Jewellery and Coins

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As Guy Borenstein gears up for Stuller’s Bench Jeweler Workshop in March, there’s one hot topic that will be addressed for the fifth consecutive year: synthetic diamonds. There’s no shortage of available equipment to detect lab-grown diamonds. According to the Natural Diamond Council (NDC), there are about 40 instruments on the market that aim to discover natural versus synthetic diamonds.

“Five years ago, I asked attendees how many were screening for lab-grown diamonds [LGDs] and one hand went up,” says the director of gemstone procurement for the Lafayette, Louisiana-based manufacturer. That number has grown as the years passed, but “the majority are still not checking,” he adds.

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Demand is slow, but India’s import freeze is still having an impact.

Retail restocking is slow after a decent but not record-breaking holiday. The diamond market is uncertain about the rest of the year, and while inflation has eased, interest rates remain high. Yet despite the sluggishness on the demand side, New York dealers are reporting firm pricing on the local and Indian markets. This is mostly because there aren’t enough diamonds coming out of India; the inventory surplus that froze the market in 2023 has abated.

The market is soft in general, but particularly in round, D to Z goods, said Nilesh Sheth, president of New York-based polished supplier Nice Diamonds. Fancy shapes and colors are still moving well, he noted. In this context, “we are only adding items available at attractive prices,” Sheth revealed.

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https://apnews.com/

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The muted sounds of hammering and sanding drift down to the first floor of Bario Neal, a jewelry store in Philadelphia, where rustic artwork that mimics nature hangs on warmly-lit walls.

Waiting for one of those rings is Haley Farlow, a 28-year-old second grade teacher who has been designing her three-stone engagement ring with her boyfriend. They care about price and also don’t want jewelry that takes a toll on the Earth, or exploits people in mining. So they’re planning on buying diamonds grown in a laboratory.

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According to the wedding website theknot.com, February 14th is actually not the most popular day to get engaged; that day is December 25th, Christmas Day. However, Valentine’s day is up there in the top 5 for the ultimate romantic gesture.

Valentine, the 3rd Century Roman Christian who tied the knot for piles of young couples in spite of emperor Claudius’s commands forbidding marriage, would be pleased you feel. Not recently though. Weddings for the first half of the year in 2020 were at about 2% of the previous year. Not even old Claudius had such a wedding-killing hit rate.

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https://www.theatlantic.com

The traditional diamond industry is thought to be under threat from lab-grown stones. But that’s not how luxury works.

Last year, a funny thing happened at Ring Concierge’s Manhattan showroom. A bride-to-be brought her engagement ring back to the popular jewelry store after wearing it for a few weeks and wanted to trade out her diamond for a worse one.

The woman was worried that the original rock was too clear, too bright, too perfect for its large size, Ring Concierge’s CEO, Nicole Wegman, told me. She wanted to replace it with a lower-quality stone of a similar size—something a little less bright white.

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Italian gemological lab Gem-Tech has warned the trade that a number of lab-grown diamonds circulating in the country are being sold as natural.

Three stones were submitted to the lab accompanied by certificates from the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) stating they were natural, Gem-Tech said last week. Gem-Tech weighed the stones and found them to be nearly identical to those recorded on the GIA certificates.

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https://www.nytimes.com/

Several traceability systems have been introduced in the last six months, spurred by sanctions against Russian-mined stones.

Tracing the path of a diamond from the mine where it originated through the global supply chain is not as straightforward as it might seem — especially for consumers who make an effort to know the source of their purchases, from coffee beans to clothing.

The reasons include a longstanding industry practice of aggregating rough diamonds from different mines, the number of intermediaries involved in transforming a raw stone into a cut and polished gem, and the fragmented and global nature of the trade itself.

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Sir Gabriel “Gabi” Tolkowsky, one of the world’s most revered diamond cutters, has died at 84, friends and family wrote on social media on Monday. Born in Tel Aviv in 1939, Tolkowsky was from a family steeped in the diamond industry. He learned the trade from father, Jean, who had a diamond-polishing factory in Israel — an education that would set him up for a career manufacturing some of the world’s most famous diamonds.

“Every day after work, [my father] would come home from his workshop with people from all over the world who had come to learn about diamond polishing and sit in the one big living-cum-bedroom-cum-dining room we had,” Tolkowsky said in a 2008 interview with Singapore’s The Straits Times.

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