At the Independent Jewelers Organization (IJO) Louisville show in late July, colored stone vendors serving independent retailers doubled down on the year’s emerging trends, including beaded styles, cowboy motifs, and desert-hued diamonds.
Allen Dolberg at Zoma Color in Milwaukee, Wis., offered a wide variety of colored stone cocktail rings. He said that teal-colored gems, especially sapphires, were popular in recent years, but that, lately, a new palette had begun to resonate with buyers.
“Over the past nine months or so,” Dolberg said, “tastes have shifted to pure green: green sapphires and green tourmalines.”
Meanwhile, Sam Adris at Adris Oriental Gems, a dealer in New York City, featured a wide variety of loose gems, including a matched pair of rhodochrosite drops and a faceted champagne-brown diaspore from Turkey. Demand, however, is centered on sapphires, he said—mostly classic blue stones from Sri Lanka or Madagascar. Adris reported that sapphire prices have been stable over the past year—unlike aquamarine and tourmaline, which have increased.
“We’re also selling more unusual gems like moss agate in fancy cuts such as kite cuts,” Adris said.
Brecken Farnsworth, co-owner of Parlé, a gemstone jewelry manufacturer in Pocatello, Idaho, echoed the rising interest in unusual colored stones. Parlé showed a new range of rings, earrings, and necklaces—including several pairs of 14k yellow gold earrings featuring Montana agates in drop and triangular shapes paired with faceted stones in autumnal hues such as brown zircon, orange Montana sapphire, and citrine. She also mentioned increased demand for opaque gems such as chrysocolla, malachite, and lapis.
Beads were a strong seller, Farnsworth added, singling out a strand of blue-green Guatemalan jade beads with an opal pendant.
The designer Lika Behar, an IJO newcomer, showed a number of trendy turquoise bead strands and bracelets as well as chic cowboy-themed jewels, such as a boot pendant featuring Kingman turquoise.
At Imperial Pearl, the longtime pearl specialist highlighted collections that performed well at JCK Las Vegas, including a new line of Tahitian pearl and lab-grown diamond styles as well as 14k gold chains strung with freshwater pearls, akin to rosary necklaces.
The volatility in the gold market—the price of the precious metal peaked in January at $5,586 per ounce and has hovered around $4,000 in recent weeks—led some brands to introduce new collections in more accessibly priced materials. Brevani, a New York City-based jewelry manufacturer, responded by launching a new capsule collection of butterfly pins (they retail around $1,200) and stud earrings in anodized titanium.
Even the diamond merchants at IJO embraced color. Om Color Diamonds, a New York City company that specializes in yellow and brown diamonds, promoted its Luscious Lemons range of yellow diamond designs. Owner Bhavik Gandhi also showed off the brand’s Desert Diamonds display, tag-teaming on De Beers’ latest beacon campaign.
Gandhi said that while fancy color diamonds in a palette of desert-inspired hues had long been a niche product, lately the gems were drawing new interest from buyers looking for diamonds that stood apart from the sea of same-looking colorless lab-grown stones.
“In lab, everything is too perfect,” he said. “The brown category is not easily replicable in lab. They used to be called chocolate diamonds, then champagne, and now it’s ‘Desert Diamonds.’ The product has always been there but now they’re calling it something else.”
Top: Earrings in 14k gold with Montana agates, citrine, and diamonds, $6,745; Parlé
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