Recently, I've noticed a new type of video in Facebook's Reels (their ripoff of Tiktok): repetitious images of small, colorful, plastic dots being sucked up by and handheld tool and plunked down, row after row, on an adhesive canvas. The videos have a hypnotic appeal, especially with the sound effects. Today, having nothing else much to do (except laundry, dishes, bill paying, cleaning up after cats and dogs, and worrying about potential demise of democracy on Tuesday, etc.) I decided to learn more about the activity these videos represent called diamond painting.
I began by Googling "diamond painting" and discovered that there were a large number of retailers from whom I could order diamond painting kits, but Google didn't hold too many hints about the nature of this activity. So it was off to YouTube. My husband always says if you want to find out how to do something, indeed anything, go to YouTube. I began with a video that was titled "Things I wish I'd know when starting diamond painting." The video which was about 12 minutes long was visually an uninterrupted flow of a woman's hands putting red diamonds, one by one, onto a complex, apparently abstract design that was already about one half completed.
The first thing I noticed about this video, and all the others that I watched this afternoon, was that these experienced diamond painters were almost always demonstrating placing the little plastic color chips on their canvas one-by-one, and not in groups of five to ten as shown in the Reels I'd seen on Facebook. Yet even this still had a nice repetitive, hypnotic effect on the viewer. Over this visual a woman with a pleasant voice talked steadily, and easily about the things she wished she'd known which included things like: round vs. square diamonds really didn't matter much, spending money on better tools than those that came with every kit did matter (for example broader sturdier "pens" led to less hand cramping, bigger sorting boxes led to less refills, etc.), the size of the design mattered a lot in terms of detail afforded, and several other points that I forget already.
I watched at least a dozen different videos (from hundreds that were available on YouTube), produced by five different women. Which leads me to my first observation: diamond painting appears to be primarily a hobby of women. I'm sure there are men who do it, I just didn't see any videos by men in my brief foray into the subject. I kept coming back to the woman who had produced the first video I saw, because I really enjoyed her voice, and she demonstrated the widest array of types of diamond paintings from quite simple and small, to large canvasses with 277 colors (from a company in Germany).
My second observation is that diamond painting involves a lot of highly repetitive and actually soothing activity. It seems to be pretty low stress, repetitive, calming, requiring only modest skill levels, hand/eye coordination, and dexterity. I probably couldn't do it because I suffer from essential tremor in my hands and have both severe osteo- and rheumatoid-arthritis in my hands. The companies that produce diamond painting kits market them tout the hobby as restorative, calming, soothing, allows one to let ones mind wander, and still end up with a beautiful product without any artistic talent required. It is being marketed as a type of "art therapy", much the way that adult coloring books were marketed a decade ago. Of course with adult coloring books, the individual got to choose which colors they would use to color in the designs - so that the end product was highly individualized and far more creative than diamond painting.
Companies selling diamond painting kits describe them as being much like "paint by numbers" kits. However, while paint-by-numbers kits told one where to put which color, the application of the color with an actual paint brush required substantially more skill, and led to much more variation in the final product than diamond painting does.
So where does "the demise of society" come into this? Let me start by making it clear that there is nothing inherently wrong with engaging in activities that are repetitive, soothing and calming. Running, walking, yoga, meditation, even routine household chores (I find washing dishes soothing and mindless), raking leaves, mowing the lawn, all can have those effects. Although not as repetitive, activities like singing and dancing can also relieve stress and anxiety. However, the fact that there seems to be an ever greater need for activities to reduce stress and anxiety is concerning, and indicative of serious underlying fault lines in our society. The widening disparity between rich and not just the poor but the "middle class" is just one among many of those fault lines. The on-going commodification of life, where more and more things (education, water, health) have dollar signs attached to them, and become less available to those with low incomes, is a second fault line. The erosion of our environment, with massive shifts in climate is another.
I'm not trying to trash the individual people who enjoy engaging in diamond painting, it looks like a pleasurable activity and its hard to fault individuals for liking it. However, on a societal scale it represents two disturbing trends: commodification and environmental destruction. It sucks most of the skill and creativity out of an activity, requires substantial expenditure of cash (kits can cost upwards of $75 for large more complex artwork), and dramatically contributes to the very serious problem of plastic pollution, especially pollution by tiny particles of plastic. I learned from one of the videos I watched than depending upon the company one might have to reject or throw away a significant percentage of the diamonds one gets because they are flawed in some way. Also, the storage of diamonds involves the use of plastic containers (from very small to quite large). Then there is the long term future of all the art work produced covered as it is with all these tiny plastic chips. None of these are heirloom products, they won't be sold, collected, put in museums or even cherished by younger generations. They will ultimately from a few months to a few decades, end up in the trash. At a time when our oceans are being overcome by micro-plastic pollution, that is ending up inside wildlife and even humans.
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