Every industry has a language, and jewelry's is older than most. This guide collects the terms the trade actually uses — the sight and the memo, hallmarks and making charges, pigeon's blood and provenance — written plainly enough for a newcomer and precisely enough for a dealer. It is free, it always will be, and it grows with every edition we publish.
A stone starts in Botswana, Russia, Canada or Australia — or increasingly, in a reactor in Surat or Singapore. Producer sales and tenders set the first price it will ever carry.
Rough crosses into Antwerp, Dubai or Ramat Gan, where bourses, sightholders and dealers move it toward the cutters — and where most of the trade's credit lives.
Surat polishes roughly nine of every ten stones on earth; Bangkok and Jaipur rule colored gems. Yield decisions made here — what shape, what grade to chase — decide the stone's fate.
GIA, SSEF, Gübelin and their peers grade, certify and determine origin. A sentence on a report can multiply a price tenfold; the paper is part of the product.
Design, brand and setting happen in Paris, Milan, New York and ten thousand independent workshops. This is where melt value becomes meaning — and margin.
A boutique, a department store, a livestream, a DM thread. The final border, where the trade meets a person with an occasion — and the whole pipeline gets paid.
De Beers' ten-times-a-year allocation sale, where approved buyers — sightholders — purchase rough in pre-assembled boxes at prices set by the producer. Refusing a box has consequences; so does needing one.
Carat, color, clarity, cut set the grade — but the trade increasingly prices a fifth C: certainty of origin. Two identical stones can part ways on price over a paper trail.
Miners set rough prices, retailers set polished prices, and the cutters and traders in between absorb the difference. When both ends tighten at once, Surat and Antwerp bleed first — the industry's recurring crisis.
Goods consigned to retailers on memorandum — sold before they're paid for. Memo keeps counters full and balance sheets fragile; its terms are one of the best barometers of trade confidence.
The assay office's stamped guarantee of fineness — 750 for 18k, 916 for 22k. The oldest consumer-protection system in the world, and the inspiration for this paper's own mark.
The labor and design fee added over the metal's melt value — the jeweler's actual margin. When gold spikes, making charges get squeezed first; watch them to see who holds pricing power.
24k is pure; 22k, 18k, 14k, 10k and 9k trade purity for durability and price. Bull markets in bullion push whole countries down a rung — India's 18k boom is this cycle's signature.
What a piece is worth as raw metal, ignoring craft entirely. The gap between melt and retail is where brand, design and trust live — and it's the number every buyback desk starts from.
Emerald, ruby, sapphire — the trio that anchors colored-stone value. Everything else, however beautiful, trades as 'semi-precious' economics with rare exceptions like paraíba and spinel.
Most gems are heated, oiled or filled to improve appearance; the sin isn't treatment, it's silence. 'No indications of heating' on a lab report can multiply a stone's price tenfold.
Labs read a stone's chemistry and inclusions like a birth certificate — Mogok ruby, Panjshir emerald, Ceylon sapphire. It's expert judgment, not barcode certainty, and labs occasionally disagree.
The trade's most contested color term: the pure vivid red, historically Burmese, that marks the summit of the ruby market. Whose lab gets to say it is a running commercial war.
Unauthorized but legal dealers trading new watches outside official channels. Grey premiums and discounts are the truest real-time price signal in the industry — we quote them daily.
A maison that builds its own movements rather than buying them. The word carries a price premium and a century of Swiss industrial politics.
A watch's model number — collectors trade references the way equity desks trade tickers. One digit can double a price at auction.
Any function beyond telling the time: chronograph, perpetual calendar, minute repeater. Complexity is the currency of horological prestige — and of service costs.
The hammer price is what the gavel confirms; the buyer's premium (20–27%) goes to the house on top. Read carefully: reports mix the two, and the difference is the house's entire business.
A jewel's chain of ownership. A documented duchess multiplies value like a lab report multiplies a ruby's — history is the one gem that can't be mined.
The confidential minimum below which a lot won't sell. 'Bought in' means the reserve wasn't met — auction-speak for a price the market refused.
A piece unseen for decades. Freshness is the auction world's scarcity premium; a jewel flipped twice in five years trades tired.
Diamonds grown in weeks by HPHT or CVD — chemically identical to mined, economically a different universe. Their price curve is a technology curve, which is the whole story.
One-to-one retail relationship management — the private-client WhatsApp thread, remembered anniversaries, first calls on new goods. The oldest luxury skill, now run on software.
The customer researches at midnight, tries on Saturday, buys by DM on Tuesday. Winning retailers price, stock and staff as one continuous counter across all of it.
An EU-led ID standard giving each piece a scannable record of origin, materials and custody. Coming for jewelry the way nutrition labels came for food.
Carat