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? 

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.

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? 

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. 

Back in 2020/21, I was trying to help a woman in her 30s looking for a career change into the gem trade. She had big ideas: learning CAD and to be a setter, getting her own cutting done, building a website on her own, designing a jewelry line... You name it, she was gonna learn it and do it. She was very over the top but also very motivated.  

One day, she asked me: how do you price gems on your website? What list do you use?  

I couldn’t stop laughing. Gemstone pricing is the secret of the Gem Trade. If you can take a look at a rock in front of you and say what it should cost based on estimated size, color, what you know about treatment, and all the nuances about inclusions, color in different lighting, etc. etc., then you will have already been well schooled in the trade. And I mean years. 

I had another (potential) client who wanted to invest in gems but never bought anything from me directly. She kept sending me links to gems to find out if they were priced right. She’d find flaws and ask me what discount should result once she talked to the vendor. I kept saying to her: “any vendor working with fixed online prices has already decided how to evaluate the flaws and consider them in the price. They know prices better than you.” Eventually I stopped trying to be helpful. I don’t know if the client ever made her investment.  

Buyers who are not in the trade often make mistakes. When I started out, I made them also. But one's capacity to judge gems and prices improves over time and this will make a huge difference.  

And therein lies the most important secret weapon to get lower prices. Even though the internet universe in which we now live has to operate with fixed pricing, gemstone pricing doesn’t work like shoes or washing machines. It works more like a commodities exchange but without the ticker tape.  

When you buy on location, you see this operate in full force. In the mining villages, but also in trading towns like Bogota or Bangkok or Jaipur, you’ll find people chatting in the village square, town center, or other designated trading place, showing one another parcel papers, sitting at tables in coffee shops with their wares on the table.

There’s a back and forth about who makes a first offer, and then who makes the counteroffer. It’s a bit of a sport for most traders. And even if there are legitimate “shops” or show rooms, trading isn’t any different. It can be quick or it can take all day. 

Your experience will be evaluated quickly, not just by the seller you might be dealing with but by everyone else watching. Calls will be made to get more or different gems.  

If you are judged to be a novice, you will lose your shirt at this point. But as a pro, you will be in heaven as you are in a unique position to show how much you know and make fair prices that both parties can work with. A gemstone seller will know and appreciate your knowledge. You will not make ridiculous low ball offers that only offend the seller so that he will try to cheat you next time. And you will not be paying too much either. Finally, you’ll be able to know a good price when you see one and a seller will be overjoyed when you do. He will want to do business with you because if you see a good price, you will acknowledge this by buying.  

To achieve low pricing, two other factors matter as well:  

Firstly, buying power: the more money you are able to spend, the better the discount you get. I periodically get asked for steep discounts based on the buyer having a tax ID. But if they want to buy a $50 stone for $25, this makes no sense for me. To take advantage of wholesale pricing, the key is quantity, not the tax ID number, which only allows you to save on sales tax.  

And secondly, you need to bring the promise of continued business. I have worked with each and every one of my vendors for years. I do add new vendors and try to find other business, but I also keep purchasing from the older suppliers, even when I can do better elsewhere. You never know when you will need them again.  

I’ll close this blog with something that you don’t need to get good prices: you need not be a registered US wholesale buyer with a tax ID. First of all, on location nobody cares what your reason is for buying, whether or not you want a stone for an engagement ring or a set of gems for resale. They won’t charge you US sales tax anyway. You may need a business visa to buy gems wholesale and export larger quantities, but for that, in turn, you will not need a tax ID.  

So keep these three things in mind when looking for low prices: know your prices, buy quantity, and offer continued business. It’s that way for me, and it will work well for you also.
 

Unfortunately, blogs can’t only contain good news. We are in the process of raising our prices on jewelry and custom orders because both the price of gold and labor have outpaced us. Any current listings on Etsy are staying at the current price but as new items are coming out, we have to make our adjustments upwards. (So shop that sale while it is still on!)

We completed our last price increase in the spring of 2022 but we tried to be modest at that time. However, our base gold price for that increase was $2000 per troy ounce and now gold is at $2500. To top that off, when you make price adjustments for retail you need a small margin in case it moves again. That means we have to use $2700 per troy ounce as a basis for calculating.

This is because you cannot change prices every five minutes as it is both confusing for clients and a lot of work. However, if you shop on any wholesale sites like Stuller or Ross Metals or Rio Grande, you can see that there are constant adjustments because wholesalers have a small margin. I am guessing that their websites adjust prices automatically. This would be impossible on Etsy.

Wholesalers rely on larger orders than retail, which is how they bridge the gap of their low margin. As a retailer, we cannot do that as we sell only one piece at a time, not 10 or 20 or even 200. Each piece we make is from scratch in terms of gems used, layout, labor, etc. The only thing we save on is that we do have molds for our pieces. But the initial layout and CAD work is not really accounted for (normally that would be ‘research and development’ and larger business have a % worked into their cost of goods for that).

In addition to the metal price increase, our setters are charging about 20% more. Given how we make our jewelry, the setters have most of the work. They never get to see the same layout twice and rarely use the exact same gems. The sizes of the gems vary more than diamonds, and colored stones are softer so that takes more time, as does hand applied millgrain, and the shaping of the prongs to claws (something you don’t see in commercial jewelry).

Last but not least, Etsy has been raising its own fees steadily, so our jewelry markup has to change from a very modest multiplier of 2.2 over cost to 2.5. Remember this multiplier is over straight production cost, so it doesn’t include my pay, Karen’s or Diana’s pay, or any additional supplies overhead such as the free shipping, boxes and packaging, or any other running expenses including phone, electricity and internet, office materials and miscellaneous. Standard suggested wholesale markup is x3, retail x5, but unless you are a very well-known brand your markups will not look anything like that! I am very good at reverse engineering the cost of jewelry I see online (occupational hazard) and I would say that places like Tiffany’s do have a 5x markup, and large chains that sell many items over and over (like say places like Kay or Zales) might have it too as they produce very cheap. Tiffany’s produces in-house, not overseas, or in the diamond district, so their basic cost is higher. And their quality is also far higher than that of chain jewelers.

Now there’s one perk of the current price dilemma: platinum prices have been nearly unaffected. My guess is that platinum doesn’t have industrial uses, and it isn’t considered as much of an investment as gold is – gold is a go-to for many investors when stocks and bonds are too volatile or in a downward trend.

Platinum production cost is now pretty much equivalent to 18kt white gold when it comes to making jewelry (platinum is much heavier so the pieces weigh more, that’s to be considered). It is easier to work with because it is a little softer, and it is considered more valuable an investment in terms of jewelry.

I am busily at work creating new pieces, rings in particular because they seem to sell out 90% of the time at present. I will add more platinum to the mix so that you can at least benefit from a more upscale piece if you have to pay higher prices. And I recommend that if you want something made in white metal, you use platinum instead. That will make it easier to set Paraiba or other softer stones, too. And that will make us very happy, lol.

Please allow some patience as we are slowly changing the prices anywhere. As I said, whatever is on Etsy, including prices for setting earrings etc, will be honored until it is changed (we will change the stacking rings and the custom listings). The price list on our website has disclaimers on it, and the individual listings on our site cannot be purchased outright, meaning that we will inform you of any change in price before you make the purchase!

Etsy has over two million sellers, and the category with the most sellers for handmade goods is – you guessed it - jewelry. Learning jewelry basics and beading is both simple and fun, and we all have a phone we can take photos with. So why not make a little money with your hobby?

Also, many of the newer and smaller sellers don’t charge much for their work to start with because they are hoping to compete against more established shops. The same is true for shops from Bangkok, India or Hong Kong, where manufacture is a fraction of what we pay people here or in Europe. As a result, we get a lot of comparison shoppers asking us to price out a ring or necklace to find the best price.

Surprise: we are not cheaper than other shops! In fact, we probably charge more than most Etsy sellers for a piece of jewelry. We make partly hand-fabricated fine jewelry on 47^th Street in Manhattan so we are not going to charge less than a piece manufactured in Hong Kong! Besides that, a lot of detail is required to calculate an accurate quote, and if that is not provided, two vendors can give you vastly different numbers for the same idea. I often have to clarify that point even before I work up a quote, so that potential clients don’t end up with sticker shock and no idea why we cost more.

So: what is it that makes us more expensive then, other than perhaps just pure labor cost? Here are a few pointers. You can use these to help you select what kind of jewelry and price point you would like. Maybe you don’t need top quality diamonds, or a hand set piece with an unheated sapphire, to make yourself happy. Maybe you are fine with an engraving in a CAD, or a CAD that is a knock off of another piece of commercial jewelry. When you choose your jeweler, you can rank your own priorities based on these tips.

1. We make our pieces in New York. All of our manufacturing is done here. New York jewelers charge up to $100 an hour, and five times the setting cost (if not more) than an overseas production team.
2. We have a US based CAD designer and allow more than the one revision that is normally offered when you commission a CAD. We usually do two revisions and charge nothing for minor changes. Often, we also offer layout options before making the 3D piece. Some NY manufacturers charge up to $700 wholesale for CAD work. We are actually quite reasonable for CAD work in the US. But we cannot beat the price of CAD work done in countries where the hourly wages are $4-8.
   
   
3. Our setters have worked for Cartier and Tiffany among others. They operate small, independent workshops; they don’t have employees, but hand set each piece themselves and they do not subcontract, so when they are out sick we have to wait until they are back. They have families to feed with their craft and we do not negotiate low pay with them. We respect their work and their time. For us, the setters are the most important contributors to our pieces. Setting colored gems requires additional skill, especially for pave setting of small gems, which means we have to work with setters who have a lot of experience.
   
   
4. We usually pave set our melees. That means the seats are cut by hand and the setting beads are cut by the setter also (the setter does all this when he puts it together). The tiny prongs you see are not in the CAD, as is normally the standard. Our engraving is not done in the CAD either, it is hand applied before we make the mold. Our engraver is expensive, and has worked for companies like Buccellati, among others. We pay over $200 for a simple engraving on a shank. Our millgrain is also done by hand, with a millgrain tool. It is again, not in the CAD.
5. We are AGTA members. This requires that we know and disclose origin and treatment on all of our gems. We can be held liable for this, not just in court (because we are US based), but also with the AGTA. We cannot sell synthetics at gem shows because the AGTA does not allow this. We stick to natural stones (not lab grown, not synthetic), and little to no treatment.
6. We hand select all our gems and do the layouts for each and every piece separately. Nothing repeats. Even when we make two pieces that are the same, they really aren’t because natural gems aren’t like eggs. They are unique.
   
   
7. We use Swiss Cut diamonds, VS GH. That’s the most expensive diamond your money can buy and you will not find it in any commercial jewelry. It’s just not standard. You will find it in fine quality designer jewelry, like Harry Winston. Not Zales. They will use SI quality mostly, or lower. Sometimes they use more greyish stones that we in the industry call ‘salt.’

So I think you can see that there are many details that factor into the cost, last but not least my company is located in the US, my employees are here and our shippers are here, so we pay US costs for everything. We have to pay taxes and cannot hire day or hourly laborers off the street, we have overhead, payroll, health care expenses etc.

Custom work is never cheap because the costs of design cannot be distributed over more than one piece, but it can still be done for less if you don’t mind employing some cost saving measures.

One final piece of information I want to impart is that when you source your own stones you will likely have to pay more for your piece, regardless of whether you saved on the stones or paid extra because you had a very specific thing in mind. The extra time it takes to make a setting to fit your gem and the extra risk employed using a client’s stone needs to be covered. Bringing your own materials, therefore, is not a cost-saving measure. Its purpose is for you to have more choices when it comes to gems, its purpose is not to save you money. At CRD we do not work with customer’s stones for liability reasons, and the extra cost is part of the reason why.

Etsy recently implemented a sustainability feature that allows sellers to click on an attribute that marks an item as ‘recycled’ or ‘organic’, or ‘ethically sourced.’ Not all our listings have the attribute as a clickable option on our back end, so we assume it is still in testing mode (we often get selected to test new features). The Etsy seller Handbook has an article on what items the attribute can be applied to. Here’s what it says about gems:

Ethical Gemstones: Ethical gemstones, including diamonds, require high standards for social and environmental responsibility that go beyond being Conflict Free™. Note that ethical gemstones don't typically include vintage gemstones due to lack of supply chain transparency. All gemstones, including diamonds, in or on the item must be ethical in order to claim this attribute. Sellers should qualify claims for “ethical” so that consumers understand what this label represents in their listing description. https://www.etsy.com/seller-handbook/article/1101070151405#SAD

As you may know, ‘ethics’ is totally up my alley as I am an ethicist by training. My Ph.D. is in philosophy, one of my two specializations is applied ethics (the other is epistemology, or theory of knowledge). I am also published in this field. I won’t bore you with further details, but I will link to my Ethics text here: https://learninglink.oup.com/access/burnor-2e

I don’t normally bring up my academic background because it’s (a) not relevant and (b) I don’t want it to be misconstrued as tooting my own horn about my being such a wonderfully ethical being. I’m the same as everyone else, just with a research degree in the relevant field. I do know a lot about the term ‘ethical,’ how it is used and I am very familiar with the problems posed by determining what territory it covers and how. And that’s why I want to weigh in on how problematic it is to try to make a gemstone be ‘ethical’ – and note, on the side, that no object can be ethical any more than it can be courageous or trustworthy. This requires agency, and agency requires an agent, someone who can choose between actions. But let’s set that aside, maybe I’m just being nitpicky.

Let’s look closely at that quote and figure out what’s being claimed. Start with “conflict free.” According to IGS (International Gem Society), a Conflict Free diamond is defined as a diamond that has “not financed civil wars.” https://www.gemsociety.org/article/conflict-free-diamonds/. But that applies to diamonds. Colored stones are not used to finance civil wars or much of anything else. They cannot be used as currency in the way diamonds are because their values are hard to determine, the pricing varies too much and as a result, they are not easily converted for cash on the open market. (Colored stones can and are used in money laundering schemes but I will have to leave that topic for another blog.)

You can of course say that a colored stone is conflict free but it would not say much, certainly it would not be a term of distinction, just like the word ‘natural’ when applied to most food stuffs, like ‘all natural’ doesn’t add much by way of information on a can of beans or a bottle of water. So if that were the only criterion for ‘ethical,’ all colored stones would be ethical stones.

It is also false to imply – as Etsy does above - that non-vintage gems have a transparent supply chain. They do not. And to know if a gem is ethically sourced you need to know about the supply chain, of course. Unfortunately, most gems go through too many hands for anyone at the end of the supply chain to know much about their history. Only a small subset of gems on the market are ‘block-chained’, meaning that their travels are fully documented. A portion of Dudley Blauwet’s gems are now block-chained. Nomads Gems will additionally make the distinction between gems bought on the open market and gems bought from trusted sources. Most small vendors however make no claims about their sources one way or the other, because they can’t.

Assuming, for the moment, that the supply chain was transparent, however, this still does not answer what makes a gemstone ethical. Again, let’s resort to what has been said about diamonds to get us started with a hypothesis. IGS offers this definition of ethical:

Conflict-free refers to diamonds which have not financed civil wars. Ethical diamonds go further, ensuring fair pay, safe working conditions, environmentally sound practices, and no human rights abuses.

But this claim makes another hidden assumption that cannot be verified: that an employer-employee relationship exists that can both implement and oversee mining practices and a pay structure (and the claim that the practices need to be environmentally sound goes even further than that, to facts about local government and infrastructure).

Now, diamond mining is expensive, in part because most diamonds are far beneath the ground. The tunnels can be a mile deep, and setting up such mining operations therefore requires big funding. As a result, diamond mining is done by larger companies, and these in turn have an infrastructure that can be the basis of fair pay and working conditions. Only 15% of diamonds are mined artisanally, meaning they are mined by small groups working claims on their own or mining without a license (local governments don’t usually run much interference in this process). In colored gems, estimates for artisanal mining or ASM, are up to 80%, with over 20 million people involved in mining worldwide, according to Guebelin: https://everledger.io/artisanal-gemstone-mining-blockchain-reveals-the-force-of-storytelling/

For example, in the town of Muzo, Colombia, large groups and families from the Muzo and Muisca tribes literally wash the bed of Rio Minero for emeralds (this is called surface mining, or alluvial mining), and sell them to Bogota through their known middle men or on the gem market in their towns or on the square in front of Casa Esmeralda in Bogota. Their pay is what they get for the gems they find, they do not have any employers in the official sense of the term, and they work with whatever equipment they can afford. (Here’s a quick but well referenced Wikipedia overview on Artisanal mining, though the references are mostly to gold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artisanal_mining#:~:text=20%25%20of%20the%20global%20gold,on%20ASM%20for%20their%20livelihood.)

Obviously, neither fair pay nor safe working conditions are relevant in this context. In many of the less wealthy countries in the world people have to be entrepreneurial to find a way to get paid. They don’t have employers in the way we ordinarily use the term.

In many African countries, the number of officially employed people is far smaller than the number of unemployed or self-employed people because so few have a chance of getting any pay at all, never mind if it is fair or not fair in terms of wages – since they don’t get wages. My guess is that it is mostly the government, schools and hospitals that offer jobs in the traditional sense. Real statistics are hard to come by because not all births or deaths are officially recorded. I did look up some statistics here, and so can you, but knowing what I know about data collecting in Africa, especially in remote locations, I suggest you take whatever you find with a grain of salt.

In regions where the ground is rich with minerals such as the Mozambique belt and Madagascar, locals mine gems because that is their best option, they sell to brokers or on the open market where their finds will simply fetch the going price. How they mine and what kind of danger they subject themselves to is essentially up to them – certainly it is not regulated. There is no infrastructure, no external control, and in many cases, no law that protects anyone other than the local clans or tribes rules and regulations (there could be many such rules but those are largely tangential to what we might call the ‘labor market’). Larger mining corporations do exist for colored gems; mostly they are run by people from other countries because foreigners usually supply the financing and very often also the oversight; but as I said above, these do not cover nearly as much of the trade as is the case in the diamond world.

I suspect, therefore, that few to no Etsy sellers are either mine or claim owners or work with any artisanal groups directly. As a result, I fail to see how a high standard for social responsibility could be implemented, overseen or enforced. What Etsy is hoping for is an impossibility when it comes to colored gems.

This doesn’t mean that any claims about ethical gemstones are all B.S. It’s just that the foundation of what makes a trade ethical has to be grounded elsewhere.

My view? It has to be grounded in TRUST. If you can trust someone, then you can trust them to do what they can to keep their relationships above board and do what they can. Note, by the way, that I am therefore in disagreement with Klemens Link, who says that “Without trackability and transparency, there is no trust” (as quoted by Everledger): https://everledger.io/artisanal-gemstone-mining-blockchain-reveals-the-force-of-storytelling/ Trust is what you need in the absence of trackability and transparency. Once those are in place, trust is no longer needed. I would agree however, that trust is built on a foundation that began with trackability and transparency. For me to trust my sources in Madagascar, I had to meet them in person and see how they operated. And for a more indirect approach: I can trust someone by proxy, when I trust their intermediary.

This is an important point. As a small business, it is impossible for us to own or run any kind of mining operations, let alone travel to the source countries and have an informed opinion on an ongoing basis. When we do travel and buy overseas, we do our best to be informed, and additionally we pay above market because I want the seller to have the best advantage of working with us that we can provide. We also help finance the families that are involved in trading with us once we feel we have a close bond.

It is true that because we want to offer a wider variety of gems, then we cannot have the transparency we would like with everything we source. But we do provide transparency where we can (i.e. you can read the blogs about all my travels), and we also work only with vendors who we trust. Some of them have ‘families’ they support, meaning they are well integrated into local clans in the industry and the relationships they have are lifelong and strong. And this, more than anything else, ensures a solid backflow of our wealth to those for whom our most basic expectations of life (food, clothing, shelter, transportation) are only a dream to have on a consistent basis.

For those of you who want to refrain from purchasing anything that has an ‘iffy’ supply chain, my recommendation is that you contact us and ask us directly, as there’s only so much information we can make available on Etsy. We do work with Greenland Ruby (as they are 100% located in the ‘Western World’ so it’s of course super easy to be ‘ethical’ in all of the above defined ways). Many of the gems we source from Dudley Blauwet are block-chained, and for our Madagascar gems, Colombian emeralds and even some of our Paraibas we have fairly solid information on their life before they came to CRD.

Yes, from the retail perspective, 2022 was a relatively quiet year. People got the message about prices for everything increasing and prudently set their funds aside to prepare for things to come. In the high end gem market, however, life was busy. Some of my vendor friends were just about crying because they couldn’t find the goods. “I could have sold that 50 times over if only I’d had it,” one of my gem dealers vented about the new craze for radiant cut teal sapphires. Another person I know has a waiting list for 5+ carat royal blues. If you are looking for that special stone this year, how should you navigate this market without overpaying?

The first and most important advice to give here is something you don't want to hear: be discreet. Don’t spread it around that you are looking. I know, I know: you want to show your friends on Instagram, Reddit, or on the latest thread on your favorite online forum. You need all those opinions from others, after all, so that you don’t make any mistakes. You have to resist this!

But why? Getting other opinions keeps you safe, right? Wrong. There are several excellent reasons for staying under the radar. Let me discuss what I think are the two most important ones. (Yes, there are more. You’ll have to ask me, this blog is already too long.)

• You are driving up the price. Remember the good old rule about what causes inflation? Inflation is caused by increase in demand. And the rarer the stone, the faster a price can rise, even if there’s only a small handful of people looking. For some markets, i.e. unheated rubies above a certain size and in a certain color, there are way fewer stones available than the internet will have you believe. That’s the first point.
  The second point is that the more followers you have, the more interest your post generates in a forum, therefore the bigger the reach. And among those reached, you will have guessed by now, are not only buyers but also sellers. Many of them at "ground level", in Ratnapura, say, where the very stones you are talking about may be coming out of the ground (i.e. royal blue sapphires). And the next time a US based vendor contacts "ground level" for similar material, the price is higher.
  In our market this way of prices spiking, or rising permanently, is a well-known phenomenon, and in the last few years the speed at which information about gemstones circulates, has increased. We do what we can to avoid getting “important” gems to be seen in the retail market so that this doesn’t happen, but it happens anyway, and it happens all the time. And this is true, even if the call comes in by phone from a few smaller brokers to one of the main dealers in NYC. (By the way, that description makes me a small broker, and I am going out on a limb here but I would say that most of the big colored gems in NYC are in the hands of less than 10 people; the other couple hundred or less of them worth their name, own just a handful of expensive stones or lie somewhere in between). One of those upper 10 people said to me last week that in his view, if a broker waits longer than an hour to get stones on memo to show a client, he can lose the call. In our lingo, the “call” is the request for a particular type of stone, like a matched pair 5+ ct GIA No Oil Colombian Emerald certed green. And – I will add this now – in some cases, several calls coming in that afternoon for the same set of criteria can make the owner reconsider the price.
  Also, in many regions of the world, gem dealers and brokers at ground level, and this stretches all the way to the N.Y. diamond district, operate in a large filial structure that gives them more financial backing and safety than someone outside that structure would normally realise. “Important” stones are routinely owned by more than one person, and you would be surprised how persistent a high price can be once the word is out that there’s a demand for that stone. Prices can get blown out of proportion, in fact, and then even vendors will not touch the goods, further decreasing availability at your end. As a gemstone seller, about 1/3 of the prompts I receive on Instagram are from other vendors overseas. I never respond because I need to go through my own trusted sources so that my purchases are protected. I would never buy from anyone on Instagram unless I knew them personally or through another person. If I were a retail buyer, I would at least test purchase for something inexpensive to see how the whole thing goes before I would even consider working with them on something big.

 And what is the second most important reason for discretion?

• You are not getting good advice. Now you might ask how I could dare say such a thing, just point blank without referring to any advice in particular. Here’s why: photos don’t tell the whole story. Sometimes they don’t tell any story, or they tell a plain wrong story. And any advice you will be given is based on the photos you put out there. So even the best advice (and much of it isn’t the best advice) is only as good as the information it is based on: the photo. Try as we may, photos are very difficult to take accurately. Sapphires and rubies (and many other stones) both look more vibrant and photograph more vibrantly at the equator than they do in North America. Furthermore, phones and cameras differ (especially with respect to "the white balance"), the time of day when the photo was taken and often even because of the exact locations of several photos of the same stone even from the same person. And never mind all the stuff you can do with Photoshop! Even assuming the seller did their very best with the photo equipment they have, their camera may trick them and change things (smart phones are smarter than people!). Rubies and emeralds in particular are very hard to portray correctly. This is so much so that I often prefer to buy by color description and just use the photo to get an idea of saturation and clarity.

          

An in text footnote is apropos here. Actually, two.

Footnote A is that photos get constantly stolen online and then regurgitated by sellers (or pretend sellers) that do not own the stone but they try to use the photo to get clients for other gems. If you went by Instagram, you would think that there are 100x the amount of fine quality unheated Burma rubies on the market than there really are. And you would think that you should only buy a Russian Alexandrite that changes from red to green and that’s clean and sparkly. Right about now I want you to picture an emoji: it’s one of those faces that laughs so hard that tears are coming out of that round yellow face, because that one stone is a museum quality piece and its picture is shopped around everywhere.  

Footnote B goes like this. Human visual systems vary a lot. Some of us don’t see as many differences in the green or red spectrum as others (same with other spectrums). There’s a lot of vision science to support this claim, so you don’t need to take this from me. If you want to have a fun evening testing your color vision with friends, go to one of the online tests, like the Ishihara or Cambridge Color test, or the Farnsworth 100 Hue Test. Prepare to be surprised, especially if you are male – you are statistically more likely to have a color deficiency.

Now. I hope I have convinced you what not to do. But what should you do instead? Imagine you have 10, 20 or 30K to spare, and you could really use some good advice because you don’t fully trust your seller.

My first piece of advice in that case is that you need to lose that seller. The gem business is in some ways a business like any other. Would you keep a carpenter or roofer you didn’t trust? No. You would go by recommendations, or a good bit of research, hopefully some opinion neutral informative ratings based on data, or you request an independent reference. You can do all those things with gem sellers too!

You are using a vendor not just because they own the gems and you don’t. You use them because you are deferring to their expertise. If you have seen 50 relevant comparison stones (or even 500), they have seen 50,000 or more. They have looked and looked and looked, and you simply can’t see what they see automatically until you have seen as many gems as they have. It’s a skill that can only be taught by doing it over and over, like egg sexing. Once someone shows you over and over and over that “this one’s male” and “that one’s female” you will eventually see automatically what they see, but there’s no criteria anyone can write down that can take the place of this process of simply seeing these things over and over again. 

In the same way, a ruby dealer will see secondary hues that you simply do not see, and that a photo cannot capture. They will hone in on relevant inclusions in a way that you can only if you know what you are looking for. Consider a mammogram. Can you read one and know you have a lump that needs a biopsy? Not unless you are trained in mammography, right? It’s the same with cell biology and microscopes. And with so many other things, like gems. 

So a very good gem seller (and one who can also communicate very well) is one who enables you to know things through his or her eyes, and whose descriptions are dead on. But it’s also one who protects you when you don't see what he or she sees. That person’s prices in the high end stones should be very dead on as well unless the stones are old and the vendor hasn’t had the time or energy or financial interest to change prices (yes, that happens).

One more point. Keep in mind that people who can afford to deal in expensive gemstones, who have the money to own them or the skill to find and present the right stones to the buyer, are not desperate for sales. Their reputation has more value to them than any one particular deal. Unless they make millions, they can’t very easily disappear after cheating someone unless they don’t live here in the first place, and one bad review because the client felt cheated on the value of their purchase can cost them the next 50 sales.

Also don’t forget that lab reports help you greatly when you need independent findings, especially with color ratings. So if you want a sapphire that’s royal blue but you’re not totally sure it’s royal blue when you are looking at it, then you get a GIA royal blue rated stone, and you have a royal blue in the most objective sense of "royal blue". Larger laboratories often use more than one person to do some of the color ratings (and for other things, too!). And stones above a certain value have to be run by the boss (This is from the horse’s mouth: Gubelin does that for Kashmir sapphires).

An example of the ColorCodex introduced in 2019. Used by AGL to determine color. Click here for full article

Ok this was another long article but I’ll leave you with one last trick I learned from James Alger. It’s obvious really, once you hear it, but until you do hear it you won’t think of it: buy a small comparison stone and use it when you look at goods in person. If you want a 10mm Emerald that is GIA rated "green" then find yourself a 3mm stone plus some help in figuring out if it’s the right green. Or if you just want ‘this color’ – whatever "this color" is - it's just the color you like and and that's the one you want. Then you find this color you like in baby size and send it to the vendor. They will probably thank you because that’s the best way for them to figure out what you want. 

I announced their arrival somewhat prematurely in the fall of 2021, right before all exports from Madagascar stopped because of an illegal export scandal in Antananarivo, the capital. A Sri Lankan gem dealer was caught with about a million dollars’ worth of sapphire rough in his hand luggage and an invoice claiming it was only garnet. The man was imprisoned, the goods confiscated, the Department of Mining closed down. Several more customs officers were arrested for taking bribes, even though, mind you, that is standard practice and the government knows about it. The ordeal ended up disrupting the entire gemstone trade including Tucson 2022. Rumor had it that higher ups in the government felt that they were not getting enough of the financial pie so they started to confiscate shipments occasionally so that they can collect “new taxes” before they release them to the relevant parties. The ensuing bottleneck is still creating issues for export.

In any case, my gems are finally here, after an adventurous journey from Antananarivo (Tana) to Mauritius, to Europe and then to the U.S. The Department of Mining in Tana is operating on a limited basis, and while there are still a lot of restrictions, some export is possible, in the semi legal fashion in which so many things work in African countries. The Sri Lankan who was jailed made it out safely a few months later, to Bangkok I am told, after some negotiations, which surely involved significant funds collected by the Madagascan government. Meanwhile, my faceted stones traveled underneath a layer of less expensive collector’s minerals that were exported this fall. That’s as much as I can say, except to add that I wasn’t part of the journey. Until export questions are fully legalized again, yours truly prefers to purchase remote. 

My shipment involved five parcels of gems: a largish box of yellow and green sphene in various mixed qualities, a smaller lot of color change garnet cushions, a large parcel of aquamarine, two parcels of mixed quality grandidierite, and finally my surprise gems, several large lots of Sapphirine. No, not sapphire. Sapphirine! Looks like sapphire and is named after sapphire, but isn’t.

My being the proud owner of a bunch of sapphirine is actually the result of an error, as the material was supposed to be Serendibite, a related mineral with extremely similar crystal structure and RI. Here’s what happened:

Back in the fall of 2021, I was told about a new find of gemstones in the South of Madagascar, where the grandidierite mines are located (not far from Fort Dauphin, if you want to check it on the map). The area is dangerous as it is populated by Dahalo, criminal gangs, so even other Madagascan clans do not go there. Incidentally, the Dahalo also do much of the gemstone mining in that and other regions but to sell it they bring it to adjacent villages. Rarely do Madagascans go to the remote areas in which the Dahalo live.

Additionally, much of Southern Madagascar is exceptionally poor due to droughts caused by global warming. Anyway, word had it that the material was Serendibite, normally found mainly in Sri Lanka; and a lab report was produced – a report that has since turned out to be either fake or simply mistaken. A refractive index test might confuse the two gems because their RI values are so close, but an X-Ray would be able to distinguish them. X-Ray machines are expensive however, and it is unlikely that a Madagascan lab would have one. Also, if you look through the information logged on MinDat here, you will see that Serendibite (but also Sapphirine) have indeed been found in Southern Madagascar before. So perhaps however the lab (or “lab”) report came to be, its author made an educated guess. Here’s the info for Sapphirine if you are interested.

Now as it turns out both minerals are rare when it comes to the world of faceted gems, so from that point of view, it didn’t matter to me which of the two I was buying, so long as the material was pretty. Serendibite would have fetched more money though, and I would have been the only one to own it. If you check on Etsy, sapphirine from Madagascar, though rare, is indeed available on the market.

So how do I know that what I have is Sapphirine? I sent a non-faceted sample to GIA, and they X-Rayed it for me. It’s definitely Sapphirine: a vibrant blue and brown di-chroic material, included and dark but the color itself is not at all ugly. 95% of what I have is not gemmy and I will probably sell it at a low price, but a few pieces are pretty enough to make jewelry out of them. Some of the faceted material was also cut along the wrong axis, so it looks more brownish than it should, or actually striped if you loupe it.

So there you have it. Would you like some Sapphirine? I will put it on Etsy of course but in the meantime you can just contact me.

Let me wrap up this blog with some notes on the other gems. The color change garnet is fantastic, the color change is complete, in blue light the gems are very blue, in daylight greyish blue, and in incandescent light a strong red. There’s a larger cushion as well which shifts from purple to pink, a lovely clean 6mm stone, and a matched pair of cabochons (4mm). The prices are good on all of these, and gems from Bekily are rare right now.

The sphene is gorgeous, at least most of it, including this pair here:

Here are some of the other sphene waiting to go on Etsy:

The aqua is lovely too but some pieces need recutting. The aquamarines are quite large for the most part, with the largest clocking in at 9 carats. Aquamarine has gone up in price significantly. I am not known for selling a lot of aqua but that was mainly because up until the last 3 years or so, it was readily available on the market. This is no longer the case when it comes to the finer goods.

Last but not least, the grandidierite I have is super nice. We have one on Etsy here. My photo here shows only a part of the parcel, I have another box. Much of it is satiny, not brilliant, save for a few pieces, and the nicest looking piece at AGL (because I am not entirely sure that it is grandidierite, it was very clean and slightly different color; whereas the rest looks right and also can’t be anything else given the color and inclusions). The color ranges from a deep greenish to a lighter blueish teal.

You will see all the material rolled out on Etsy in the next few weeks, as I get to it piece by piece. If you’d like to get ahead of the line for the best of the grandies, sapphirines, and color change garnet, please contact me.