Jewelry setting is a precise craft that requires skill, patience and delicacy. Yet even the most experienced setters occasionally crack or chip stones during the setting process. What happens then? Who assumes responsibility and how do you mitigate the risk?
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Let’s put this title into perspective first. Gold has gone up 60% in 2025, which is likely to be the largest price increase on record (starting in 1973, so that’s not covering the Great Depression!). Here’s where you can look at the historical as well as the daily gold price: https://goldprice.org/gold-price-history.html
You’ll see there that in 2015, Gold was hovering around $1000 per ounce, now it’s above $4000. Until 2020, gold prices were fairly stable. CRD first started increasing its prices in 2022, but we quickly realized that we did not calculate sufficiently and then the market ran away from us. Now our quotes are only good for a couple of weeks and are subject to change if a custom order is not initiated at the time of the quote (I order the gold as soon as I receive the down payment).
One can see the changes reverberating throughout the diamond district. Most of my contractors (i.e. setter, polisher, jeweler) have less work. In my case it is marginally less because I use the top people and they are always busy. But manufacture has definitely slowed down, and it has tightened its turnaround time so that nobody gets caught buying high and selling low. The gem trade has been correspondingly sluggish, but prices are not coming down in either gold or gems. However, the largest price increases for gems occurred around 2021-23 and have now abated – at least that is what I have experienced with regard to my purchasing habits.
But ok, enough said about the downside. Where is the upside? It is here: most of the gold on the market these days is recycled so it is simply cheaper for the industry to buy back gold than to mine it; if you go through the right channels, you can also sell gold and make a nice profit.
I don’t mean gold coin or bullion. It is too soon to sell that, as most major investment banks are predicting further increases in gold. Therefore, if you have gold for investment purposes, then I would hold on to it.
I am talking about different gold. The gold in your jewelry box! Broken chains, single earrings, busted rings, stuff from grandma from the 60s (don’t sell anything from 1940 or earlier). Stuff you bought and didn’t like. If there’s enough gold on the piece, then anything that you bought before 2020 has the potential to fetch more now than what you paid for it.
How do you get the most money for gold?
First rule: forget the gems. If you have hung around our shop long enough, you know that most commercial jewelry uses gems that have almost no value. Even those slightly greyish opaque diamonds set in cheap halos (often called “salt” in the industry) have no value. Nobody busts those out. But: if you have reason to believe that the gem or gems in your jewelry are valuable, then have a jeweler remove them. When you sell gold, almost nobody gives you anything for a gem. Even a diamond will fetch at best half of the current wholesale price. Better to reuse it in another piece of jewelry.
Second rule: Forget selling gold to pawn brokers or jewelers. Pawn brokers give you 50 cents to the dollar. Jewelers might give you more, or if they know you, they may give you much more, but don’t expect it to be more than maybe 80-90%.
How do you then get closer to 95% or more? You need to ship your gold to a refinery. I use a company in NY called “Manhattan Gold”. They also accept retail sales.
Online gold buyers usually offer the highest percentage below the daily spot price that you can get, even if you are me. I usually get around 98% with Manhattan gold. I sell back broken castings, the occasional piece I no longer use, I sell gold for clients, and occasionally I melt down something personal I no longer wear. I have profited from my original purchase every time. Understandably I buy cheaper than you but at the increase of 2020-2025 anyone can make money. I sell client gold usually as a form of payment for a new custom order, and I give back 100% of what I receive. I’m not interested in being a pawn shop!
In order to sell gold, it would be nice to have an exact scale. A postal or a good cooking scale is ok, as long as you can read grams on it so you don’t need to convert. Something like this on Amazon is also worth it. I’m not claiming that this particular product is ok, I don’t own it and my scales cost more. I use GemOro. You can find them on Amazon but also on other websites in case you try to avoid monopolies (I have given up but I applaud the effort).
So if you can weigh your gold and discern the karat number, you can use an online gold calculator to figure out the value. Then you can use a calculator offered by a gold dealer to compare prices to the daily spot and to other gold buyers.
Some online gold sellers offer a very fast turnaround, and you may also find gold buyers in your local town. If so just ask outright what the return is, then you’ll know if it’s worth it. You will get cash or a check on the spot, so you can use it to buy this year’s Christmas presents!!!
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Every year, I like to compile a little gift guide that will hopefully help you find something interesting for your friends and family. I will shamelessly advertise my own favorite pressies for friends and family, sticking to small and independent shops.
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For most people who are born into a fixed price culture, it is an entirely new experience to make purchases without having a sticker price on the coveted object. Worse yet, if you ask for “the price,” the seller may look at you like you are from another planet. That’s because there is no “THE” price, other than the number arrived at after an exchange between the seller and the buyer. If you insist on a price, you will get “a number” but that number is not (necessarily) intended to be the price of the object that the seller wants to sell at. Nor may he or she even know (yet) what that price is. Because that depends on a lot of factors that are not technically tied to the object itself.
Value is not just determined by the cost of goods plus a markup in a bargain culture. It is the result of an exchange during which buyer and seller evaluate one another for their expertise, their financial ability, and where in the chain of ownership buyer and seller are located. I.e. if the seller is a miner and the buyer is a retail buyer from another country, the profit to be had is very large. But if the seller is a broker who has to pay the miner and the buyer is a wholesale buyer, the profit margin decreases.
However, in wholesale, purchases are based on quantity – where that is either the result of several smaller purchases on repeat business, or a larger one-time purchase of a parcel, or both.
The video above shows Yvonne's friend, Jochen of Jentsch Mineralien, buying minerals on location near Muzo in Colombia.
It is very important for a gemstone seller, especially if they are in a developing country, to know what type of buyer you are. If you are visiting just once, making one purchase, and do not know gems or their prices, then you will have to pay top dollar. To avoid being pigeonholed as an easy target for a larger paycheck, here are some tips and tricks.
1. Know your stuff! That is the single most important rule that you must follow. If you want to buy a no heat blue sapphire in Sri Lanka and you are not known to the seller or introduced (this gives you safety), then you need to know how to identify that the gem is heated. Even a Sri Lankan lab report is no guarantee, because most labs do not have the latest, most expensive scanning equipment you might find at GIA. I am not very good at knowing whether a gem is heated (many experienced buyers make very accurate guesses but I am not one of them), so I will not buy unheated material on location. I will go only through sources I trust. But, if you want to buy a garnet, and they are traditionally not treated, then you just need trained eyes to look for window and flaws, and you need to have researched the prices for comparable gems on some websites that have fixed prices.
2. Show you can use your tools. Your ability to handle a loupe and tweezer, as well as when you need to use either, will be evaluated. The more experience you have with tools, the better your prices will be.
3. Use recommendations whenever possible. If you got information about a specific seller from another seller, mention their name. Even when I do not have that, I will mention the names of well-known buyers that I have done business with, just so they know I am in the trade, and I have recourse to complain to one of my “colleagues” if I am given exorbitant prices.
4. Buy a parcel! Single stones always go at a premium. Parcels are much cheaper and you will verify the price per carat, rather than by checking every single stone. The idea is to look at a parcel and just study the finest material in there. Don’t make that too obvious as you wield your tweezer. Look at each gem in the parcel and count in your mind how many good stones there are and how they should be valued. Parcels may include useless material and you may need to eyeball the percentage of that before you decide if the parcel price is good.
5. Become a repeat buyer. Make a smaller purchase first to show your willingness to interact and then come back at a later point. I’ve done it where I would look at emeralds in Bogota first, get an idea of what people want to quote me, and then let them know I will buy once I return from my excursion to the mining villages. Then I purchase a week later, and during that week I will have got an idea of price and availability. This helps when I cannot return to the country another time. Leaving even a couple of days between your initial request and your purchase can help. But: don’t make the mistake of driving the price down too much or doing too much comparison shopping. Word gets around and that can be good or bad. Essentially you need to decide what kind of information about you you want to spread and you are the only one in control of that.
I realize these are tall orders. None of these tips and tricks are easy to follow. They also tell you why wholesalers get better prices than one off retail buyers. That said, you can certainly work on some of these tips. You can go online before you travel and do some research, you can bring a sample stone you want to match (maybe a small purchase from a reliable US seller). You can make sure you have cash on hand, and you want to give yourself a little time to get a feel for the trade on location.
Last but not least: what about buying ONLINE from an international vendor? You can, after all, bargain on sites like Instagram, as well as connect to a small seller in the middle of nowhere, as long as that seller has a cell phone and internet (hint: they all do!). My advice? If you don’t know the seller, then forget it. I wouldn’t do it, and neither should you. That’s just a recipe for getting ripped off, and it is totally obvious why.
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Lab grown diamonds are rapidly increasing their market share but what happens to their value after you've bought one? Should you use them for the jewelry you want to make as an alternative to earth mined gems?
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Tariffs definitely affected attendance at the JCK Show. Some vendors decided not to attend and others scrambled to import their inventory. However, those who did come did well and Yvonne came home with some special discoveries.
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As you probably know by now, at CRD we make all our jewelry here in the United States. Each of our manufacturing partners – from casting to jewelry work to setting and polish – is located in Manhattan, in the Diamond District.
Yet, we are not exempt from the consequences of what the media calls the “trade war:” the temporary and permanent changes proposed, considered, and executed regarding tariffs. In other words, this involves a 10% or more upcharge on all imported goods (depending on where they come from). Nothing in the world is made in a vacuum. Gold, gemstones but also tools and supplies for the trade travel around the world in various states before you can hold the result in your hands. And as they travel internationally, they will pick up price increases along the way in the form of taxes, duties or tariffs. The article here goes into greater depth on this.
Consider gold. While the United States has domestic supplies of gold (for instance, in Nevada), some of its gold is imported from Canada (as well as South Africa and Mexico among others). The United States also refines much of its gold, but 70% of the world’s gold is actually refined in Switzerland (and the US has to import 25% of the refined gold it needs from there). Before it turns into your favorite jewelry item, therefore, gold may have already traveled around the world, i.e. from Canada to Switzerland to the U.S.
Platinum is also mostly imported as the US has almost no domestic platinum mining. The world’s largest platinum producer is South Africa, the rest is imported from various other countries.
Even for those of us who make and use our own castings, our pieces of jewelry are not entirely made here. This is because not all of the parts that go into a piece of jewelry are actually cast. Bails, posts for earrings, earring backs, jump rings and wire are examples of findings that almost any jeweler uses and which are generally not cast but bought pre-manufactured. Parts can be manufactured in Jaipur, Hong Kong, Bangkok, before they are shipped to wholesalers in the United States. Some large wholesalers manufacture here, many do not. Like most other jewelers, we do not necessarily know where exactly an earring post was made. This means that a gold bail may have started in Canada as gold, becomes refined in Switzerland, is made into wire or a post in Bangkok, and then comes to the United States (or somewhere else) for assembly.
Another important type of jewelry supply that we rarely consider are the chemicals needed in jewelry work such as pickle, rhodium, and other acids used to clean jewelry after soldering. These are in addition to the tools we use: polishing equipment and wheels, sieves, tweezers and loupes and scales, casting materials, and even packaging. Our packaging comes from Rio Grande and Westpack for instance. Westpack is located in Denmark. High quality loupes and tweezers are made in Switzerland, the lower quality tools usually come from China.
3D printers, another modern jewelry staple, are made in China, the Netherlands and the US, among others places. Rhodium, used to plate white gold, meanwhile, is 80% South African, and secondarily Russian. None of it comes from the United States, but it is used in just about every piece of white gold jewelry sold here.
And of course, last but not least, most gemstones these days do not come from the United States (and even less so from Europe). Mining in the US is (a) subject to a number of environmental restrictions, and (b) expensive in terms of equipment and labor. Many areas are also mined out, or the yield is too small to be considered worth the labor costs of mining it.
This is why we now source pretty much 100% of colored gemstones from South America, Africa and Asia (diamonds are also 100% imported – there's no diamond mining and hardly any diamond cutting in the US).
Some countries export the gemstone rough directly, others, notably Sri Lanka, cuts all gems within the country. Other major cutting centers are Bangkok and Jaipur (India cuts 90% of the world's diamonds for instance), and for more commercial cutting like cheaper beads, materials get shipped to Hong Kong for processing. Gemstones and diamonds can easily take a trip around the world before they find their permanent home with a private jewelry buyer.
If you think about it, therefore, there’s no such thing as a piece of jewelry that is truly made in the USA. The supplies and parts needed for it not only come from all over the world, they also travel the world in various iterations before they arrive here in the form in which they may become part of a piece of jewelry or be part of the manufacturing process.
Can this be changed? The answer is a qualified yes. In principle, anything can be made anywhere, including all of its parts. The qualifier is the cost. Manufacturing companies usually look for cheapest and most effective ways of making their product. This is how free international trade started in the first place. You make this, I make that, and then we trade so each of us gets their thing for a little less – to put it in a pedestrian way. But if the trading itself has a price to it, it will raise some prices. And with regard to some items, such as rhodium and platinum, the price increases are permanent as some raw materials simply cannot be found in the country in which they are needed or used.
Let’s face it. The world economy is totally topsy turvy these days. Gold has become so expensive that making platinum jewelry is a bargain. Tariffs on gems are 10% from now on despite the pause on higher amounts. Also the standard of living in our supplying countries is rising, bringing further price increases on gems, gem cutting, and jewelry manufacturing labor to consumers. This begs the question: is it still possible to make affordable jewelry?
I think the answer is (a qualified) yes, and the secret lies in what we have been doing all along: working with small gems. But there’s more to the story. What follows are tips on how you can save.
Use Platinum. I know, it sounds crazy but right now platinum is cheaper than gold because it is not an industrially used metal. Platinum is a metal of choice for setters because it is pliable enough to set the soft gems I so commonly work with.
If you do prefer a yellow or pink color, I would opt for 18K yellow gold because it is truly superior in color to the 14K version, and I would choose 18K rose gold for the same reason. 18K rose is very soft looking.
I do not recommend using silver, however. It tarnishes, even platinum silver and argentium silver do to a degree, and it is very difficult to get the tarnish to stay off. Also, regular and argentium silver are soft. This means the prongs can easily pull open, or an entire ring gets bent, and the stones fall out. We usually make silver jewelry only upon request these days (exceptions apply).
Use smaller gems and make a cluster design. You can even do a cluster ring or pendant without a center or with just a very small center. Here are some examples of new rings and pendants we are making that work for marquis and pear shapes, but could be adapted for other shapes as well.
Use less pricey center gems and let the side stones be the center of attention. You can do this two ways: use a lighter colored or less vibrant center so that the side stones draw the eye. For example, lighter blue sapphires are considerably cheaper than the vibrant royal blue ones. Same with emeralds. The lighter gems, often sold under “green beryl” go for significantly less money than the saturated gems. Light green beryl also tends to be extraordinarily beautiful, and pairs well with paraiba for example. Or you can use gems that are generally less expensive but still pack a punch in terms of color. Two examples of gems I happen to love that are vibrant are blue zircon and amethyst. You can also work around a gemstone slice, a cabochon, a rose cut or a large entirely less precious gem like fossilized wood, gem silica, or boulder opal. A setting for these gems might sound expensive but need not be because you can make a very thin metal frame in CAD, or in some cases, you can even drill the gems.
Go eternity. You can do so much with an eternity ring design, with the added benefit of being able to slide it right next to a wedding or other plain band. Or wear several together. Since manufacturing in the US can be expensive, I further suggest doing a partial or half eternity band to save on setting labor. Half eternity bands can also be sized, whereas most full eternity bands cannot (because cutting out or soldering added metal is impossible once the stones are set). Eternity styles can be bezeled or prong or pave set, they can alternate shapes, colors, and sizes. You can do an ombre too.
Accent Studs - Single Studs. Instead of making a pair of large stud earrings, make a 3mm pair, or go single, or both. Most people nowadays have a second and third earring hole that would be great for a single fancy accent stud or just a dainty single 3mm post. We are going to make more single and small studs available for precisely that reason! Take a look at these in store here.
Make a stacking ring. Stacking rings can have a single stone or several, they can be eternity style, and you can, just as with an eternity piece, vary the shape not only of the stones, but the ring design itself. A good example is a crown or V design, either with a center stone or eternity style. Stacking rings can be so much fun as you get to mix and match quite a multitude of options. You can work around a wedding band and an engagement ring even!
Finally, I’d like to add that while we did have to raise our prices on gold and manufacturing – we had absolutely no choice either – we have not raised prices on any of our gems. Nor do we plan to. I very much hope to keep it that way but I do want to add that this is not a promise. So go get 'em while you can!
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We've got some exciting new rings, pendants and earrings coming to the shop for spring:) New gems and designs are on the way and you'll get a preview of what's new in the shop and what we have still to come.
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Cecile Raley Designs had a fairly busy holiday season and, if you notice our total listing numbers, they have gone down a bit during the last couple of months.
Time, therefore, to refresh and restock. And for that, I will need your input. For this year’s Tucson, we are prepared to spend a little bit more as we have sold down on all of the Denver purchases from September 2024, and I have been emptying the safe since I broke my ankle last spring. Let me take you through the various categories I intend to refresh and invite your comments.
Sapphire: My focus will be on interesting cuts – kites, hexagons, fat ovals like 3x2 and 4x3, rounds above 4mm, and as much in the purple and magenta range as I can find. So in terms of colors, I am hoping for saturated pinks, purples and blues, but lavenders and lilacs we love also. Which cuts interest you most?
Note that pink sapphire in sizes other than melee are usually heated, and there has been increased retail interest in these colors. Correspondingly, vendors have raised prices to curb buying and meet demand. But I have had more requests for these so I will do my best. Hot pink and purple were my best sellers last year.
A color I am confused about buying is teal. The market seems to demand teals and there are a lot of sales, but I hardly sell teals at all. So is there any interest in teal colors, such as greenish, or warmer greens, yellows?
Finally, we have run out of many small sizes, is there any interest in anything particular? 4x2 marquis, 4x3 ovals, 5x3 pears, small hexagons or kites, etc etc. I am wondering how much people still want to buy any of the specialty cuts in any of these.
Ruby: If the Canada Ruby company is back in business, I will be going there for stock. In my view, this is a small investment opportunity as many buyers don’t want to buy rubies from conflicted areas such as Myanmar. I also always look for saturated unheated and heated rubies, but the prices for these have gone up significantly. Under 2mm, I can source most rubies, but, for instance, finding even matching sets of marquis, small ovals, or pears is more difficult. Most rubies I can get my hands on sell quickly but I will do my best.
Paraiba: I have sold down quite a bit on stock. I have hoarded some single one carat pieces that are between 10 and 15K and I have more green paraibas, but what I am really looking for would be some pieces that are below one carat but above a half carat. That is what I am getting the highest demand for, and that category is the most difficult to fill. Ideally I would find round gems but as the rough material is long and narrow, cutting the rough into round shapes is very pricey. And since it is the cost of the rough that dictates the cost of the faceted piece, it often turns out that the final price of a round gem is more than what most clients like to pay.
On the more positive front, I think I can supply more melees in blue to green, round and other shapes, without raising prices this year. I have been working with a new supplier for a year and a half now, they are directly in Brazil and they have offered a consistent supply.
Other Tourmaline: I am always on the lookout for vibrant pinks and blue greens, or icy tones. While the neon pinks do not sell very well, I personally think they are a wonderful alternative to the more expensive pinks like neon sapphires in the same saturation, and despite their rarity, the pinks have not gone up in price as much as sapphires have.
Benitoite: I have my usual meeting with the Benitoite folks before the AGTA and GJX begin the first week of February. But note that I still have small ovals and rounds available. I will therefore be buying less. I am going to ask for small specialty cuts for the most part, as well as rounds above 3mm if possible.
Cobalt Spinel: Again, I would need your advice on this. I have not sold much cobalt spinel in the last few years. Prices have actually been stable for about 2 years, although supplies are down to what people have hoarded. There’s been nothing fresh coming from Vietnam and insofar as anything hits the market, it is old stock. The new blue Mahenge pocket appears to be done or more would have hit the market. I still have blue spinel from Sri Lanka, cobalt spinel from Vietnam, and cobalt spinel from Mahenge, mostly in smaller sets but also a few pieces in the .2 carat range that aren’t round. Again, the rough doesn’t really favor round shapes and the lack of supply doesn’t allow for matched sets. One has to work with a mixed shape and size set and design from there.
Here are some of the cobalt spinels currently in the store and click here to see them all.
Burmese Red Spinel, Mahenge Spinel: I always, always, always look for neon color spinels in reds or pinks, but prices are pretty close to exorbitant at this point, even for melee. Both Burma and Mahenge spinel demand have outpaced supply. In 2020 you could still get them at reasonable prices but even the larger gem dealers that used to stock them, such as Yavorski and Nomads, are very sold down. I look at their stock at every show, hoping there’s some magic they are pulling out of their drawers still, but there’s just nothing left. The best material at this point is mildly included. And even those are expensive, and even those are hard to get in the very neon colors. But if I find the material, I usually buy it!
What I can still get is Mahenge spinel melee 2mm and under. I know one supplier that has parcels still. But Jedi pinks or reds from Myanmar I can’t restock. My vendor for those from the last 5 years has quadrupled in price and their stock is down 80% nevertheless.
Pink and Lavender Spinel: I do continue to buy those but prices of lavenders have gone up as well, as purples and lavenders have been very popular colors. The more reasonable colors, at this point, are the peachy tones, as compared to sapphires in the same saturation.
Zircon: I am less interested in the earth tone zircon or the yellows, even though I think they are super pretty. But whenever I can find truly saturated blues, especially in nice cuts, I will source them.
Demantoid Garnet: Of course I will be replacing the melee I sold as well as add a few other sizes. There are only rounds in small stones, but there are three shades. I call them “olive,” “apple,” and “emerald.” That’s probably self explanatory; olive is the cheapest by less than half and the least popular even though it is not any more common than the more desirable apple and emerald green. Emerald is the most expensive. I tend to pick a large, a medium and a small size in melee. If anything particular is of interest, please let me know.
Purple Garnet: In light of the most recent purple craze, I feel I should stock up on more purple garnet again. That, at least, has not gone up in price as much in the last few years.
What I probably won’t buy are peach toned sapphires as they are mostly not pretty in the lower price range. I feel the same way about alexandrite but I do have access to melee if you are prepared to pay a few thousand per carat (…!). Kornerupine is basically wiped off the planet, except for some overpriced single medium sized specimens (between half and one carat).
In terms of shapes I will work hard to get 5-6mm rounds as that was my most popular size in the last several months. I had made a point to stock anything pretty in that size and shape, and it all sold. I will look for 4mm pairs as well as 7mm rounds. Past that I cannot source anything sufficiently interesting in an affordable price range – that’s my humble opinion anyway.
I will stock up on hexagons and kites as well as Asscher if I can find it, but I would prefer not to buy too much of these specialty shapes as they might go out of style. I'd be interested in your input into this and your preferred gemstone shapes in particular.
Last but not least, I have pre ordered hauyne, and if anyone else would like some in sizes that aren't listed right now, you need to let us know asap. The vendor for these will be at the GJX show and he is setting aside what I would like to have so it doesn't get bought right away: 1.5mm, 1.8mm, 2mm, 2.5mm, 3mm) but the amounts will be very limited due to my funds. Remember if you tell me to buy things I have to use money, lol, and if it isn't your money then it is mine. Once that runs out then there won't be anything for you to see...
Looking forward to your comments. Please email us at cecileraleydesigns@gmail.com
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