Gem Profiles

Modern Jeweler’s popular Gem Profile columns were originally published monthly, from April 1983 – May 1993.
Each profile discusses the origin, history and story of precious stone, serving as both a reference and a market guide.
Today, the profiles should be viewed through the lens of the time they were written in, with any values assigned being understood to be historical.
The creators

WRITER
David Federman
As the Executive Editor of Modern Jeweler magazine, David Federman distinguished himself through his meticulously researched and compellingly narrated work.
His exceptional contributions to gemstone journalism were recognized with an impressive 14 Jesse H. Neal Awards, alongside the prestigious AGTA Spectrum Award.
David’s insightful and authoritative coverage significantly deepened the industry’s appreciation and understanding of gemstones and jewelry, solidifying his reputation as a leading expert in the field.

PHOTOGRAPHER
TINO HAMMID
Tino Hammid was an esteemed gemstone photographer, known for his work with “Gems & Gemology” and major auction houses.
His career, spanning several decades, was marked by his ability to vividly capture the essence of gems and jewelry.
Hammid’s photographs, celebrated for revealing the depth and detail of each stone, were pivotal in enhancing the visual presentation of gemstones in the industry. His contributions made him a respected figure in gemological circles.
The First 60
First published in 1988, ‘The First 60’ included is a curated collection of David Federman’s first 60 ‘Gem Profile’ articles.
Each article in blends meticulous research with engaging narratives. David’s expertise shines through in his exploration of the history, characteristics, and allure of each of gems featured.

“Psst, want to buy an opal?”It’s not exactly what you’d expect to hear in the…
At least 70% of the typical Japanese cultured pearls are made in America—namely, from the…
Quantity kills quality.As an example, we cite the Shanghai lake district of China, the world’s…
What’s in a name? Not much when it comes to conch pearls, the Caribbean’s contribution…
According to Islamic mysticism, the first thing God created was a tablet on which was…
Once a month, a boat brings provisions to a tiny Pacific atoll called Marutea in…
In 1962, the last year Westerners were permitted to buy gems in recently turned socialist…
Dealers old enough to remember the golden age nearly 30 years back when Burma ruby…
By now, East Africa has gained big league status as a producer of newcomer gems…
Twenty-two miles from the Indian Ocean, at a small bend in Tanzania’s Umba River near…
The stone’s blue is rich, royal and velvety, the quintessence of sapphire color. And because…
While buying American things may be in vogue again, national pride hasn’t helped sales of…
It is almost a macho obligation these days for precious stone dealers to say they…
When importer Richard Postrel buys pink sapphire from Burma tribesmen, they call it ruby—and don’t…
Blessed is the corundum that contains rutile (titanium oxide). Not only does this mineral produce…
Dealers don’t like to admit it but blue topaz has given aquamarine, its blue beryl…
If you had visited the Rio de Janeiro offices of gem dealer Paul Heubert in…
Just as East Africa is the brave new world of gem mining today, America was…
Are the wives of the late African miner Ali Giowatta once again on speaking terms?One…
One by one, the world’s most renowned deposits of blue sapphire are running dry or…
By logic, pink spinel should have a much wider following among jewelers. It is often…
Once upon a very real time, nearly 20 years ago, some miners in East Africa…
Gem dealers are finding it harder than ever to make a plus of emerald’s greatest…
Maybe it’s the translucent honey color. Maybe it’s the slit of reflected white light that…
If aquamarine was spared the price pummelings of the 1981-85 jewelry industry recession, it is…
Recently, the decade-old battle between aquamarine and topaz—the prime movers among pastel-blue gems—has seemed so…
Some gems seem to be victims of that oft-repeated childhood proverb: If you can’t say…
Although Africa has been producing amethyst for more than a decade, the news was pretty…
Blue topaz, the dirt-cheap treated gem jewelers order in precise shades with eye-shadow names like…
Real estate wasn’t the only casualty of the 1981 news that the rule of Hong…
Believe it or not, one scene in an 1829 bestseller by Sir Walter Scott, Anne…
During the spring of 1985, lapis lazuli, of all things, became a hot topic on…
Although quaint folklore and superstition heighten consumer interest in stones like sapphire and opal, they…
Indicolite, the blue member of the tourmaline family, is easy to admire and hard to…
Is it possible for a gem species identified with class rings to have class? For…
Call it either grace or irony. But scattered throughout western Australia’s mammoth but so far…
Fancy-color diamond specialist Hank Frydman likes nothing better than showing a mouth-watering array of lovely…
Big, blue and fabulously fancy, the Hope Diamond is the most famous gem in the…
Looked at with no regard for its 100-year history, the Tiffany diamond is, according to…
Believe it or not, the stone that kicked off South Africa’s diamond rush in 1868…
There he was, standing in his undershorts and shirt, in a small, private office at…
Before 1980, sapphire was synonymous with blue. Few jewelers even knew—or cared—that the gem came…
Caesar Habib, a Los Angeles-based specialist in Brazilian gems, still can’t forget the moment this…
Ever since stones from a splendid new Brazilian find started making their way to market…
Twenty-eight years after it was discovered in 1868, gemology pioneer Max Bauer wrote that demantoid…
The Second 60
Published in 1992, The Second 60 included 10 essays created specifically for inclusion in the book.
This volume extended beyond the familiar, featuring profiles of lesser-known and esoteric gems.
David Federman’s insightful exploration ensures these unique gem stories are brought to a wider audience, enriching the reader’s understanding of the diverse and fascinating world of gemology.

Remember those sappy 1986 headlines about a hulking 1,905-carat Idaho star sapphire supposedly purchased for…
Likening the color of fancy yellow diamonds to that of the canary seems to have…
When London jeweler and author Edwin Streeter published the fourth edition of his book “Precious…
It’s a shame that the word “semantics” doesn’t begin with a “c.” If it did,…
As poetry, this early 17th century quatrain lacks merit, but as a capsule summary of…
When it comes to value based purely on measurable factors like color or clarity, gemologists…
April 28, 1987 was already a historic day in jewelry auction annals before the sale…
The diamond market is the gem world’s last bastion of prissiness about gemstone treatment.Whereas colored…
Till recently, the most one could hope for color-wise from a pink diamond was a…
Late in the 1970s, when ads hawking emeralds for $5 apiece started appearing nationwide, gem…
Until recently, it wasn’t easy being green for any gem except emerald. Things began to…
Next time you feel like cursing the IRS, think about life under Mogul rule in…
You’ve heard of Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher who taught that everything in the material…
When in the early 1980s researchers at the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) unveiled a…
It has been more than four years since Louis Spaulding Jr. last found a mineral…
The world of phenomenon gems was dealt a severe blow when Sri Lanka’s deposit of…
Ask the average jeweler which variety of opal is the most prized in the world…
During the 1980s, when the Japanese pushed black opal prices to levels beyond the reach…
It took gem-oddities specialist Lowell Jones five years to accumulate the greatest modern-day collection of…
Like Babe Ruth, a fine pitcher who switched to playing outfield and became a far…
Can an all-nacre, non-nucleated pearl from a cultivated salt-water oyster or freshwater mussel be called…
Now hear this, now hear this: Lightning Ridge, Australia, the planet’s most celebrated source of…
To most retail jewelers, opal means Australia and almost no place else. Few know that…
No fancy color diamond collection is complete without a green stone. But since, next to…
In 1922, while extracting meats for fish bait from James River clams in South Dakota,…
Although it gets so little respect from mainstream dealers it could be Rodney Dangerfield’s birthstone,…
When it comes to ruby, one word has long sufficed to summarize this gem at…
Connoisseurs may glorify rare Kashmir sapphire with its soft velvety blue. Collectors may extol the…
Three times since 1971, a sizeable Burma sapphire once owned by John D. Rockefeller Jr.…
Just a few years ago the presence of numerous Thai rough buyers in Sri Lanka’s…
David Stanley Epstein, one of the best known of America’s young gem cutters, recently began…
If pyrite is known as “fool’s gold,” then rock crystal—the clear, colorless variety of quartz—could…
Until a year or so ago, having exclusive distribution rights for the world’s largest chrysocolla…
Options for retirement careers and sidelines are few in Globe, Ariz., a desert town 90…
Tamerlane, the Mongol conqueror, Henry VIII of England and Peter the Great of Russia are…
It is generally thought that quartz, the rock family that gives jewelers such gem staples…
In 1912 the National Association of Jewellers overhauled the birthstone list for the American market.…
If you are among those who believe that United States history begins with Christopher Columbus…
When smuggling of tanzanite, a popular blue zoisite found only in the Merelani hills of…
The world has lived so long with a 2,500-plus Dow Jones average that it comes…
Creation plays by very frustrating rules when it comes to pure red and orange diamonds.…
Let’s test your powers of visualization. Imagine you are holding an emerald crystal and looking…
Pity lavender jade, that pink-to-purple member of jadeite’s rather extensive color family. Far rarer than…
Royal patronage has long been the cornerstone of fame for gems. Where would a sales…
Joel Arem, who specializes in making collector markets for neglected gems, thought he knew a…
Think of quartz and words like “commonplace” and “abundant” come to mind. That any member…
At first glance, rainbow calcite makes you feel like someone slipped you a Mickey Finn.…
Until 1912, the year a Jewelers of America forerunner revised this country’s birthstone list, chalcedony…
Test your gem marketing skills by solving this problem based on actual history:It’s somewhere around…
At last count, four South American neighbors—Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Uruguay—are producing, at the very…
There are two distinct cultures in the world of colored stone retailing—the jewelry store and…
With thanks
These profiles would not have been possible without the support of the jewelry community, including those who supplied the gems to be photogaphed:
Adachi America Corp., Los Angeles; Akiva Gil Co. Inc., New York; American Jade N Gem Corp., Los Angeles; American Museum of Natural History, New York; American Pearl Co., Camden, Tenn; Argyle Diamond Mines, Perth, Australia; Assael International Inc., New York; Aurora Gems and Facets International, New York; Bill Heher, Trumbull, Conn; Calibrated Gems International, Los Angeles; Casimira Gems, Chicago; Christie’s New York; Colin Curtis, Fallbrook, Calif; Crystal Reflections, San Anselmo, Calif; David Humphrey of Geo Design, Pacific Palisades, Calif; David Penney; Echo Gems, Scottsdale; Equatorial Imports Inc., Dallas; Financial Registered Trust, Liechtenstein; George S. Williams Precious Gems Inc., Dallas; Gems and Minerals of Sarosi, Los Angeles; Gonzalo Jara, Santa Fe de Bogota, Colombia; Harold Dibble, Angola, N.Y. (faceted by Art Grant); Heher Enterprises, Trumbull, Conn; House of Onyx, Greenville, Ky; International Jewelry Creations, New York; Intercolor, New York; Jack Lowell, C.G.M. Co., Tempe, Ariz; James Alger Co., Manchester, N.H. (cut by Bernd Munsteiner); Jan Goodman, San Francisco; J. Gregor & Co. (cut by Richard Homer); John Bradshaw, Nashua, N.H; Joseph Ambalu, Amba Gem Corp., New York; Jungle Gems, New York; K.C. Bell of K.C.B. & Associates, Santa Monica, Calif; Kevin Lane Smith, Seattle; Korite Minerals Ltd., Calgary, Alberta; Krementz & Co., Newark, N.J.; Leo Boyajian, Naples, Fl; Lowell Jones, Palm Springs, Calif; Manning Opal and Gem, New York; Mary Murphy Hamid, Los Angeles; Mason-Kay Inc., Beverly Hills, Calif; Maurice Shire Inc New York; Mayer & Watt, Beverly Hills, Calif; Michael Dyber, Rumney, N.H; Michael Schramm, Sapphires Unlimited, Los Angeles; Mojave Blue, Bakersfield, Calif. (cut by Michael Dyber, Rumney, N.H); Morningstar Pearls, Santa Monica, Calif; Ouerland Gems, Los Angeles; Overland Gems, Los Angeles; Pala International, Fallbrook, Calif; Pan-American Diamond Corp., New York; Ponderosa Mine, Boise, Idaho; R.C. International, Bellevue, Wash. (cut by Joseph Czeresncki); Ralph Esmerian, New York; Ramsey Gem Import Inc., San Diego; Reginald C. Miller Inc., New York; Rex Harris, Delta, Utah. (faceted by Tina Neilson); R.H. Co., Los Angeles; R. Esmerian Inc., New York; Smithsonian Institution, Department of Mineral Sciences, Washington, D.C (in cooperation with John White, curator); Susan Clark Gallery of Gem Art Inc., Vancouver, British Columbia. (carved by Thomas McPhee); Susan Hendrickson, The Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, Hill City, S.D; The Sugilite Source, Phoenix; Tiffany & Co., New York; Tino and Mary Hammid; Tsavo Madini Inc., Costa Mesa, Calif; Tuckman International, Seattle; Walter Arnstein Inc., New York; Western Opal Corp., Los Angeles.
