A gem dealer's journal

Simon Dussart: Your book emphasises the mine to market approach in the trade. What changes would you like to see, believe we should operate, in how the gems are sourced and sold to ensure a more ethical practices? Actually, how would you define ethics in the trade ?

Richa Goyal Sikri: I’ve written several articles on responsible sourcing, and four years working on this book has been an incredible learning experience for me in this space. Think of responsible behaviour like a multi-tier cake. You can’t start from the top. The first step must be the foundation, which in my opinion is transparency. What I mean by this is being true and clear in what you are selling? Treatments, enhancement, and origin (to whatever extend possible). Be clear in what you know about the stone and what you don’t know. To this layer, we can add others such as responsible behaviour towards our suppliers, employees, community, and environment. Often when you say the word ‘responsible’ the tendency is to point a finger to a miner or a merchant, what about the government? How is the government and the bureaucracy supporting the industry?

AsiaLounges: Following your last answer, do you think that removing colour calls / colour types and origin determination in order to stick to strictly provable data would help labs to be more coherent with one another or is this a fool’s errand either way?

Billie Hughes: Certainly having fewer subjective factors on the report could reduce the number of discrepancies on lab reports on the market, but you wouldn’t eliminate them completely. There may also be ways to modify the way we treat color calls and origin determination that could create more consistent results without doing away with them altogether.

Color types like Pigeon’s Blood and Royal Blue can be highly subjective, so removing those from reports could create more consistency. But it wouldn’t fix the problem of subjective color calls on colored stone reports, because the nomenclature for colored stones has been inconsistent for many years. Many variety names rely on judgements on color. For example, distinguishing between ruby and pink sapphire or green beryl and emerald is subjective. Which tourmalines get called “rubelite” or “indicolite?” Is the trade comfortable with removing “Padparadscha” from sapphire reports? 

With regards to origin, moving to broader origin categories might be a middle ground between issuing very specific country of origin comments vs. getting rid of origin. For example, it can be difficult to separate blue sapphires formed in similar metamorphic deposits like Sri Lanka, Madagascar, and Kashmir (India). But the vast majority of these stones are easy to separate from blue sapphires from magmatic deposits like those in Australia and Thailand. Classifying stones in these kinds of categories would be more consistent. Stones from different types of deposits also tend to be more similar in appearance. However, there are always outliers so this wouldn’t eliminate the problem. Furthermore several years ago one of the world’s most well-known lab tried a similar system, and it never really took off. It seems the market was not ready for this type of system.

We must keep in mind that it is not as simple as just collecting data. How the data is collected can have an impact on results. A lot of our work involves the interpretation of data, and this interpretation is depending on the knowledge, attention to detail, and experience of the gemologist.

Hey Loungers,  Today we discover the parcours of Laurie and Simon Watt’s son, the arty beardy guy from the Mayer and Watt team: Geoffrey Watt.  Bourbon connaisseur, gem dealer and photographer, sieur Geoff scoffs at nothing and shares enthusiastically what he has discovered whether in artistic form or through IT Segways! But rather than listening to us debating about his merits how about we take a look at what he has to say? Geoffrey, the floor is yours buddy,    Welcome Mayer and Watt's Geoffrey on the floor with us today - Photo Credit: Geoffrey Watt   AsiaLounges: First of all, thank...

Hey Loungers, Many have mentioned that we do not interview enough females in these columns. While I disagree, I find myself interested to study a new pattern in our trade: The Path of Inheritance in the Trade, is it a curse, a boon or a bit of both? To that end, we have decided to interview Kamila Guerchouche about her new brand, Kaerche and used this opportunity to ask her a few questions about her path as a second generation gem dealer. If you are as interested in that story and potential new questioning arc, follow us with this very...

Hey Loungers, While most of those among you that know me know that I have always displayed a certain skepticism towards the appraisal world, it was, I must be honest, mostly born from a place of misunderstanding at best and complete lack of knowledge on the topic at worst. I was, somehow, looking at Rappaport and believed, perhaps foolishly, that appraisers and other pricing publications aspired to do the very same, I was wrong it seems. Having decided not to part ways with my legendary curiosity, I decided to go against my feelings and investigate a bit more about this...