Editor’s Note
Vincent Pardieu, a veteran field gemologist with decades of experience visiting mines worldwide, offers a rare glimpse into the realities of the gemstone trade. As he releases his first book, focusing on a Greenland ruby deposit, we explore the journey of a man often called the “Indiana Jones of precious stones.”
Field gemologist Vincent Pardieu has visited more mines than anyone else on Earth. On the occasion of the publication of his first book, focusing on a ruby mine in Greenland, the Frenchman opens up about the reality of the gemstone market.
Vincent Pardieu, a field gemologist, has spent twenty-five years chasing rubies, sapphires, and spinels.
He is called a “field gemologist.” For twenty-five years, Vincent Pardieu has traversed the valleys of Afghanistan, the forests of Madagascar, the plains of Mozambique, and the mountains of Burma to document, in situ, the reality of precious stone deposits. A former member of the AIGS – Asian Institute of Gemological Sciences in Bangkok – who also worked at the Gübelin laboratories in Lucerne and then at the GIA in Bangkok, where he built one of the world’s largest reference collections, he now advises laboratories, traders, and sometimes, mining operators.