Author: David Federman

“Psst, want to buy an opal?”It’s not exactly what you’d expect to hear in the tourist thoroughfares of Mexico City as one shops for native wares. But, believe it or not, this gem is a common street corner commodity throughout the country’s tourist areas. And it has been so for years. “I couldn’t believe my eyes,” says eminent gemologist Cap Beesley of American Gemological Laboratories, New York, about his first trip to Mexico City 20 years ago in search of opal. “Everyone was hustling the stuff.”Few Americans are ready for the sight of opal in profusion during their stays south…

At least 70% of the typical Japanese cultured pearls are made in America—namely, from the shell of a freshwater Mississippi basin mussel (naiad is more correct) that has been processed into a bead that forms the pearl’s nucleus.Divers who find these mussels often cook them open in hopes of finding natural pearls and then selling them to various pearl companies that specialize in the freshwater variety. These days, most such firms are found in Tennessee, perhaps the biggest population stronghold for freshwater natural pearls. In fact, Ed Harvey, E.B. Harvey & Co., Knoxville, Tenn., says 80% of the freshwater pearl…

Quantity kills quality.As an example, we cite the Shanghai lake district of China, the world’s prime producer of freshwater cultured pearls.To boost harvests of these very popular pearls, most of which resemble Rice Krispies, the Chinese government has turned pearl farming there (and elsewhere throughout the country) into something of a numbers game with growers paid purely by pearl weight not worth. U.S. dealers who buy direct from the Chinese say this weight-over-worth policy has worked to swell output, currently estimated at between 75 and 80 tons annually—but at the expense of top grades. Only a decade ago, better goods…

What’s in a name? Not much when it comes to conch pearls, the Caribbean’s contribution to mollusk-made gems. Gemologists treat this name with so little respect that it might as well be an alias.First of all, the name isn’t pronounced “conch,” but “conk” (as in honk).Second, and far more serious, the gem isn’t even a pearl. Oh sure, it’s got the same basic chemicals—aragonite and calcite—as the oyster pearl. But the ratio between them is so different that the outcome can’t be called nacre, although it too is a calcium carbonate just like an oyster pearl. Besides lacking nacre, the…

According to Islamic mysticism, the first thing God created was a tablet on which was recorded every event that would ever take place until Judgment Day. Next, God created a perfect sphere some 70,000 leagues in size with 70,000 tongues to sing His praises that He turned into the mighty ocean from which all life emerged.Both the tablet and sphere were made of pearl.Given such veneration for this organic gem, it is hardly surprising that for centuries men dreamed of systematically forcing oysters to grow more pearls—rather than leave production to the highly selective whims of nature. Experimentation with pearl…

Once a month, a boat brings provisions to a tiny Pacific atoll called Marutea in the outlying southeastern portion of French Polynesia, better known as Tahiti. This is the only contact with the outside world the island’s 50 or so inhabitants have.That’s because the island is private property, bought by Hong Kong businessman Robert Wan in 1986 from Frenchman Jean-Claude Brouillet. How did Brouillet come into possession of a South Sea island in the first place?The Polynesian government sold Marutea to Brouillet in 1974 on the condition that he start an industry there. Brouillet chose pearl farming. Every August since…

In 1962, the last year Westerners were permitted to buy gems in recently turned socialist Burma, New York dealer Reggie Miller, Reginald C. Miller Inc., bought a large selection of very fine 20 to 40-carat peridots there for $1.50 a carat.Some 25 years later, the best Burma peridot he can find is decent but not great and costs him $100 a carat. Based on such prices, Miller figures he would have to pay $150, perhaps as much as $200, per carat for top-grade material in sizes between 20 and 40 carats. “But I can’t find it,” he says. “Not in…

After East African chrome tourmaline—a rare green tourmaline which, at its best, can double for fine tsavorite, even emerald—rubellite is the most prized and expensive member of this very broad gem family. Although the name suggests that it is a red tourmaline, that’s mostly wishful thinking.More often than not, rubellites tend to be too highly violetish to be considered red in the sense that ruby is red. Not that rubellites don’t on occasion look like their namesake gem. We photographed one such ruby stand-in from Madagascar for this article. And recently we were shown a suite of Brazilian stones from…

Dealers old enough to remember the golden age nearly 30 years back when Burma ruby was so plentiful there was no need to sell any other variety have had to make a painful peace with stones from substitute sources, mainly Thailand and, more recently, East Africa.Those too young to remember are more skeptical. Were the best Burma rubies of yesteryear really so superior? Or were they, like so many other bygones, an over-sentimentalized fantasy?To decide which, Modern Jeweler’s yuppie-generation gem market specialist spent a couple days making cold-eyed comparisons of better-to-fine classification Burma and Thai rubies, ranging from melee to…

By now, East Africa has gained big league status as a producer of newcomer gems such as tsavorite and tanzanite. But it is still considered bush league when it comes to traditional stones such as sapphire and emerald.For sure, the region is rich in these standbys. However, the quality of stones found so far is generally judged inferior to that from other active localities such as Burma and Sri Lanka for sapphire, or Colombia and Zambia for emerald.That leaves ruby, which East Africa mines in abundance, to earn it the respect it craves as a source of stalwart gems. Ruby…

Remember how for years the iron-clad price ratio of gold to silver was 35:1? Then when recently it spread to as much as 80:1, the ratio fell by the wayside. Nevertheless, the commodities world long lived by a certain price relationship between the world’s two most-coveted precious metals.Well, believe it or not, there was a similar rule-of-thumb price ratio for the world’s two most-coveted gemstones, diamond and ruby. According to that rule, traceable at least as far back as the early 1600s and still observed around the turn of the century, a 3-5 carat ruby was to be priced 10…

Siam, excuse us, Thai ruby still has plenty of detractors in the world gem community. To many old guard dealers, it is a poor substitute for the Burmese variety, despite the fact that Burma stopped official gem mining in 1962, leaving the world almost totally dependent on neighboring Thailand and stretches of mine tract just across its Cambodian border. The adjustment to Southeast Asia’s other and once-despised variety of ruby has been slow and reluctant.Granted, Thai stones come in larger sizes and are generally cleaner and brighter. Nevertheless, because connoisseurs usually found them so unfavorably purplish, so unbearably reminiscent of…

Twenty-two miles from the Indian Ocean, at a small bend in Tanzania’s Umba River near the Kenyan border, you’ll find a unique two-mile radius corundum pipe that produces just about every color of sapphire imaginable. Since the pipe’s discovery in 1962, its distinctive stones have earned the name Umba sapphire.Around 1965, Phoenix, Ariz.-based Naftco Gems, one of the first American firms to specialize in East African gems, and Naftule Fils in Switzerland, cornered the Tanzanian fancy sapphire market. Today the corner is still theirs—but far less so than it once was. As Umba sapphire has slowly come into its own,…

The stone’s blue is rich, royal and velvety, the quintessence of sapphire color. And because the gem is 24 carats, the telltale color banding that supposedly confirms Kashmir origin is immediately noticeable. Beyond such details, the eye-watering beauty of this sapphire is hard to convey.Astonishingly, this magnificent gem, which has less than tracking it back at least 75 years, probably sold for perhaps $1 per carat when it was in rough state. Today, the fine-finished masterpiece is available at an adamant $200,000 per carat, close to $500,000. What’s more, its owner, a major New York dealer says it would have…

While buying American things may be in vogue again, national pride hasn’t helped sales of sapphires from the country’s vast Yogo Gulch deposit in Montana. Sitting in a New York mid-Manhattan Citibank vault are some 250,000 carats, mostly rough, of blue and violet sapphire, all that remains of possibly the final attempt to make a go of mining at Yogo.Citibank acquired the goods in satisfaction of a debt owed by publicly traded Intergem Inc., Denver, the fourth Yogo mining venture since 1956. Intergem closed its Montana sapphire business in 1985 for basically the same reasons as its post-war predecessors: the…

It is almost a macho obligation these days for precious stone dealers to say they are versed in padparadscha sapphire, the rarest and most-prized fancy corundum in the world. Yet one of the few acknowledged experts on this gem in America, New York lapidary Reggie Miller, Reginald C. Miller Inc., says that after nearly 25 years’ experience buying padparadschas, he has seen less than 10 that qualify as fine specimens of this stone. “Padparadscha’ is one of the most abused gem names I can think of,” Miller says. “In fact, Ceylonese dealers use it as a catch-all term for any…

When importer Richard Postrel buys pink sapphire from Burma tribesmen, they call it ruby—and don’t take kindly to contradiction.When cutter Reggie Miller buys pink sapphire from Sri Lankan dealers, they call it padparadscha (an extremely rare pinkish-orange sapphire)—and act offended if you suggest otherwise.For hundreds of years, Asian dealers have been calling pink sapphire all kinds of things. Everything but what it is. And, until recently, many gem dealers in America took after them—insisting pink sapphire was, at the very least, pale ruby. As a result, pink sapphire had to fight an uphill battle to be recognized in its own…

Blessed is the corundum that contains rutile (titanium oxide). Not only does this mineral produce asterism—the star effect—in sapphires, it also acts as a blueing agent when combined with iron. There’s only one drawback.Rutile can’t perform both feats at once. It has to be in different chemical states to make stars and to make color. If left in its undissolved state where it clusters in dense bundles of microscopic needles, abundant rutile causes corundums to become anything from translucent to opaque. Usually corundums with heavy concentrations of rutile have a milky appearance, which is why it is called “silk” in…

At its breathtaking best, tanzanite looks the spitting image of Kashmir sapphire—exhibiting the rich, royal velvety blue those stones are prized for. But costing a fraction of the price. Then the merest hint of violet creeps in and tips off experts that the stone is something else.That “something else” is a blue zoisite, rechristened tanzanite by Tiffany in 1969 to honor its one source, Tanzania, and considered by many the pride of that gem-rich East African country. “It’s so good to know there is a stone that is still actively mined that gives you the Kashmir-blue color which is the…

Dealers don’t like to admit it but blue topaz has given aquamarine, its blue beryl double, a hard time in the last few years. Indeed, lighter-shade aqua that once fetched $150 per carat has dropped considerably below $100 per carat because look-alike blue topaz was selling readily to the trade for $4 per carat. Manufacturers who couldn’t see any difference between the two stones but price took topaz. So did retailers, especially when they realized that, for $8-$10, they could buy all they wanted of deeper-shade blue topaz that rivaled $200-$400 per-carat aqua in color intensity.As a result, a lot…

If you had visited the Rio de Janeiro offices of gem dealer Paul Heubert in mid 1982, chances are you would have seen several pieces of precious topaz taped to the sun-drenched windows. “You didn’t dare buy polished topaz then without subjecting it to fade-testing,” says Heubert, president of Inter-Ocean Trade Co., New York. “That was when the topaz irradiation scare was at its height. And the best way to test for irradiation was to let stones sit for a couple of hours in the very intense Brazilian sun.”Today Heubert’s office windows are once again bare, large by because the…

Just as East Africa is the brave new world of gem mining today, America was her counterpart a century ago.Certainly, the discovery of tourmaline in southern California in 1898 touched off as much excitement in the international jewelry market as did the discovery of tanzanite and tsavorite in the 1960s. Ironically, Tiffany, which played a major role in elevating the two East African unknowns to front-rank gems, played an equally important role in the success of California tourmaline. Tiffany then, as later, was among the world’s most adventuresome jewelry stores, always alert to new beautiful gem discoveries for which it…

Are the wives of the late African miner Ali Giowatta once again on speaking terms?One way to tell, say observers of the Tanzanian social scene, is to watch the supply of chrome tourmaline. Giowatta, a Muslim, owned the world’s only two chrome tourmaline mines, both located in northern Tanzania. When he died in December 1980, a bitter battle for control of the mines broke out between his three wives. This feud brought the mines’ already sporadic production to a halt. The world had to depend on dealer backlogs of this gem, many of them in dealer-obstinate, Germany’s great cutting center.…

This sky-blue-color copper derivative, so important to the ancient Egyptians and Aztecs, has known better times.Perhaps the best times of all for this gem were the late 1960s when social awareness briefly held more sway in U.S. fashion trends than the social registry. Back then, American Indian jewelry was powerfully in vogue and turquoise, the gem most associated with it, was hot.But once so-called native Indian jewelry started coming from Hong Kong and Taiwan, with its turquoise often plastic treated or just plain plastic altogether, the gem’s popularity nosedived. It didn’t help matters when a major tribe of the Southwest…

One by one, the world’s most renowned deposits of blue sapphire are running dry or simply not running at all. Kashmir, the supreme source, has been a lost cause since the 1920s. More recently, in 1962, Burma sealed off her fabled Mogok tract, leaving the world dependent on intrepid smugglers for the greatly diminished supply of her coveted corundums. In 1974, Cambodia’s famed Pailin region was decreed, and has remained, off-limits to gem mining. And around 1980, Thailand’s Kanchanaburi sapphire fields ceased to be worth the time and trouble to work.All this, says New York dealer Abe Nassi, has left…

By logic, pink spinel should have a much wider following among jewelers. It is often mistaken for pink sapphire (just as red spinel is for ruby), but costs far less. The confusion with sapphire is compounded by the fact that it comes from the same two major gem sources, Burma and Sri Lanka. Indeed, it is usually found in the same gem gravel as sapphire.Yet ask a jeweler to look at pink spinel and he will probably look at you like you were a weirdo. So much for logic. Many jewelers are used to thinking of spinel as cheap jack-of-all-trades…

Once upon a very real time, nearly 20 years ago, some miners in East Africa went looking for a purplish-pink garnet called rhodolite which was very popular in Japan. One day, while digging for rhodolite, the miners found a strange orange and sometimes reddish-orange garnet mixed in with the pink garnet.“What is this stuff?” one asked. “I don’t know. But whatever it is, no one will want it,” another answered.And, sure enough, the Japanese kept rejecting this new garnet when offered it by dealers in Nairobi, Kenya. In time, the African dealers came to treat the gem with contempt.Gradually, as…

Gem dealers are finding it harder than ever to make a plus of emerald’s greatest minus: its tendency to be highly included. And the ploy of calling the numerous wisps and veils of commercial Brazilian and Colombian stones something exotic like “jardins” (gardens) falls flat. What killed the acceptability of emeralds whose insides look like exploded cotton bolls?Blame it on Zambia, the African country where in 1976 geologists discovered a radically different kind of emerald than that known for centuries. Roughs yielded stones so clean that dealers at first suspected they were synthetic with their stark, saturate greens that looked…

Even in the best of times, it’s the worst of times, as far as supply goes, for natural-color (a.k.a. “fancy”) blue diamonds. Nevertheless, no one remembers times quite this bad for finding fancy-color diamonds with this much-coveted hue. And, no one expects things to get better any time soon.Oh sure, one can find stones with somewhat fanciful, rather than fancy, color that the Gemological Institute of America, this country’s chief pedigree of diamonds, compassionately classifies as “faint blue” or “very light blue.” But just try to find true-blue stones that deserve any of GIA’s really meaty grades: “fancy light blue,”…

The natural pearl isn’t the only worldwide casualty of environmental sea sickness. Now coral, the other great organic gem from the globe’s seas, is in big trouble—at least in its finest, most coveted red colors. Just shop the major movers of coral in New York’s Manhattan market.At A.F. Greenwood on 47th Street, the closest to pure red in coral they have on hand is salmon-pink material. And because the current cost to them for decent red coral is so high, the firm doubts it will be buying premium grades any time soon. “The stuff is just not sellable at those…