• How are mining and marketing different for diamonds and colored stones?
• How does the supply of a gem affect its marketability?
• How do treatments impact the sales of certain colored stones?

There’s a greater selection of colored stones available today than ever before. And new cutting techniques present familiar materials in interesting ways. Because there’s more choice, jewelry designers have to catch customers’ eyes with distinctive products and designs. 

A fine ruby can provide the warmth that a diamond’s icy beauty can’t match. Even so, diamonds are economically more important than colored stones. 

The US is the world’s largest gem-consuming market, followed by China. In 2016 US retail sales of diamond jewelry amounted to about $37 billion. By comparison, US sales of colored stone jewelry were about $6.4 billion—just a fraction of the diamond total. Sales of emerald, ruby, and sapphire jewelry made up the majority of the latter figure.

Promotion of diamonds changed when De Beers moved to a supplier-of-choice business model. This delegated diamond promotion to more players and converted a single-channel system to a multichannel system. However, because De Beers had spent many millions of dollars on global diamond advertising for decades before that, their efforts still play an important role in consumer demand. There is no single marketing source for colored stones, making the colored stone market far more diverse and fragmented.

Diamonds are also featured in many more types of jewelry. Even if a fine sapphire or emerald forms the centerpiece of a ring, it’s almost always surrounded by an array of diamonds. 

Multinational mining companies invest hundreds of millions of dollars and take many years to develop diamond mines, but the potential profits are enormous. The developers of Canada’s Ekati mine spent more than $700 million for development and early operation, but the estimated value of the diamonds in the ground is more than $8.6 billion.

Many diamond deposits are vast enough to sustain mining for decades. For example, the Jwaneng mine in Botswana is essentially a gigantic pit, 2 km (1.24 mi.) long, 1 km (0.62 mi.) wide, and 200 m (650 ft.) deep. But it’s the world’s most profitable diamond mine, with more diamonds per ton of ore than any other mine in Africa.

Because of the size of their potential output, most diamond mines are massive industrial operations. Colored stone mining of this size and scope is almost unknown. Most colored stone mining operations are small in scale, worked by individual miners who are working to feed their families and hoping for a chance at a better life.

Also, unlike diamond mines, colored stone deposits can be mined sporadically for centuries or exploited to exhaustion in just a few decades. You’ll learn more about colored stone mining in the next assignment. 

While approximately 80 percent of colored stones are mined by independent and small-scale mining operations, the last couple of decades have seen more investment by large multinational companies, including publicly traded companies. This has created larger and more sophisticated mining operations, as well as more consistent supplies of some stones. For example, a much higher percentage of the world’s emerald supply now comes from large mining operations.

As the global consumer market becomes more and more concerned with transparency, sustainability, and corporate responsibility, the challenges of establishing an ethical supply chain are greater for the colored stone industry than for the diamond industry. One of the greatest challenges is to protect both the investment of large corporations and the rights of independent miners, many of whom are unlicensed and operate outside formal channels.

Even though they’re not as economically important as diamonds, colored stones generate many billions of dollars worldwide, not only for the nations that mine and process rough gems, but also the manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers who turn them into jewelry products and sell them to consumers.

Some of the best-selling and most well-known colored stones are blue sapphire, tanzanite, ruby, emerald, cultured pearl, tourmaline, opal, amethyst, and red garnet. These gems are more familiar to most consumers than others like zircon and tsavorite garnet. The difference is due to a combination of factors. One is their availability, in terms of quantities produced. Another factor is their marketability, which often affects, and relies on, consumer preferences. The third factor has to do with treatments and their ethical disclosure, which requires clearly informing consumers about the nature of the gems they’re buying.

Technology and consumer sources of colored stones have played major roles in altering awareness and increasing sales of many colored stone types. Television shopping has even created markets for some stones that were once rarely used in jewelry, like scapolite and sphene. The ability to reach more than a hundred million households has helped a stone like chrome diopside become a strong seller, even though it had very little public recognition before newly developed consistent supplies appeared. New markets with strong purchasing ability and consumer markets open to new sources like China have also hugely affected the market.