De Beers in Canada

[dimonfind]

Treasures from the ground

Tuesday, August 24, 2004

http://morganhilltimes.com/life/lifeview.asp?c=120668

Polishing rubies and sapphires in Chantaburi, Thailand. The country produces fewer mined gems these days, but remains a manufacturing and trading center.



Gems are among the most gorgeous examples of nature at work, even though the jewels we admire get a helping hand not afforded to phenomena like sunsets and snow-capped peaks. When we imagine gemstones, few of us picture hunks of rough minerals formed deep in the Earth’s core. Instead, it’s polished, faceted little dazzlers set in jewelry that we have in our mind’s eye - even though they may also have been heat-treated, dyed, irradiated, laser-drilled, oiled and fracture-filled to produce greater color saturation, clarity and weight. And if we don’t get excited by such images, people expecting gifts from us this holiday season certainly might.

Apart from geologists, few people would consider gemstones in their natural state to be particularly beautiful - though ideas of what is “natural” and “unnatural” are not entirely clear-cut. After all, even a gem merely extracted from its host rock could be considered “unnatural.”

Generally, though, humans have been untroubled by this hair-splitting for a long, long time. Our ancient ancestors mostly just liked the bright shiny things they came across in their daily lives. Millennia ago, people living inland collected the attractive pebbles they found along riverbanks, and coast-dwellers gathered up shells and coral.

Ater a while, people figured out they could stick gems in wet clay and bake them in the sun to create an even lovelier token. Or drill holes in mussel shells and string them together to make a necklace. After thousands of years of this sort of thing, people began mining, cleaving, polishing and shaping gemstones, harvesting and stringing pearls, and setting them in jewelry with improving metallurgical technology.

Which brings us to modern times - those three-month’s-salary engagement rings and all the rest. Let’s look at some of the gemstones we all know and love.

Diamonds

Diamonds are by far the most popular gems on the planet and, for a number of reasons, they have come to dominate the gemstone trade.

Diamonds are famously the hardest substance known to man - even being said to tip Cupid’s arrows - but they are also easily split along the cleavage points of their crystal formation, making them fairly easy for manufacturers to work with. The ancients valued diamonds - then mostly found in streams - for their hardness, though they did not have the technology to bring out a stone’s maximum beauty by polishing and faceting.

While fairly rare, and now almost exclusively extracted by deep-bore or open-cast mining - diamonds can be wrested from the earth at a high rate of return in countries where labor is cheap and environmental controls are lax. They have a high refractive index, meaning cut diamonds show a great deal of “brilliance,” “scintillation” and “fire” - in other words, they’re sparkly.

There are other gemstones rarer by far. Still others possess higher refractive properties. But a combination of several superior qualities caused diamonds to be prized long before market leaders De Beers ever stepped into the picture. Born out of the Kimberley, South Africa diamond rush of the 1860s and ’70s, De Beers formed through an unlikely alliance of two Englishmen - upper-class colonialist Cecil Rhodes and Barney Barnato, a boxer-cum-actor from London’s East End. The company - named after a Cape Colony farm they bought from a family called De Beers, and where they sank two diamond mines - quickly put strong emphasis on public relations, and by the early 20th century had been able to position the diamond as the “king of gemstones.”

The classification and study of diamonds over the past 100 years has far outpaced that of any other gemstone, only adding to the strength of the diamond’s market position. Meanwhile, colored diamonds - ranging from yellows, greens, blues and reds to browns, blacks and pinks - have found a new popularity in recent years, and fetch prices even higher than their “white” cousins on the market.

Not that it matters much to the trade which diamond you buy, because from the retail price the shop will keep around 40 percent, while the maunufacturer/wholesaler and De Beers (or some other mining company) will each pocket around 30 percent.

What’s for sure is that relatively little profit will trickle down to miners in those countries where the gems are mined, notably Botswana (now the world’s largest producer), Namibia, South Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone and Angola. Diamonds are also mined in Australia, Russia and Canada, and continue to be found in small quantities in India, Brazil, Indonesia, Burma and elsewhere.

To this day, De Beers, which was taken over in the 1920s by Ernest Oppenheimer, a former clerk in its London office, distributes the majority of the world’s rough diamonds to a select band of around 120 manufacturers. Though De Beers’ pre-eminence is no longer at its 1920s peak, when it controlled about 90 percent of the world’s rough diamonds, at around 65 percent - or $5.41 billion in 2003 - it is still sufficient to have it barred by anti-trust laws from operating in the U.S. (De Beers plead guilty to price-fixing before a U.S. court last month in a move that will apparently lead to the end of over 60 years of anti-trust rulings against the cartel.)

Emeralds

Along with diamonds, rubies and sapphires, emeralds are among the “precious” stones which attract the highest prices of all gemstones at auction, as well as on the wholesale and retail markets. Relatively soft and almost always marred by non-emerald mineral inclusions, emeralds are nonetheless highly prized - largely due to their color, which many regard as the epitome of green. Emeralds are member of a larger mineral family, beryl - but only green, gem-quality beryl is designated emerald.

Of late, however, emeralds have lost some of their luster, as the common practice of filling their usual fissures and cracks with nonemerald material to produce a smooth, clean-looking stone has come under fire from the public. While they remain one of the four “classics,” their prices have generally dropped over the past 10 years, from a peak of $11,000 per carat for high-quality goods to a low of $6,000 in 2000.

The best emeralds, it is agreed, come from Colombia, while deposits of lesser-quality green beryl occur in Brazil, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Madagascar, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Tanzania and elsewhere.

Rubies and sapphires

Corundum is the mineral classification of both rubies and sapphires, second in hardness only to diamond. But while a sapphire is corundum of any color other than red, rubies throughout history have been only associated with gems of the deepest crimson and fetch higher prices than even blue sapphires. Indeed, the ancients often described any transparent red gem as a “ruby,” including garnets, spinels and tourmalines.

Meanwhile, a constant debate is waged over the cut-off point between pink sapphire and ruby - with the most vitriolic arguments generally coming from those who possess stones perilously close to the divide.

Before diamonds came onto the scene, rubies and sapphires held positions of the highest esteem. Legends surrounding these gems are plentiful, such as the mythological valley of rubies that were guarded by gigantic birds of prey called rocs, appearing in the Arabian Nights and elsewhere. Treasure-seekers were supposed to have tossed pieces of meat into the inaccessible valley, where the rubies that literally covered the ground would stick to the meat. The rocs would eat the meat and pass out the rubies in their cliff dwellings. The treasure-seekers could then climb down and claim their prizes. And often get eaten by rocs for their troubles.

Many modern gemstone researchers believe the legendary valley is none other than Burma’s Mogok Valley, where rubies may have been mined since as early as AD 500, and probably long before. It is possible that the tales of predatory birds were created to keep invaders away from the mines, which today continue to yield the finest, “pigeon’s blood” rubies. Burma is the source of the finest rubies in the world, with Mogok the top location and Mong Hsu a sourceof lesser-quality gems. Cambodia, Vietnam, Madagascar, Kenya, Tanzania and Sri Lanka are also ruby-producing countries, while Thailand now has few of the deposits that once made it a top exporter.

The benchmark for blue sapphires - the most prized color in sapphires - are the highly prized Kashmir gems, but today Sri Lanka, Burma, Madagascar, Cambodia, Thailand and Australia are the chief sources. “Fancy color” sapphires - including pinks, greens, purples, yellows, as well as clear and nearly black corundum - are found throughout the world, most heavily concentrated in the main ruby- and blue sapphire-rich nations.



Semi-precious gems

For want of another term, “semi-precious” is the adjective attached to any gem that isn’t a diamond, emerald, ruby or sapphire. It’s a designation that isn’t well-liked by producers, dealers and retailers, who generally prefer “colored stones” to describe all gems except white diamonds. And who can blame them, when an incredibly rare and beautiful color-change stone like alexandrite is lumped together with common quartz? Or consider the gems with deep cultural significance, such as jade in China, or those with colors scarcely found anywhere else in the natural world, such as the vivid neon-blue of Paraiba tourmaline, discovered in Brazil in 1989.

Of course, such semi-precious gems often sell for prices that rival the precious quartet, while spinels, garnets, peridots, amethysts, aquamarines, bloodstones, opals and others get their day in the sun thanks to birthstone sales. Other semi-precious gems wax and wane in popularity; witness the tanzanite, tsavorite and spessartite fads of a few years ago, or the current craze in China for Canadian ammolite.

With regards to almost all transparent semi-precious gems, most connoisseurs prefer them to be “eye clean,” with no visible mineral inclusions. However, a small number of gems are actually valued for their inclusions, such as rutilated quartz, or for spectral phenomena, as with precious opal’s “play of color” and cat’s-eye chyrosoberyl’s dancing band of light. Semi-precious gems come from all over the world, with the heaviest concentrations in South and Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Amazonia.



Organic gems

All sorts of organic material is used in jewelry, from bones to leather to wood. But “organic” gems are generally taken to mean just three: pearls, amber and coral. Pearls are the natural result of mollusks coating irritating grit with a secreted substance but are now predominantly “cultured”, a process which involves inserting grit - usually small pieces of mollusk shell, actually - into harvested freshwater and oceanic mollusks. Amber received a new notoriety with the film “Jurassic Park,” and coral - popular with Italian jewelry designers and cameo artists - is increasingly rare due to over-harvesting and pollution.

We all know what coral is, but gem-quality coral is a pinkish, smooth variety found in the Mediterranean Sea and generally shaped into cabochons (oval-shaped pieces that are flat on one side) or beads. Amber is fossilized pine-tree sap, which sometimes contains the remains of insects and other creatures trapped in the sticky resin before it hardened, and is found primarily in the Baltic countries and the Dominican Republic.

Lookalikes

Again we must dust off our definitions of “natural” and “unnatural.” A synthetic diamond, strictly speaking, is a diamond - crystallized carbon - but few diamond lovers would agree. Up until recently, it was more expensive to create a synthetic diamond than to mine the real thing. Today, synthetic diamonds are almost exclusively used for industrial and high-tech purposes. For the most part, the “fakes” people buy are more properly termed simulants, or even “stand-ins.” Cubic zirconia, for example, is a synthetic gem, grown in a lab, and is a common diamond simulant used to keep the price of a jewelry piece low. What it isn’t, however, is a synthetic diamond. Glass is the most common gem simulant of all!

The term “simulant” probably reflects marketing agendas more than scientific classification - any time you see a gem, synthetic or not, extolled for its “diamond-like properties,” you’re hearing about a simulant. Meanwhile, everyone in the gem business being extremely touchy about their own products, many sellers of synthetics prefer the terms “created gems” or “man-made” gems.

Gem treatments fly even further below most consumers’ radar. Nearly all gems can be treated to improve their looks, from the gentle heating that brings out tanzanite’s purplish-blue color, to the irradiation of topaz in linear accelerators to achieve a royal blue coloration. Untreated gems generally attract much higher prices than treated stones - and these days they’re much rarer. Consumers should always ask about treatments from their jeweler.

The bigger picture

In recent years, consumers have generally become increasingly aware of the political and humanitarian repercussions of their purchases - and so, too, gemstones have been scrutinized. Because both gemstone mining and manufacturing are concentrated in poor countries, several aspects of the gem trade have come under fire.

Diamonds have received the most heat of late. The United Nations and several NGOs decry the trade in diamonds from war-torn African nations such as Sierra Leone and Angola, where factions fight for control of diamond mines whose proceeds go toward purchasing more weapons to terrorize civilians.

It has also recently come to light that Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda financial network may have included Sierra Leonean diamonds purchased through Liberia’s exiled president Charles Taylor.

Meanwhile, the use of child labor in gem manufacturing in India and elsewhere has drawn the attention of human rights activists for years. Political conditions in Burma and Colombia, the primary sources of rubies and emeralds respectively, have served to taint those gemstones, too.

For lovers of gems, these issues can be confusing. On the one hand, gem mining and manufacturing are vital industries in some of the world’s poorest economies. A consumer boycott or economic sanctions would have devastating consequences for the people who depend on gems for their livelihood.

On the other hand, there is a deep unfairness surrounding the plunder of such natural wonders from the developing world, brought to the West’s luxury markets for the equivalent of slave’s wages in many places. What wealth does flow back to the place of origin is generally scooped up by violent despots and greedy merchants instead of trickling down to the miners and gem-cutters themselves.

In the end, for many of us, gems may simply be things to be marveled at, and that’s as deep into the alternately beautiful and sordid business as we’d like to go.

Engagement rings aside, of course…