Stories

Diamond Digger – The Weird Side of the Internet

Written by Staff on March 18, 2026

Diamond Digger – The Weird Side of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.

Now I have to admit it, when I saw the headline on this story, I had an entirely different idea about it. And I’m going to show you the headline, so that I can pre-disappoint you as well. It was: “A New York woman dug for 3 weeks to find her own engagement ring diamond.”

Am I the only person who took from this that she was at the dump, digging for the engagement that went down the trash compactor? Because digging through the nasty for three weeks is a hell of a story.

Not to say that the truth isn’t cool too, but it doesn’t satisfy my inner noir.

Michelle Fox is a 31 year-old strategy consultant from New York City who is getting engaged… someday. But not until she finds the perfect engagement ring. We’re assuming her partner to be a person of patience, not because he will have to go to many many stores and be prepared to pretend he gives a fig about diamonds, but because of why this article headline got me tricked: she’s digging in the dirt for her perfect diamond.

It was a diamond mine, an actual public diamond mine, the only one in the world and it happened to be a short drive from her. She grabbed a tent and camped out and dug for three weeks, and came up with a 2.3 carat diamond.

I did some math. The average salary of a strategy consultant is about $140k a year. Works out to about $2600 a week. Figure three weeks and we’re at about eight grand. And the average cost of a 2.3 carat diamond, sans ring, is middle range around twenty-six grand. So this was smart if she had the time and you’d have to factor in how much you’d have to pay to spend three weeks digging, and I did some math, bt I draw the line at labor statistics.

Of course, she didn’t do this to save money, She might not have found a diamond at all, so this was a labor of love. Her reason for doing this was, in fact, based on love. She wanted an ethically sourced diamond, conflict free. Digging for it yourself is about as conflict free as it gets.