Demand for Colored Gemstones Rising in Bridal Market

By David Blomquist | June 04, 2026

Don’t look now, but while everyone’s talking about how lab-grown diamonds are shaking up engagement rings, colored gemstones are making a move.

Retailers and gemstone dealers on a JCK Talks panel in Las Vegas said color is increasingly the choice of both bridal and fashion customers looking to stand apart from the crowd.

“Color has never been more hot in my 30-year career,” Kimberly Collins, a dealer and jewelry designer based in Reno, Nev., said at the May 30 seminar. “You don’t even have to try to sell color. It’s selling itself.”

Danny Shaftel, CEO of Houston’s Shaftel Diamonds, noted that his customers are taking a closer look at sapphires, emeralds, and now bicolor tourmaline as well.

“We got some great earrings and rings,” he told JCK attendees. “People walk in, it’s sitting there, and it’s big, it’s bold, it’s beautiful—and it’s $20,000 instead of $200,000.”

Shaftel said many high-end clients who formerly might have only considered an engagement ring with a prominent natural diamond are now thinking about a colored stone at the center instead. He said it’s a way for them to clearly differentiate their ring from jewelry designed around large, inexpensive lab-grown stones.

“That six-figure client who has the money for a natural 3 to 5 ct. diamond, all of a sudden it’s not as special,” he explained. “So the conversation around ‘Let’s find you something unique, something that people will look at and know that it’s a natural gemstone’ has become a lot easier.”

Even rubies, among the most expensive colored stones, are selling well for engagement rings, according to Collins, who said she’s recently brokered four or five of them for bridal settings.

“If you’re looking for a ruby, you know that it’s more expensive,” Shaftel said. “The person who comes in for a ruby is more of a connoisseur who’s spent time looking and is okay with a 2 to 3 ct. ruby instead of a 5 to 7 ct. sapphire.”

It’s not just familiar colored stones that are selling well. “The green palette, from peridot to tourmaline, but also reds, pinks, purples are trending heavily,” said Collins, mentioning garnet as another colored gem getting more attention.

“Garnet is an untapped market,” she said. “Anyone who doesn’t have a spessartine colored garnet in their store, you’re crazy.” Collins said her firm and other dealers experienced a crush of business at Tuscon’s gem shows earlier this year.

The JCK panelists agreed that selling more color starts with intensive training of sales personnel. Jessie Vaughn, a buyer for the Lux Bond & Green group of jewelry stores in New England, begins with one-on-one introductions to colored stones for new staff during onboarding. That’s reinforced with a monthly email about gemstones, in-store training, and trunk shows from wholesalers.

“Continued education is extremely important,” she said. “It’s about getting our sales teams to be comfortable and show it.”

Like other segments of the jewelry business, gemstones took a hit over the last two years from President Trump’s tariffs. Bruce Bridges, CEO of Bridges Tsavorite, said the American Gem Trade Association (AGTA)—of which he is president—is trying to convince the administration that tariffs on gems backfire against American workers.

“We’re all for spurring manufacturing in the U.S., but this is actually hurting our U.S. manufacturers because 99% of everything this includes is not geologically present in the United States,” said Bridges.

Administration officials seem open to reinstating duty-free entry to the U.S. for loose gemstones, he said, but doing so has been bogged down by litigation over the tariff plan as a whole.

For retailers pinched by the higher price of gold and silver and the declining volume of natural diamond sales, Collins said color can provide a needed boost to the bottom line.

“It’s having its moment, and that’s the way you’re going to make your margin,” she said. “You’re not making the same margin with diamonds as you are with color, because it’s so unique.”

The panel was moderated by Victoria Gomelsky, editor-in-chief of JCK.

(Photo by Camilla Sjodin)