The most opaque corner of the trade — and the most alive. The gemstone desk tracks auction results from Zambian emerald and Mozambican ruby tenders, the cutting rooms of Bangkok and Jaipur, treatment disclosure fights, and the collector demand pushing top stones past diamonds.
Untreated Burmese rubies, Kashmir-quality sapphire and vivid Colombian emerald keep setting per-carat records. Scarcity is structural: the great mines are old and the new finds are small.
A ruby's passport matters as much as its color. Lab reports naming Mogok or Kashmir multiply value — which makes origin science, and origin fraud, the desk's permanent beat.
Producer tenders in Zambia and Mozambique now set benchmark rough prices with auction transparency — squeezing the traditional dealer margin and professionalizing a famously handshake market.
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.
Brandee Dallow (ex-De Beers, Rio Tinto Diamonds, RJC) begins as chief executive of the International Colored Gemstone Association on July 6.
The State of the Colored Gemstone Industry panel reports engagement customers choosing sapphire, spinel and garnet first; margins beat diamonds; Tucson 2026 ranked among dealers' best shows ever.
Marion Fasel's Vegas read: mechanicals (transformable pieces), creative alternatives to gold (beads, cords, small scale), and narrative jewelry as the feature customers pay for.
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