? That maybe, just maybe, the bad things that follow us home after the auction house or the jewelry store weren’t our fault, but the stone’s? It's easier to blame a curse than face the possibility that we’ve become a little monstrous in our pursuit of shine.
I have no doubt some of these stories are exaggerated, maybe even made up entirely. But they persist. Not because they’re true in the strictest sense, but because they’re true in a deeper way. They speak to a part of us that suspects beauty, when paired with power and greed, is dangerous. That maybe we’re not supposed to have too much of it, or we’ll forget how to be human.
So we keep these stories alive. We tell them in whispers, pass them around at dinner parties, write them into screenplays. We visit the museums, stand in front of the glass, and ask the same question that little boy asked about the Hope Diamond: “Is it really cursed?” Maybe we want the answer to be yes. Maybe that’s the only way we can justify how far we’ve gone for a little piece of rock that sparkles.
And maybe the curse was never in the diamond at all—but in the way it reveals what we’re willing to believe, just to make ourselves feel a little more powerful, a little more chosen, a little more lucky.