Author: David Federman

The subject is citrine, or, at least, it’s supposed to be. But there’s something about this super-abundant, almost laughably affordable gem that fails to excite most dealers—or maybe just the ones we talked to. Normally voluble, they either clammed up or waited patiently to change the topic to some other gem not yet covered in these profiles.Oh sure, they all agreed, citrine is beautiful. No one disputed that. In fact, the 240.1-carat stone on the facing page resembles the finest golden sapphires we have ever seen.But that citrine is evidently handicapped by the fact that it costs a puny $7…

Maybe it’s the translucent honey color. Maybe it’s the slit of reflected white light that intersects the stone lengthwise when cut in cabochon form.But whatever is responsible, cat’s-eye chrysoberyl is a rare gem that is highly prized by men in this country and even more so by them in Japan. Indeed, says John Ramsey, Ramsey Gem Import Inc., San Diego, “Japanese demand is the reason why we don’t see finer cat’s-eye in smaller sizes in this country. The best stuff in sizes up to 5 carats goes to the Far East.”Whether sent to Asia or brought here, cat’s-eye is used…

If aquamarine was spared the price pummelings of the 1981-85 jewelry industry recession, it is no thanks to America. There the gem’s sales have been the weakest in decades—and getting weaker.Mass volume U.S. jewelry manufacturers have jilted this blue beryl in favor of an abundant and less expensive look-alike, irradiated blue topaz. “It’s a matter of economics,” explains Antoine Habib, Kaiser Gems Ltd., Los Angeles. “What costs manufacturers $30 to $60 per carat in bulk aqua costs them only $4 to $8 per carat in bulk blue topaz.”Elsewhere in the world, however, near-giveaway prices for blue topaz have not shaken…

Recently, the decade-old battle between aquamarine and topaz—the prime movers among pastel-blue gems—has seemed so one-sided that some of America’s fiercest aqua partisans are doubting, if still not deserting, the cause.As the blue beryl has steadily lost ground to far less expensive but no less beautiful blue topaz, some firms that specialize exclusively in aqua have begun to pledge allegiance to both blues. One of them, Kaiser Gems, Los Angeles, once around 40-50% of its 1985 sales to blue topaz, the first year it ever sold blue topaz.However, such accommodations to topaz are not always defections from aqua, although they…

Some gems seem to be victims of that oft-repeated childhood proverb: If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. Andalusite is one of them.For sure, this gem has its devotees. But most of them keep their devotion low-key and platonic. Thus andalusite stays a victim of the silent treatment. Even those twin-pillar tomes of gemology, Max Bauer’s Precious Stones and Robert Webster’s Gems, devote minimal attention to this gem.Granted, stones are often afflicted by annoying amounts of gray and brown. And, yes, it is hard to find fine qualities in sizes over 5 carats. Worse, rutile needles…

Although Africa has been producing amethyst for more than a decade, the news was pretty much of a trade secret until only a few years ago. Now, with this deep purple gem very much in vogue, jewelry manufacturers and retailers are specifying the African variety when ordering amethyst.”Not that they always get it. To the contrary, stones labeled ‘African’ stand more than a 50-50 chance of having originated in Brazil (a beehive of amethyst mining) or Uruguay (a new source). And despite an easy-to-perform test to distinguish natural from synthetic amethyst recently made public by the Gemological Institute of America,…

Blue topaz, the dirt-cheap treated gem jewelers order in precise shades with eye-shadow names like “London blue,” has fostered high hopes for this species in the realm of pink. Can treaters coax pink from affordable golden topaz on the same scale they’ve coaxed blue from colorless?They haven’t so far. But the gem market grapevine is abuzz with rumors that various kinds of precious (golden, peach and sherry-colored) topaz are being irradiated to produce pinks hues.Treaters who specialize in blue topaz insist that irradiation has not worked to produce pinks. Even so, it is known that dealers experienced in home and…

Real estate wasn’t the only casualty of the 1981 news that the rule of Hong Kong would be transferred from capitalist Britain to Communist China in 1997. The island’s thriving white opal market was trampled in the same panic that killed its 10-year building boom.For more than a decade, Hong Kong had been the undisputed center for white opal, responsible for cutting at least 90% of the world’s supply. Like most of the colony’s successful businessmen, Hong Kong’s opal czars had fortunes tied up in local real estate and stock market speculation. News of the change in rulership burst both…

Believe it or not, one scene in an 1829 bestseller by Sir Walter Scott, Anne of Geierstein, destroyed the European opal market for nearly 50 years. One of the book’s characters, accused of being a demon, dies shortly after her mysterious fiery opal loses all color when touched accidentally by a drop of holy water. Was the poor woman really a demon and her opal some kind of infernal talisman? Or was she simply a victim of her—and, by implication, all opal’s fragility? Readers took no chances and immediately stopped buying the gem. Within a matter of months, the market…

Naming new-found gem and mineral species after those who discovered them or in honor of important mineralogists and geologists has been accepted practice for at least a century. But in 1911, the mineral world made a notable exception to this custom for a pink beryl that had recently been discovered on the African island of Madagascar.At the urging of gemology and jewelry kingpin George F. Kunz, the new stone was called “morganite,” ostensibly to honor banker/financier John Pierpont Morgan for his many donations of gems and minerals to the American Museum of Natural History. Among Morgan’s gifts to the museum:…

Jewelers who planned to stock fine blue-color moonstones in the near future might have to delay their plans indefinitely now that the world’s main vein for this gem in Sri Lanka has run bone dry. What remains in the way of this feldspar are mostly run-of-the-mill stones that resemble water with milk of magnesia stirred in. For an idea of what used to be, turn your eyes to the facing page. There you will find pictured the maybe-extinct variety of this gem that many Europeans, principally Germans, found lovely enough to frequently encircle with diamonds.Why so few U.S. jewelers ever…

During the spring of 1985, lapis lazuli, of all things, became a hot topic on Capitol Hill.The subject first came up during Senate Armed Services Committee hearings on Afghanistan, the prime source of lapis and the scene of a then-six-year-old war between Moslem rebels and the Soviet-backed government of Babrak Karmal. Moslem freedom fighters testified that sales of lapis rough are a major means by which they now raise cash for arms needed to fight invading Russian troops.They may well have borrowed the idea from their opponents. In early 1984, the government of Afghanistan advertised an auction for tons of…

Although quaint folklore and superstition heighten consumer interest in stones like sapphire and opal, they rarely clinch sales of these gems. But when it comes to jadeite, folklore and superstition are living reality and, thus, bona fide selling points.In fact, jadeite may be the world’s only gemstone that is still used as much for an amulet as it is for adornment. It is estimated that millions of Orientals, Chinese especially, wear jadeite jewelry for good luck and health.”Within every Oriental there lurks a jade lover,” says jadeite specialist Leon Mason, Mason/Kay Inc., Los Angeles. That love has yet to surface…

When tanzanite, a baked-to-blue zoisite from East Africa, took the jewelry world by storm in 1969, it was considered the poor man’s sapphire. But with prices of better material now several hundred dollars per carat, it may finally be time for iolite to try on the up-for-grabs mantle of sapphire substitute.Certainly, its price is right, if not always its blue. Stones up to 3 carats rarely command more than $50 per carat, usually far less. And while larger sizes between 5 and 10 carats may sport price tags of up to $150 per carat, retailers and jewelry manufacturers usually let…

Indicolite, the blue member of the tourmaline family, is easy to admire and hard to write about. Mainly of interest to collectors, information on this stone is far more difficult to come by than the stone itself. Unlike comparably rare padparadscha sapphire, indicolite has no mystique or controversy surrounding it to spur interest and examination. Few have ever mentioned the stone to us. None has championed it.To be honest, if gem miner and dealer Bill Larson, Pala International, Fallbrook, Calif., hadn’t, purely by chance, pointed to some particularly beautiful examples of this gem in his showcases at the 1986 summer…

Is it possible for a gem species identified with class rings to have class? For years, serious respect has eluded red-family garnets due to their association with school colors and signet jewelry.Now newer strains of red-family garnet, found mostly in East Africa and Sri Lanka, are bringing stature to the stone. These strains are called rhodolite garnet and feature, at their best, a lovely vibrant violet, often reminiscent of an orchid. For the last 20 years or so, ever since rhodolite was found in abundance in East Africa, nearly 50% of all these garnets marketed in 1- to 5-carat sizes…

Kunzite is a much bad-mouthed beauty. At its best a deep-pink lavender, this spodumene is hard to set and, once set, easy to fade. Nonetheless, kunzite deserves a place in the sun.No, make that shade. Hot lights can, and do, turn this stone a whiter shade of pale, although color loss is usually very gradual. However, worn with an understanding of its high-strung traits, top kunzite can give enduring beauty equal to that of Ceylonese pink sapphire and Brazilian pink topaz—for vastly less money.Unfortunately, the deep pink/lavender varieties of spodumene are rarely seen in this country. More appreciative markets—Japan, in…

Call it either grace or irony. But scattered throughout western Australia’s mammoth but so far mediocre diamond output, consisting mostly of industrials selling for under $10 per carat, are a few fancy pink stones that have commanded up to $60,000 per carat. “We’re talking pink with a capital ‘P’,” says Hank Frydman, a fancy-color diamond specialist who operates out of New York’s Diamond Trade Association. “To date, these small consolations probably don’t add up to more than a few thousand carats (in the rough!) of the Argyle mining venture’s 25 million carat-plus annual production. Nonetheless, Australia is already significantly touting…

Fancy-color diamond specialist Hank Frydman likes nothing better than showing a mouth-watering array of lovely brown diamonds to out-of-town jewelers who visit him at the Diamond Trade Association in New York. But the vacant stares that usually greet these stones quickly remind him that brown diamonds are still a seldom acquired taste.Nevertheless, Frydman is convinced that some day soon the very same diamonds will become a required taste. “It’s a matter of economics,” he explains. “Fancy brown diamonds are just about the only bargains left in the diamond kingdom.” So it would seem. Today the standard pure-brown stone, possessing what…

Big, blue and fabulously fancy, the Hope Diamond is the most famous gem in the world. The 45.52-carat stone, on display at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., has everything going for it. The Hope is the largest deep-blue diamond in existence. It is steeped in mystery, with a lore as dark as its color. What’s more, scientific study of the stone in recent years has added to the Hope’s mystery and made it as much a legend with gemologists as it is with the jewelry-buying public.For instance, the Hope is the only diamond of its kind to phosphoresce red—for…

Looked at with no regard for its 100-year history, the Tiffany diamond is, according to experts who have studied it closely, the following: a bulkily cut cushion-shaped stone weighing 128.51 carats, borderline fancy light to fancy yellow and VS, not flawless clarity as most texts state. Seen in this light, purely as a diamond with no past, these experts estimate its present value at $1 million.Yet as a historic stone, the same experts say the Tiffany diamond could probably command $5 million today if Tiffany put it up for sale.This five-time jump in value is due to the Tiffany name…

Believe it or not, the stone that kicked off South Africa’s diamond rush in 1868 was a 21-carat yellow rough that was later cut into a 10.73-carat, supposedly canary-yellow, oval cushion called the “Eureka.” This find would have seemed augur great things for the world supply of colored diamonds, especially those of the yellow variety, which until then had been as rare as any other color.But fate had nothing that grandiose in mind. Instead, South Africa merely swelled the number of yellowish diamonds. Alas, the yellow usually present was not so much a hue as an unattractive tint (later dubbed…

There he was, standing in his undershorts and shirt, in a small, private office at the Miami airport that seemed, under the circumstances, as big and as public as Grand Central Station.Joe Tenhagen, a Miami gem dealer who specializes in emerald, had just returned from a routine buying trip to Colombia, the world’s leading producer of emerald.But emerald wasn’t what the six customs agents were looking for in the linings of his luggage and clothes that spring day in 1981. They were looking for cocaine, the estimated $16-billion-a-year cash crop that is Colombia’s No. 1 export. After a fruitless 90-minute…

Before 1980, sapphire was synonymous with blue. Few jewelers even knew—or cared—that the gem came in other colors—especially yellow and gold. They weren’t alone. Most sapphire dealers felt the same way.One of the few exceptions, famed New York cutter Reggie Miller, Reginald C. Miller Inc., remembers buying the finest yellows and golds for next to nothing on his frequent trips to the Far East during the early 1960s. “Dealers in Ceylon (the world’s chief sapphire mining center) didn’t even want to be bothered with fancy-color sapphires—certainly not yellow,” he recalls. “They stored the rough in big sacks and cut it…

Money doesn’t grow on trees but gems do. Or did. Some 25 to 40 million years ago, in what is now the Baltic region of Europe (Poland, Latvia and Lithuania especially), towering tropical pine forests began to sweat sap profusely. Globs of this sticky, aromatic resin poured down the sides of trees, often trapping leaves, twigs, bark and, occasionally, insects in their paths, and meanwhile snowballing in size. (The same process repeated itself during a later geological epoch in what is now the Dominican Republic and, still later, in what is now Tanzania.)Imagine, for a moment, these forests with their…

Caesar Habib, a Los Angeles-based specialist in Brazilian gems, still can’t forget the moment this past May he confirmed the rumors he’d been hearing for months about a spectacular find of alexandrite in Minais Gerais, Brazil’s province of gem plenty.”A dealer showed me a 400-piece parcel weighing 126 carats of which 35 stones were between 1 and 2½ carats,” he recounts. “That was way more than all the alexandrite I had seen in the previous five years.”But the parcel wasn’t only good news from a quantity standpoint. It was equally impressive from a quality standpoint, too.”The best of the stones…

Ever since stones from a splendid new Brazilian find started making their way to market in early 1987, much conventional wisdom about alexandrite has had to be chucked.Take, for instance, the common trade assumption that South America is good for nothing but the most inferior variety of this color-change chrysoberyl. Rather than turning green in sunlight and red in incandescent light as model alexandrite is supposed to do, Brazil’s stones are accused of almost always stopping far short of green at olive and far short of red at brown. “Don’t mention Brazil and alexandrite to me in the same breath,”…

A diamond by any other name is a zircon. Or it was for a couple of centuries, one of them ours. Since the mid 1970s, however, a diamond by any other name is more likely to be cubic zirconia.Due to the name similarity, many jewelers assume that zircon, a natural diamond substitute, and cubic zirconia, a manmade diamond simuland, are one and the same—or closely related. They’re not. But the widespread belief that they are stymies efforts on the part of zircon zealots to improve the much-maligned reputation of this gem. Many devotees protest the backhanded treatment zircon, the December…

Despite Tiffany connections and a large connoisseur following, tsavorite is becoming something of a has-been. And the very thing that should be helping the faltering career of this green garnet, strong family ties to much-coveted demantoid garnet, is hurting it. Indeed, tsavorite seems cursed by déjà vu as it follows in the footsteps of demantoid.Although demantoid took the jewelry salons of Paris and New York by storm after its discovery in Russia’s Ural Mountains in 1868, its vogue didn’t survive the Victorian era because mining lasted less than 30 years. Many dealers predict a repeat of history as mining of…

Twenty-eight years after it was discovered in 1868, gemology pioneer Max Bauer wrote that demantoid garnet would probably never earn full-fledged gem status. Much as he admired the stone, Bauer thought it was too small, soft and scarce to merit anything more than curiosity.Just about the same time, the late 19th century’s other great gemology pioneer, George F. Kunz, was in the Ural Mountains of Russia, demantoid’s prime source, buying every piece of demantoid rough he could find. Kunz, on leave from Tiffany where he served as the store’s chief gem buyer, was financed by banker/tycoon J. Pierpont Morgan, an…