Editor’s Note
This article highlights a critical challenge facing the jewelry industry: establishing reliable traceability for colored gemstones, from semi-precious varieties to rubies, emeralds, and sapphires. As consumer demand for ethical sourcing grows, this issue will become increasingly central to the market.
One of the greatest challenges the jewelry market will face in the coming years revolves around the question of sourcing colored stones. This term encompasses the immense variety of semi-precious stones available to workshops—from garnet and spinel to topaz, beryl such as aquamarine, and the vast group of quartzes—as well as the prestigious circle of precious stones: ruby, emerald, and sapphire.
Unlike diamonds, which are becoming increasingly traceable—from mine to cut—colored stones travel a long and sometimes opaque path before shining on the creations of renowned houses. Major luxury groups openly acknowledge the difficulties encountered.
The Kering and Cartier groups established a Responsible Jewellery Council (RJC) in October 2021, which aims to guarantee the provenance of these gemstones in the near future, though without committing to a definitive timeline.
“Harvested” from the river—not extracted, treated, or heated—the sapphires of Auvergne are collected only during the gold panning season, which requires the river to rest in winter.
The task is immense and difficult. For example, an artisanal sapphire mine in southern Madagascar can be occupied by thousands of independent miners, including children, working outside any legal framework, as reported by Glitz. These unregulated sites are scattered across the entire island off the southeast coast of Africa. It is impossible to verify working conditions because jewelers buy not from the mine but from traders.
In its impact report published in 2022, the house of Boucheron lists significant advances related to the traceability of noble materials like gold, platinum, and diamond, while also raising very concrete challenges related to precious stone extraction:
The jeweler emphasizes efforts to clarify the stone’s journey by ensuring responsible practices at every step of the value chain. These are long-term efforts but already paying off:
To our knowledge, Boucheron is the only house to have made such an ambitious commitment, although the jeweler acknowledges needing the goodwill of the entire industry to guarantee large-scale solutions.
The efforts made by the sector are significant. The vast majority of jewelers have thus renounced stones, though highly prized by customers, from Afghanistan or Myanmar, major conflict zones. Burmese rubies are now excluded from collections, while Sri Lankan sapphires are becoming increasingly rare due to dwindling reserves.
While large groups have a decisive role to play in regulating the mining sector, small players are, for their part, seeking relevant alternatives. This is the case for Mélanie Zacharias, who, after honing her talent at Chaumet overseeing heritage collections, now offers custom-made jewelry pieces created around Auvergne sapphires.
These stones have the great advantage of coming from an “alluvial” deposit: meaning they do not come from underground mining requiring the drilling of galleries in hard rock. They are extracted, or rather harvested, from rivers, usually located at the foot of steep cliffs or mountains.
In the 2021 exhibition dedicated to precious stones, held with the support of Van Cleef & Arpels at the National Museum of Natural History (MNHN), curator François Farges, a professor at MNHN, highlighted the uniqueness of these French sapphires, harvested in Haute-Loire and the Massif Central.
Auvergne sapphires with a very extensive color palette, crafted in a Parisian high jewelry workshop using recycled gold—the first collection of pendants imagined by Mélanie Zacharias draws its lines from ancient motifs.
