Ron Winston inherited the family diamond business after his father, Harry Winston, died in 1978. He sold his stake in the company to Toronto-based Aber Diamond Corporation in September and remains chairman.

When was the first time you remember understanding the value of diamonds? My father used to come home at night and pop stones out of his pocket. I was two, three, or four years old and he would say, “Son, I want you to remember this. This is a fabulous pigeon blood ruby from Burma.”

While other kids played with rocks, you played with diamonds? Well, he was not going to let me crawl off and put a half-a-million-dollar ruby on my equivalent of a Thomas [the Tank Engine] train set. They were loose stones and he would tell me to look at them and then he would take them back.

They are also choking hazards. Yeah, I didn’t think about that.

When you were at Harvard College do you remember having a relationship to diamonds? No. I kind of eschewed it.

Did you hide who you were? No, I didn’t hide who I was, but I didn’t really publicize it.

When was the first time you remember thinking “I love diamonds”? I loved fancy diamonds ever since I was in my teens. And my father loved them, too, and nobody knew about them. Today everybody knows pink diamonds, but in those days, as Mel Brooks said, “Who knew?”

What qualifies a fancy diamond? It is a color.

Any diamond with color? Yeah. Haven’t you seen colored diamonds?

Of course. JLo made the pink diamond famous. Yeah. She bought ours.

What is your favorite color diamond? It would probably be a beautiful Brazilian pink or green.

When you see a diamond, what feeling does it evoke in you? It is a very tangible feeling of the coldness, the hardness, the brightness, and of course, with colored diamonds, it is this exceptional scintillating rareness of things that you don’t see very often, of nature’s creations.

If you were sentenced to never hold a diamond again, how would that feel for you? Sensory deprivation. Like being in solitary confinement.

Do you wear any diamonds? Sometimes at black-tie parties I will take a couple of earrings and put them on my side lapel.

Did you propose to your wife with a diamond? No. I didn’t. It was just kind of an ad hoc thing. We just got married and she got a ring.

Why are many women so focused on the size of a diamond? Diamonds to women are sensual and sexy.

What is the equivalent for a man? Cars.

So what is it about diamonds for women? Diamonds are tangible stars. We admire the heavens but we can’t touch them, and so diamonds are basically the closest we can have. And it is part of neurobiology. Termites bring up glittering stones when they burrow in the ground and they put them in front of their termite mounds, so there is a kind of attraction to shiny things.

All animals? Or just termites and humans? I think most animals have it. Why do you bring up termites? Because they go down and decorate their termite mound. It is called bioturbation.

Why? I don’t know. Do you speak to termites? I don’t. I don’t know why they do it. It is a biological response to concentrated light shining. They like it. And I think this goes throughout the animal kingdom.

If you were a woman and you could pick any diamond to have in your engagement ring, what would you choose? Probably a square cut or an emerald cut.

How big would it be? Ten karats. Maybe 20 karats.

Would you wear it every day? Ten karats, yes. Twenty karats, no.

Would you take the subway with it? I don’t take the subway now.

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Samantha Ettus is the creator of the bestselling Experts’ Guide series of books. She interviews experts as an on-air correspondent on WNBC’s New York 360º and is host of the “iCelebrate” series for NBC/iVillage.