CaratTwo speeds in color: $906,250 for one sapphire, demand still 30% down
A 6.59-carat Kashmir sapphire cleared $906,250 in Dallas while ICA members report colored-stone demand roughly 30% below 2022. Mahenge spinel is up 150% since the pandemic; tsavorite has fallen 15% to 20% in a year.
§1Two numbers, opposite ways.
Two numbers describe the colored-stone market and they point in opposite directions. A platinum ring set with a 6.59-carat Kashmir sapphire made $906,250 at Heritage in May, more than $300,000 above its high estimate, in the largest jewelry auction that house has held. Meanwhile members of the International Colored Gemstone Association report demand running roughly 30% below 2022 levels, with association president Damien Cody describing slow trading across the membership.
The gap is a size and quality gap, not a confusion. Rapaport's survey of the trade in January put Mahenge spinel up about 150% since the pandemic and Mozambican Paraiba up from around $7,000 a carat to between $10,000 and $12,000. Untreated calibrated tsavorite, calibrated pink sapphire and single blue sapphires above three carats had each gained more than 50%. A one-carat untreated royal-blue sapphire moved from about $3,000 to $4,000 or $5,000.
§2A size and quality gap.
The same survey shows where the softness sits. Tsavorite has given back 15% to 20% over the last twelve months as Chinese demand thinned, and the broad commercial book has been flat to weaker throughout. Currency has muddied the read further: Colombian emeralds are up close to 20% on exchange rates alone, and Zambian emeralds 25% to 30%, which means part of what a dealer calls a price rise is a dollar story rather than a stone story.
The gap is a size and quality gap, not a confusion.
§3Bridal says otherwise.
Retail is the part of this market nobody is measuring well. The dealer and designer Kimberly Collins reports demand up 30% to 35% since the pandemic and says she now fields "at least one inquiry a day" for colored-stone engagement rings, which is not the picture a 30% wholesale decline suggests. Both can be true: bridal has genuinely shifted toward color while the tourist, gift and mid-commercial channels that once absorbed most calibrated goods have not come back.
This is a market that has stopped clearing in the middle. Fine untreated material with documented origin is scarce enough to keep setting records, the commercial book is discounting, and the space between them is where inventory now goes to die. For a jeweller,
that argues for buying fewer stones with better reports rather than more stones at better prices, and for treating the lab document as the product. The ICA's first Plus event lands in Hong Kong in September, and the pricing conversation there will be about paper as much as color.
The trade, filed to your inbox before the New York open.
Prices, tenders and the one story that moved the industry overnight — read in ninety seconds.
Subscribe free →Heritage books $1.41 billion, and its biggest jewelry sale ever
The room where the Kashmir sapphire cleared $906,250.