Tucson, Tariffs Update, Gold Volatility, De Beers: ‘The Jewelry District’ Podcast

By Natalie Chomet | March 11, 2026

Victoria Gomelsky and Rob Bates talk about the “time capsule” that was this year’s Tucson gem shows: They took place right after the gold price soared over $5,500 and right before Trump’s tariffs were struck down by the Supreme Court. Still, Vic says the mood was positive and the trends were clear—from reddish pink stones to the phrase “K-shaped economy,” she shares the refrains she kept hearing in Tucson. Rob then breaks down the status of tariffs post-Supreme Court ruling. The hosts both weigh in on the volatility of the metals market. Finally, Rob shares his thoughts on the sale of De Beers and other factors affecting the diamond trade.

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Title sponsor: De Beers (adiamondisforever.com)

Show Notes
05:00 Tariffs at Tucson
06:16 Metal price swings leading up to Tucson
07:45 K-shaped economy
09:00 Colored stone trends
10:45 Tariffs update
17:00 Gold price volatility amid geopolitical tumult
19:45 What’s happening with sale of De Beers sale
23:20 The “psychologically driven” diamond market

Episode Credits
Hosts: Rob Bates and Victoria Gomelsky
Producer and engineer: Natalie Chomet
Editor: Riley McCaskill
Plugs: @jckmagazine; adiamondisforever.com

Episode Transcript
This transcript has been abridged and edited for clarity.

Victoria:
Welcome to The Jewelry District. … I’m going to be talking about the Tucson gem shows—by the time people listen, they were about five weeks out, in early February. I just haven’t had a chance [before now] to share my takeaways on this podcast.

In Tucson, it was a different time. We’re going to talk about tariffs updates later, but of course they were a huge part of the conversation, especially for the international dealers that exhibit at the GJX show across from the convention center. The convention center is where the AGTA [American Gem Trade Association] Gem Fair takes place.

Most of the American dealers had inventory already in the country. Tariffs didn’t really complicate their lives coming into Tucson, but a lot of the dealers that brought in merchandise from overseas had some sort of certificate, which meant that they couldn’t technically sell the goods in Tucson. They had to take orders … then bring [the items] back to wherever they were from and ship them from overseas, which is really complicated. Especially if you’re sort of a buyer looking for a special stone, you really want to take that stone with you. That’s the whole point. So I don’t know how many of those deals got consummated post-Tucson, and everything is moot now. But it did have an impact on the trading environment.

The other big thing, if you’ll remember, was gold volatility days before Tucson. In late January, gold hit an all-time record high of around $5,589. Does that ring a bell?

Rob:
It was over $5.5K, I know that.

Victoria:
I had spoken to Jim Wyckoff, a Kitco analyst, who you, Rob, had introduced me to. He made clear that gold does fluctuate a little bit depending on the source you’re using for those highs.

Rob:
They use gold futures.

Victoria:
Comex futures is the standard, but it can fluctuate a little. So not everybody’s going to have the same record high, but we’re around $5,500 an ounce. Gold had come off its record high and had then come down quite a bit. And silver was riding this crazy wave and continues to—and platinum. All these things were top of mind for everybody in Tucson. Because even though most people were there to buy color, which seemed relatively stable compared to these other volatile markets, we’re jewelers. People are setting these gems, of course, in the metals.

It was a surprisingly good show, or series of shows, because Tucson isn’t just one show. I felt like the mood was good, although one phrase kept coming up. I can’t remember if we’ve used this phrase or just talked about the bifurcated market, but the words “K-shaped economy” seemed to be on everybody’s lips—the idea that the wealthy continue to spend and the market continues to grow, whereas those who are less affluent are winding down, struggling to make ends meet, certainly not buying luxuries like jewelry.

That seemed to hold true in Tucson, where a lot of the people who specialize in high-end stones had done great … in fact, had bragged about doing sales of $200,000 or $300,000 stones. Yet that’s their entire business. You put all your eggs in that one basket and you probably feel vulnerable, even if it’s a pretty healthy-looking basket.

Tucson was this distilled moment in time where we were still dealing with a lot of uncertainty around tariffs. The Supreme Court struck them down later in February. We’re still working through the logistics of what all that means. But Tucson feels like it was part of a different world.

Let’s talk about the colors and stones that seem to really resonate with buyers. I kept hearing “garnet, spinel, tourmaline.” I heard it from so many dealers, it started to feel like a chorus. This was clearly the takeaway.

Part of it is that Mahenge spinel, which is beautiful in its most iconic form of very pinkish red that can probably at its best even rival some pink sapphires. Mahenge spinel is very expensive … so it rivals the best sapphires in many ways and is now competing very much in that space.

Traditionally, sapphire has been the No. 1 gem—blue sapphire, for that matter. But these other colors, largely reddish pink tones, such as rubellite garnet, various tourmalines, spinels, were really popular. That red color theme that we’ve written about on JCK continues.

Blue-green stones: Paraiba continues to be another marquee stone. Paraiba from Brazil [is] hardly at all in the marketplace; I think if they’re clean, they’re snapped up. It’s such an in-demand stone, so you continue to see paraiba from Mozambique really burn up the market. Otherwise, there wasn’t a huge new find. Last year there was a lot of buzz around Guatemalan jade, but I didn’t see much of that this year. People were in pretty good moods given how complicated the trading environment was at that moment. Things have changed.

Rob, what can you tell us about the official word on tariffs? We know they were struck down, but are people getting refunds?

Rob:
We don’t know a lot yet. The Supreme Court ruled against the specific tariffs that President Trump had enacted using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. IEEPA, as everybody calls it. The administration had this very broad view: Because it viewed the current trade deficit as an economic emergency, it could enact tariffs anytime it wanted. It could put them on and take them off.

The Supreme Court ruled that [IEEPA] does not give the president authority to do that. In fact, tariffs is never mentioned in that particular piece of legislation. So a predominant amount of the tariffs that people in the industry have been talking about—the ones on India, China, and Botswana, all the ones since April—have basically been ruled illegal. That is why people are talking about refunds.

The president noted, correctly, that there are other ways to impose tariffs. He used Section 122 of the Trade Act to impose a 10% global tariff. So right after the Supreme Court struck down the tariffs, there was a 10% global tariff on most goods. The president said on Truth Social he wants to raise that to 15%. At the time of this taping, that hasn’t happened, but it might happen 20 minutes from now. We have no idea, right?

I think the difference between the tariffs that he can enact now and the ones that he claimed authority for—which the Supreme Court said he did not have authority for—was that under IEEPA, he claimed there was no limit. He could do all sorts of tariffs.

Under these new tariffs, they’re limited to 150 days, and the ceiling is 15%. So, we still have a 10% tariff on most things coming in, but it’s done in a very different way than it was previously, where it just could be, “I’m mad at this person. I’m putting a 20% tariff on.” What people hope is that there’s going to be a little bit more order and less drama.

Now, unfortunately for the jewelry industry, there had been a provision to an old executive order under the IEEPA tariffs that said any country that has a trade deal with the United States would be allowed to import certain items duty-free. Among them, and obviously the ones most relevant for the jewelry industry, are natural diamonds, natural gemstones, and natural pearls—not cultured pearls.

The European Union had a deal with the president. Polished diamonds from Antwerp have been allowed to enter the United States duty-free, with a 0% tariff. India was working on a trade deal with the president. That would mean that all diamonds from India, which is a huge source of polished diamonds and gemstones, would be allowed to be imported tariff-free. So those were both considered big wins for the industry.

While it’s not 100% clear and we haven’t gotten any confirmation from Customs, by all accounts, diamonds and gemstones from the European Union, which had been allowed to be imported duty-free, now have a 10% tariff. Now that the IEEPA tariffs have been cut down, in most cases the tariffs have gone down. The deal with India called for an 18% tariff. Currently, India has a 10% tariff, so it’s definitely saving there.

However, there was this plan to allow diamonds and gemstones into the country duty-free, which would have been huge, and certainly people in the diamond industry were very excited about it. Now that’s probably not happening, and it remains to be seen if the items on Annex III to this old executive order—[including] natural diamonds, gemstones, and pearls—will still be allowed in the country tariff-free if the country has no trade agreement with the United States. So that’s the big question.

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Victoria:
That great uncertainty has been reflected in the wider world. I don’t think we’re geopolitics experts here, so we won’t really talk too much about what’s happening in Iran. But that has thrown a wrench into certain aspects of the trade, primarily shipping out of the Middle East. When I talked to Kitco analyst Jim Wyckoff, he mentioned that he didn’t think gold would top $5,500 anymore unless there was another global catalyst. We spoke before the war started. Surprisingly, gold is $5,148, as I look at it right now … that’s still insanely high.

Rob:
What’s weird is that gold’s been very volatile lately. For a long time, it’s been on this steady climb upwards, and right after the attacks, I think it hit $5,300 or so, and then it went down to $5,000 or so, and now it’s $5,100, as you say. But it’s staying over $5,000.

Victoria:
For the March 14th edition of The New York Times, for the jewelry sections that run in the international print edition, I did a story—that’s in the editing stages now but will be out by the 14th—on the volatility. For my lead, I was focused on the volatility of gold but also the other metals. I [was thinking], “God, it looks like an EKG of a somebody in cardiac distress.” I wanted to run that past a doctor friend of mine to make sure that was accurate. I sent her the last two months of the gold price. She said, “I’d say that’s a patient in extreme distress right there.” So that was her take on the gold graph for the last two months.

Rob:
Right, because it went up nearly $300 in one day. Then it went down, under $5,000 again. It was crazy.

Victoria:
For people in the jewelry industry, the No. 1 issue of the year has been—and maybe last year, too, because gold was on the upswing and tariffs were in play—how the heck do you price things? How do you price things when you have to issue a price update every two months? How do you communicate these things? How do you replenish your inventory? How do you cope? Those challenges continue. Pricing remains an incredibly complicated thing.

I expect that’ll be another big topic when I head to Switzerland for the watch shows in April. The Swiss have struggled with that all year because the dollar again is down, the Swiss franc is strong, and they have to cope with all these different factors. Gold is a big factor for them, but a lot of luxury watches are in steel. It’s not just gold; it’s the currency, it’s everything. We live in a pretty topsy-turvy world, I would say.

What else is on your radar right now? I know there’s a lot of drama in the diamond department. Do you want to tell us anything you know about what’s new with De Beers?

Rob:
De Beers has been up for sale for the last two years. And its parent company, Anglo American, just wrote down what’s called its book value. Right now it’s worth $2.3 billion. This is the third time over the last three years that it has written down De Beers’ value. It seems to be doing it every year.

This time it wrote down its value by $2.3 billion, and now the end value is $2.3 billion. So basically it cut its value in half. A lot of people thought that was an extremely aggressive writedown. With De Beers up for sale, Anglo is acting like Costco: You put things on clearance. You want to get rid of it, so you put it at a very cheap price. That’s what Anglo seems to be doing. It’s very disheartening for De Beers, a company that just a few years ago was worth about $9 billion, and I think it was sold at one point for about $11 billion.

Obviously, lab-grown diamonds have played a big role. The fact that the natural diamond market share in the United States has eroded so dramatically has played a big role. The fact that the China market is not doing well is something that often gets overlooked, but that has also been a big problem. The general market uncertainty, the fact that De Beers is up for sale, it hurts trade confidence.

Botswana has been greatly hurt by what’s happening to the natural diamond market. It’s possible that some, maybe even all, the mines in Canada, will close in the near future. That was once a huge diamond producer. I think until everything gets settled and De Beers get sold, the diamond market is going to be in a tizzy.

As we’ve mentioned, Botswana says it wants to own a majority share of De Beers. Angola says it’s also interested in owning a substantial share of De Beers. Namibia as well. It makes sense for these countries to own De Beers because they have a stake in the natural diamond industry’s future. For most of us, if natural diamonds go down, it’s unfortunate, but most of us will survive. But for people in Botswana, Angola, and Namibia, this really is life and death. This is something that is important to them and their economies. It’ll be interesting to see how everything shakes out.

Gareth Penny, a former CEO of De Beers, is by all indications very interested in coming back to reshape the company and bring it back to what he called its leadership position and try to bring back some of the magic that was there in past years. But it’s going to be tough. The lab-grown market has really hurt. The China market has really hurt. And it all feeds on itself.

The diamond industry is a tremendously psychologically driven market. When people lose confidence, it really hurts the entire industry. There’s been something called the bullwhip effect, which means that sometimes when diamond prices go up, there’s this outside reaction from people in the business. Let’s say, for example, diamond sales go up by 2%; then all of a sudden, all these manufacturers feel hungry for goods and they start buying. So buying goes up more and more.

The same thing happens on the downside. If there’s less demand for goods, people start manufacturing less, and the downturn appears perhaps a little bit more than it is in reality. If you’re taking, let’s say, a 5% decline in sales and then you’re producing, let’s say, 10% less goods, because of an outside reaction, it swings up and down. It’s a problem, but hopefully it will get settled soon.

Sometimes you see people in the lab-grown business taking a certain glee in De Beers’ problems, but I think a lot of the honest ones will admit that the two products have a symbiotic relationship, and the reason people want lab-grown diamonds is because of natural diamonds. It’s pretty clear we’re dealing with something which resembles an existential crisis. I think people will always buy natural diamonds, but we’re dealing with a very serious crisis. If that ever happens, it’s not clear how a lot of retail jewelers will survive.

There’s a lot of questions about the future of the diamond market. This writedown of De Beers, it’s in a way symbolic, but it’s very humbling to the company. They mentioned at the earnings meeting that it’s going to have to make a lot more drastic cuts. This is a company that’s already cut $100 million from its bottom line. It’s not easy, it’s not pleasant. You hope for a dash of optimism. I’m hopeful that when De Beers get sold, that will at least help things stabilize. We talked a lot about a lack of stability, and that’s definitely something we’re seeing with the diamond business.

Victoria:
I have two examples of that existential crisis, or together they make one single counterintuitive example. This is from [JCKs] spring weddings special report that I wrote that went out every Wednesday in February. … In the final report of the spring wedding series, I had an interview with Martin Katz, the red-carpet Beverly Hills jeweler, very high-end. He did a revamp of his website last year and as part of that has a blog. But for the first time he decided to do wedding content on there.

I wanted something for the newsletter, so I called him up and asked, “Why, after all these years you’ve been doing jewelry, are you trying to promote your wedding business? Have you always been a bridal jeweler?” He said, “I’ve always had that business, but I started noticing this one thing over the last few months.” Several women who were getting engaged came to him, basically echoing each other, saying, “I’m so happy that my fiancé chose to buy a natural diamond and not some monstrous 8-carat lab-grown diamond.”

He noticed that and was more than happy to serve them with his natural diamond engagement rings. Essentially, his bridal business was booming because there was this reaction or backlash to the same-same look of lab-grown.

Yet in the same report, I did a story about The Knot’s annual wedding study, and the chief takeaway from it was that 61% of the 10,000 surveyed couples who married last year in the U.S.—61%—chose a lab diamond as their center stone.

So you have these competing narratives: Six out of 10 brides are choosing lab, and yet Martin Katz’s bridal business is booming. Maybe that’s all explained by this K-shaped economy that I brought up earlier. Maybe it’s that those with real means are going for natural, and the value conversation is perhaps a big part of that, or the symbolism. Maybe these are all wound up together. Yet most people don’t have that kind of money. They want the big look, and that’s what they’re doing [with lab-grown]. It is really hard to make sense of this marketplace.

It’s 2026, and lab has been fairly mainstream certainly since the pandemic but even before then—maybe 2018, when Lightbox came online. So it’s been a mainstream product for going on eight years, and yet we still don’t have a lot of clarity or equilibrium in the marketplace with respect to how these two poles of it interact. I hope in a few years’ time we have more clarity, or that something comes along to make us all agree somehow. I don’t have that crystal ball, but hopefully.

Rob:
When [my family and I] were in Florida, we had dinner with [my wife] Susan’s cousin, and his fiancée had a very sizable rock. And of course it turned out to be lab-grown. It is something of a mini-trend perhaps, or something that jewelers have said, that when people see these big rocks, they assume that they’re lab. That’s one of the reasons De Beers is doing Desert Diamonds, because they are imperfect.

I think the problem is, for most mining companies and most diamond miners, a lot of the money that they make is on small stones. If a lot of those sales go to lab-grown, for use in fashion pieces or what have you, and the nicer big stones stay natural, that’s going to really hurt the mining companies’ bottom line.

We are starting to see a lot of people with very big diamonds. At some point, I think it becomes a little over the top. But I don’t judge anybody if that’s what they want. That’s fine. It’s a good deal in a lot of cases. But it’s a very different way to look at diamonds.

I remember when Lightbox came out and they said this is jewelry that you wouldn’t mind if you lost it on the beach. A lot of people snickered at that, but I can tell you, I do have a lab diamond. It’s in my house, though I’m not sure where it is. If that was a 1-carat natural diamond, I would definitely know where it was. Again, it’s just a very different value proposition and a very different way of looking at diamonds.

Victoria:
Yes. More for us to talk about on all future episodes!

Any views expressed in this podcast do not reflect the opinion of JCK, its management, or its advertisers.