Whether or not it’s a stunning emerald engagement ring or a ruby heirloom necklace, a brilliant piece of jewellery can immediately elevate any outfit. And these treasured gems are way over simply lovely to take a look at—every gemstone, created deep inside the earth over hundreds of thousands of years, is completely distinctive, which implies there’s a magic to proudly owning one.

“Each gemstone is exclusive, identical to a fingerprint,” says New York-based tremendous jeweler Sandy Leong. “No two are ever alike, which makes designing jewellery with them such a private endeavor, each for me and for my shopper. It’s particular for the wearer of one in all my items to know that their piece is as one-of-a-kind as they’re.”

Admire the historical past

Shaped by means of intricate pure processes, gems are, in reality, crystallized minerals. Two of probably the most coveted stones—rubies (the pink number of corundum) and emeralds (a sort of beryl)—are created when the minerals are compelled collectively below excessive warmth and strain within the earth. Cool, proper?

These treasured gems are additionally steeped in historic significance and cultural lore. Egyptian emerald mines date again to 1500 BC; some cultures consider that putting one in all these brilliant inexperienced stones below your tongue helps you see the longer term and shield towards evil.

If emeralds are a queen’s gem, then rubies are a king’s stone. In Sanskrit, the phrase for ruby is ratnaraj, that means king of treasured stones. Some peoples believed that rubies held the very energy of life, and it’s nonetheless seen as a logo of dedication in the present day—this fiery stone is historically given on fortieth wedding ceremony anniversaries. “There are some uncommon distinctive coloured gems with provenance that discerning purchasers think about extra necessary than buying a particular diamond,” provides Vartness Knadjian, of watch model Backes and Strauss. In reality, giant pure rubies often value extra per carat than colorless diamonds.

Perceive the journey

How do these uncooked beauties make their path from forming deep inside the earth to dazzling on our necks and ears? There are a variety of methods to uncover these gems together with underground mining, moist digging, and open-pit mining. Gemfields, a number one provider of responsibly sourced coloured gems, prefers open pit mining for harvesting rubies in Mozambique and emeralds in Zambia.

Right here’s the way it works: Geologists start with the all-important job of finding the gems underground. Then they take away the overlying floor to disclose the gems earlier than washing them below excessive strain and transferring them to the remedy plant, the place they’re sorted into minutely detailed grades primarily based on measurement, form, colour and readability.

“Gems are distinctive: every tells a narrative, and no two are the identical,” says Josina von dem Bussche-Kessell, international gross sales director at Fabergé. “By means of our bespoke work, we regularly discover that purchasers inform us that sure gems ‘converse to them’ and due to this fact, deciding on gems for a bit is a extremely private course of.”

As soon as graded, the tough gems are bought by means of public sale to cutters, who then put together them for jewellery designers, able to work their magic remodeling each into a novel accent.

“A gemstone waits beneath the bottom for lots of of hundreds of thousands of years, however as soon as found it could take only one yr for it to achieve the buyer,” says Elena Basaglia, a gemologist at Gemfields.

Search for transparency

How will you ensure while you purchase a bit of funding jewellery that its provenance is as clear because the gems themselves? With rising demand from customers for responsibly sourced gems, transparency is now a crucial a part of the mining course of. “We’ve the ability to demand change by selecting to vote with our pockets and assist manufacturers which can be working in direction of leaving a constructive influence,” says Amie Tran, PR strategist at Eco-Age, a public relations agency that makes a speciality of “progressive sustainability options.”

To that finish, main manufacturers akin to Gemfields and their friends have developed The Gems and Jewelry Neighborhood Platform in a bid to make sure honest labor and higher environmental safety and governance. Gemfields, for instance, has partnered with conservation organizations to guard African wildlife and is funding farming tasks that generate revenue for native communities.

It doesn’t finish when the gem leaves the bottom, both. “Earlier than a cutter acquires a gemstone from Gemfields, they signal a declaration to make sure that they conduct enterprise in a accountable method,” explains Basaglia. The corporate additionally retains the topsoil eliminated in the hunt for gems to refill pits or replant bushes. “We’re mining a finite useful resource,” she emphasizes. “We should deal with the longer term and pay attention to the influence we’ve got, together with the advantages we are able to deliver to each the workforce and the area people.”

In the long run, says Basaglia, “It doesn’t matter what we discover, we acknowledge that each gemstone is a present from Mom Nature. We worth each. Shade is so necessary in individuals’s lives, and there’s something very magical about discovering that buried deep inside the earth.”

Discover out extra about find out how to store and magnificence rubies and emeralds at gemfields.com.