The Orientation Premium

There is a moment in the life of every sapphire that decides more about how it will look than anything that happens before or after it. It is not the moment it forms. It is not the moment it is found, or heated, or certified, or set. It is the moment a cutter picks up the rough, turns it over in the light, and decides which way round to hold it against the wheel.

That decision is irreversible. It is made by eye, in minutes, usually by someone paid on the weight of what they return rather than the beauty of it. It is recorded nowhere on the paperwork that will follow the stone for the rest of its life. And it is, we will argue here, the least examined variable in the entire coloured-stone trade.

We are a family gem house. Three generations of us have worked the Ceylon gem fields since the 1960s; we own mines in Sri Lanka and we cut and polish in our own factory, which means the decision described above is one our own people make, on our own material, every working week. This report is our attempt to explain it properly and in public — including the parts that do not flatter us, and including the evidence that complicates our own argument.

The argument, stated plainly

Gold has become expensive enough to change the shape of jewellery. In the second quarter of 2026 the World Gold Council recorded global gold jewellery demand at 278 tonnes, down 17% year on year from 335.3 tonnes, which it called “one of the weakest second quarters in our data series” — while spending on gold jewellery rose 14% to around US$40 billion. The Council put the divergence in one sentence: “consumers bought less gold in fine-weight terms, but spending remained far more resilient.” Its explanation of how buyers adapted is equally direct: “Lightweight products gained share across many markets, while lower-carat designs expanded in parts of Asia.”

Mounts are getting lighter. Budgets are not shrinking. When metal takes up less of a jewel, something else has to carry it — and in a coloured-stone piece, that something is the stone. Which makes it worth asking, with more rigour than the trade usually applies, what actually determines whether a given stone is worth carrying.

The evidence against us

Before going further we should put the strongest counter-argument on the table, because it is real and it comes from a serious source.

In August 2026, JCK reported dealer Eric Braunwart of Columbia Gem House describing the opposite pressure at the trade’s mid-tier. His customers, mostly small and medium designers working from fixed lines of credit, were finding that metal ate the budget first: “When a designer sells through inventory, more of the replacement capital goes to metal than in previous years, even with gold’s recent pullback. The share going to stones has shrunk.”

That is a direct contradiction of the simple version of our thesis. It deserves to be quoted rather than buried, and it forces a more honest formulation.

The market is not migrating cleanly from metal into stone. It is splitting. At the top, where goods are untreated and fine, Rapaport reported in January 2026 that dealers see “limited resistance from buyers when stones are untreated and check all the boxes of top color, cut, clarity and crystal quality”. At the designer mid-tier, metal is squeezing the stone budget. Both things are true at once.

Which sharpens rather than weakens the point of this report. If the metal is taking a larger bite of every budget, then the stone that remains has to earn its place more convincingly than it used to. Whether your stone budget is expanding or contracting, the question is the same: is this particular piece of corundum performing as well as it physically can?

Very often it is not. And the reason is almost never the one buyers are taught to look for.

Sapphire is corundum, and corundum is optically uniaxial: it has a single unique crystallographic direction, the c-axis, and light behaves differently depending on its path relative to that axis. Light travelling through the crystal is split into two rays with different vibration directions. As Richard W. Hughes puts it in Gems & Gemology, “The o-ray always vibrates perpendicular to the c axis and the e-ray vibrates parallel to the c axis.”

Because the two rays are absorbed differently as they travel, they do not deliver the same colour to your eye. This is pleochroism — in a uniaxial stone, dichroism. It is not a defect. It is a property of the material, present in every sapphire ever mined.

The practical consequence is that a sapphire has no single colour. It has a range of colours, and which part of that range you see depends on the direction you look through it. Turn the rough in your fingers before it is cut and the blue visibly strengthens and weakens. The cutter is not choosing a shape. The cutter is choosing which of those blues the finished stone will show for ever.

Why the culet is the darkest part of a stone

There is a second, subtler consequence that almost no buyer is taught, and it explains a great deal about why stones look the way they do. Within a single finished gem the colour is not evenly distributed. Hughes describes the effect precisely: “the color near the girdle will appear slightly less intense than that near the culet, because the percentage of e-ray mixing into the color increases as light approaches the girdle.”

Read that carefully, because it contains the whole mechanism. The more e-ray mixes into the light path, the less intense the colour reads. Light paths near the culet carry proportionally less of it; light paths out toward the girdle carry more. So the deep centre of a stone is its most saturated region, and the rim is its palest — before any question of zoning or inclusions enters the picture.

Hughes adds the complicating factor in the same passage: “Color zoning can result in significant color variations, as can different path lengths of light.” Sapphire commonly grows in bands of differing colour intensity. So the cutter is working with two overlapping problems at once — an optical gradient inherent to the crystal, and a physical distribution of colour inherited from how the crystal grew.

The orientation convention

The trade has a settled answer to the first problem. Hughes states it in one line: “Natural corundum is generally oriented with the c axis perpendicular to the table, which tends to provide the best color and weight retention.”

That sentence is worth sitting with, because it contains a fact that runs against intuition and against a great deal of loose commentary. In corundum, the orientation that gives the best colour is generally also the orientation that gives the best weight retention. For this material, the cutter is not usually forced to choose between beauty and yield at the orientation stage. Doing it correctly is not an act of sacrifice.

Which raises an uncomfortable question. If the correct orientation costs nothing, why are so many sapphires oriented carelessly?

The answer is that the orientation decision is only the first of several, and the ones that follow are where the real conflict of interest lives.

Gem cutters are not paid to make beautiful stones. They are paid to return value, and value is measured on a scale.

Hughes and his co-authors state the position without euphemism in Colored Stone Grading: A Heretic’s Guide: “The job of the cutter is to return the most expensive stone possible, not necessarily the most beautiful. At times that means saving weight.”

This is not an accusation of dishonesty. It is a description of a rational response to how the market pays. A cutter who returns a 2.05 ct stone that lights up beautifully, when the rough would have yielded a duller 2.40 ct, has in most commercial contexts destroyed value rather than created it — because the buyer down the line is paying against a weight bracket, and there is no line on any invoice for ‘better proportioned’.

So the pressure runs one way, consistently, at every stage of the chain, and it is not a secret. It is simply not discussed with the people who eventually buy the stones.

The Sri Lankan habit

Here we must say something about our own material, because a report that criticised everyone else’s cutting and exempted Ceylon would not be worth publishing.

Sri Lankan sapphire has a characteristic crystal habit, and that habit produces a characteristic cutting fault. The same source states it plainly: “Sri Lankan material (which typically occurs in spindle-shaped hexagonal bipyramids) is generally cut with overly deep pavilions, while Thai/Cambodian rubies (which occur as thin, tabular crystals) are often far too shallow.”

A spindle-shaped bipyramid is a tall crystal. Cutting a shallow, well-proportioned stone from it means throwing away a great deal of its length. Cutting a deep one means keeping it. The rough itself pushes the cutter toward depth, and the payment structure pushes in the same direction, and the result is a regional tendency that has persisted for generations: Ceylon goods that weigh more than they look.

We say this as a house whose stones come out of that same ground and that same tradition. It is not a reason to avoid Ceylon sapphire — it is the finest blue material on earth and we have built three generations on it. It is a reason to measure the stone in front of you rather than assume that an origin report settles the question of quality. It does not. Origin tells you where a stone was born, not how well it was finished.

The recognised name for the problem

The trade already has a term for the extreme version of this. Writing in JCK, Richard B. Drucker described it: “Often, gems such as rubies are seen in ‘native’ cuts with excessive bulge, deep pavilions, and shallow crowns. While the intent here is clearly weight retention, the gems may still command high value.”

Note the final clause, because it is the honest part and it must not be dropped. A heavy, deep, imperfectly proportioned stone can still be a valuable stone — if the colour and the material are exceptional, the market will pay, and it should. Poor proportions do not make a gem worthless. They make it a gem that is not performing at its own potential, which is a different and much more common problem.

Once orientation is settled, the cutter’s remaining decisions are about angles. Get them wrong in one direction and the stone leaks light. Get them wrong in the other and it goes dark. Both faults are geometric, both are permanent, and both are visible to anyone who knows what they are looking at.

The window

A window is a pale, washed-out patch in the middle of a stone through which you can more or less see the tablecloth. It happens when the pavilion is too shallow. Hughes described the mechanism in Gemological Digest as early as 1988: “Light falling directly from above strikes the pavilion within the critical angle and so exits as unplanned leakage, never to be seen again.”

Light that leaves through the bottom of a stone is light that never comes back to your eye. It is colour you paid for and cannot see. A correctly angled pavilion does the opposite: “Light striking the first pavilion facet is well outside of the stone’s critical angle and so is totally (100%) internally reflected.”

Extinction

The opposite fault produces the opposite symptom. “Extinction is used to describe dark areas where little or no light returns to the eye,” Hughes writes, and the cause is a pavilion cut too steep: “When pavilion facets are cut at too steep an angle, light from above exits the side of the pavilion as unplanned leakage.”

Some extinction is normal and even desirable — it is part of what gives a gem contrast and life rather than a flat, painted look. A stone with none at all usually has a window instead. The fault is not the presence of dark areas but their dominance: a stone that reads as a dark ring around a black centre is a stone whose colour is being withheld from you by geometry.

This is why so much sapphire disappoints under ordinary indoor light. It is not that the colour is absent. It is that the stone is not returning it.

The number

Here is the part of this report that a reader can act on without any equipment beyond arithmetic.

The trade has a working benchmark for total depth, and it has been published for decades. Drucker, in JCK: “For colored stones with acceptable crown and pavilion angles, the total depth percentage should normally be between 60% and 70%.”

Total depth percentage is simply the stone’s depth divided by its width, expressed as a percentage. If a stone measures 9.61 × 7.10 × 5.70 mm, its total depth is 5.70 ÷ 7.10, or about 80% — comfortably outside that band, and a signal that weight has been retained in the pavilion. If it measures 9.47 × 9.39 × 5.31 mm, the figure is about 57%, which points the other way, toward shallowness.

Two cautions, because this number is a torch and not a verdict. First, the benchmark is a norm for well-proportioned material, not a law; certain shapes and certain rough legitimately sit outside it. Second, depth percentage says nothing about whether the angles within that depth are correct — a stone can fall inside the band and still window. It is a first filter, not a final judgement.

But it is a real filter, it costs nothing, and almost nobody selling you a sapphire expects you to apply it. Which brings us to the question of why the measurements needed to apply it are so often unavailable.

To understand why cutters behave as they do, you have to look at how coloured stones are priced — because the pricing structure is not smooth, and that is the whole story.

Per-carat prices rise with size. Gemworld International, publisher of the GemGuide price guide used across the trade, states the principle and the compounding effect directly: “As the weight of a gem increases so does the per carat price… The expected premium for a 3.00 ct. natural fine ruby or sapphire is greater than would be observed for 1.00 ct. size of comparable quality.”

Crucially, this escalation is not continuous. It is administered in brackets, and the brackets are the reason a fraction of a carat can matter more than a visible improvement in beauty. A stone that lands just above a bracket boundary is priced on a higher schedule than one just below it — same material, same quality, different shelf.

The granularity of those brackets is itself a live subject in the trade. In its September/October 2025 sapphire charts, GemGuide moved heated sapphires under 10 ct to single-carat increments and split the old 10.00–19.99 ct band into four separate brackets — 10.00–10.99, 11.00–12.99, 13.00–14.99 and 15.00–19.99 — a restructuring reported by the Roskin Gem News Report in August 2025. Gemworld president Stuart Robertson, quoted in the same report, described conditions at the top of the market: “In the larger, finer goods in any of the no-heat sapphire categories, it’s still a sellers’ market.”

Now put yourself at the wheel with a piece of Ceylon rough that will finish either as a well-proportioned stone just under a bracket boundary, or as a slightly overweight stone just above it. The second is worth demonstrably more money on the day it is sold. The first is more beautiful for the next fifty years. There is no mechanism anywhere in the chain that pays you for the second option.

That is not a moral failing of cutters. It is a structural feature of the market, and it will not change because buyers are told to care about cut. It will change, if it changes at all, when buyers start measuring.

What this does to price per carat

One consequence deserves stating because it is routinely misread as a pricing error. Because escalation is administered in brackets and quality factors compound, a smaller stone can and frequently does carry a higher price per carat than a larger one of different origin, treatment or quality. Per-carat price is a function of the whole stone, not a rate card applied to weight. Comparing two sapphires on price per carat alone, without holding origin, treatment and quality constant, produces a number that means very little.

It is easy to discuss cutting as an abstraction. It is not one. It is an industry of people, most of them in a small number of places, and one of those places is the town our family has worked out of since the 1960s.

Ratnapura means city of gems. It sits in the wet lowlands of Sabaragamuwa, where the gem gravels have been worked for centuries and where a substantial share of the world’s fine blue sapphire enters the market. From 31 August to 2 September 2026 the National Gem and Jewellery Authority holds Gem City Ratnapura 2026 at the Grand Silver Ray Hotel, under the theme “Home to the Finest” — described by the Authority as “an international gem and jewellery exhibition that will be held from 31 August to 2 September 2026”.

The scale of the industry behind that exhibition is not widely appreciated outside Sri Lanka. According to the Sri Lanka Export Development Board’s industry capability report of January 2025, “The entire industry employees around 650,000 persons including Miners, cutters and polishers, dealers, jewellery designers and Craftsmen, mechanists and sales people”. The same report records total diamonds, gems and jewellery exports of US$281.64 million in 2024, of which coloured gems accounted for US$108.28 million, with the figures attributed to Sri Lanka Customs.

We note, in the interest of accuracy, that the Board’s own sector web pages carry a materially lower employment figure than its report does. We quote the report and flag the discrepancy rather than choosing whichever number suits the argument.

Why the geography matters to the decision

Cutting is not distributed evenly across the world, and neither is cutting style. A stone’s proportions carry the fingerprint of where it was finished and what the rough looked like when it arrived — which is exactly why Sri Lankan goods tend to run deep and Thai and Cambodian goods tend to run shallow. These are not accidents of individual skill. They are the accumulated logic of particular crystal habits meeting particular payment structures over a very long time.

It also means the decision is fixable at source, and only at source. Once a stone is cut, the options are to accept it as it is or to recut it and lose weight. Nobody downstream — not the dealer, not the laboratory, not the retailer, not the buyer — can undo an orientation decision. They can only price it, and mostly they do not.

This is the whole reason a house would go to the expense of running its own cutting factory rather than buying finished goods, which is cheaper and vastly simpler. It is not romance about craft. It is that the single decision with the largest and most permanent effect on the stone is made at exactly one point in the chain, and if you are not standing at that point you do not control it.

The context for all of this changed sharply in 2026, and the change came from the metal rather than the stone.

The World Gold Council recorded the LBMA (PM) gold price averaging “US$4,506.29/oz in Q2” of 2026 — 37% above the Q2 2025 average of US$3,280.4, and 8% below the record Q1 2026 average of US$4,872.9. Trade reporting captured the same shock from the bench. National Jeweler, in June 2026, quoted David Siminski of United Precious Metals: “In 2025, gold was $2,625 an ounce. So far in 2026, the price has basically doubled ($5,340 was its 2026 peak as of press time).” The same report recorded platinum moving from around US$800 to about US$1,960, and silver rising from US$28 to a 2026 peak of US$114.

The effect on what people actually bought was immediate. Global gold jewellery demand fell to 278 tonnes in Q2 2026, down 17% year on year — “one of the weakest second quarters” in the Council’s series, and elsewhere in the same report described as jewellery demand falling “to its lowest quarterly volume since the pandemic”. Yet the value of what was bought went the other way: jewellery spending rose 14% year on year to around US$40 billion in the quarter, and across the first half of 2026 the global value of jewellery demand “rose to US$86bn in H1’26, up 22% y/y from US$71bn in H1’25, despite weaker tonnage demand”.

Buyers did not stop buying. They stopped buying weight. The Council describes the adaptation: “Lightweight products gained share across many markets, while lower-carat designs expanded in parts of Asia.” In India specifically, “Demand increasingly gravitated towards lighter-weight jewellery, while organised retailers continued to benefit from growing sales of studded jewellery and lower-carat products.”

Designers responded with more radical substitutions. Reporting from AGTA GemFair Tucson in February 2026, National Jeweler noted that with gold roughly double the prior year and silver tripled, “some designers are getting creative with alternative materials, even setting higher-quality gemstones in metals like titanium and steel.”

The honest reading

It would be convenient for a gem house to conclude that all of this money has flowed into stones. The evidence does not support so tidy a conclusion, and we said so at the outset: at the designer mid-tier, Braunwart’s account in JCK is that metal is consuming the credit line and “the share going to stones has shrunk”.

What can be said with confidence is narrower and, we think, more useful. The mount is no longer doing the heavy lifting it once did. A lighter setting hides less and contributes less. Where a substantial gold mount once carried a proportion of a jewel’s presence and cost, a slender one carries almost none — which leaves the stone standing on its own in a way it did not have to a few years ago.

At the same time, the top of the stone market has not softened. Rapaport reported in January 2026 that dealers see “limited resistance from buyers when stones are untreated and check all the boxes of top color, cut, clarity and crystal quality”, with replacement difficulty rather than speculation underpinning the price structure. Note that cut appears in that list, from a dealer, unprompted.

The same report carries a concrete figure for the material most readers of this report will actually be shopping for. Maria Belmont of Bangkok-based KV Gems told Rapaport: “A 1-carat untreated, loupe-clean royal-blue sapphire that earlier traded at near $3,000 per piece now sells in the $4,000 to $5,000 range.”

Rising replacement cost for good material, thinner mounts, and squeezed stone budgets in the middle of the market all point the same way: there is less room than there used to be for a stone that is not performing.

A fine sapphire today travels with paperwork, and that paperwork has become markedly better over the last two decades. It will generally establish that the stone is natural corundum, state its measurements and weight, describe its colour, and disclose whether it has been heated. Where the laboratory offers it, the report may also give an opinion on geographic origin.

These are hard-won achievements and we do not diminish them. Treatment disclosure in particular is the foundation of trust in this trade, and the standards behind it are still being tightened. Writing ahead of the 2026 CIBJO Congress in Vicenza, Italy, Dr Hanco Zwaan, head of the CIBJO Gemmological Commission, set out the case for the Gemmological Commission to remain the forum for “laboratories to discuss all pressing issues, to harmonise practices and nomenclature, to promote speaking the same language”, citing the “critical need to harmonise best management practices, technical requirements and testing protocols, so as to ensure public confidence in gemmological reports”.

The same congress cycle produced a decision that shows how seriously the language question is now taken. In CIBJO’s pre-congress report on coloured-stone terminology, Charles Abouchar of the Coloured Stone Commission set out that “Only the term ‘synthetic’ will be permitted from September 2026 onwards to describe ‘artificial products having essentially the same chemical composition, physical properties and structure as that of their naturally occurring counterpart’”. The reasoning given is explicitly about money: “If a ruby is given a colour description ‘pigeon blood’ in a laboratory report, it will command a premium price in the market, the client, not aware that it is not an international standard, may pay an unjustified price.”

That is a striking admission and an important one. The trade’s own standards body accepts that a word on a report moves the price of a stone. It follows that the absence of a word moves it too.

The silence about cut

Which brings us to the gap. The trade’s long-standing working position on cut in coloured stones was stated bluntly by Drucker in JCK: “The cut is generally considered the least critical factor in grading a colored stone.”

The same passage, however, contains the observation that undermines the position: “While the deduction for a poor cut may be small, windowing or extinction can adversely affect the color grade.”

Read those two sentences together and the circularity becomes visible. Cut is treated as marginal — but cutting faults degrade the colour, and colour is the factor everyone agrees is decisive. The penalty for bad cutting does not disappear. It is quietly re-labelled as a colour problem, and the buyer is left believing they bought a stone with mediocre colour rather than good colour badly presented.

It can be done, and one laboratory does it

We should be precise here, because it would be easy and wrong to claim that no laboratory assesses cut in coloured stones. At least one does, in detail.

American Gemological Laboratories issues a Prestige Report with Grading which states that “The AGL Cutting Grade evaluates the proportions and geometry of the gem’s shape and cut”, alongside a finish grade that “describes the finer details of symmetry and polish”, a brilliancy assessment, and a depth percentage. AGL describes the full analysis as evaluating “the color, clarity and cutting of a gemstone using AGL’s proprietary grading standards”, integrated into an overall quality rating.

So the capability exists. The methodology exists. What does not exist is demand: buyers do not routinely ask for cut assessment, so most stones do not travel with one, and a market that does not price a quality does not receive it.

We are not calling for a mandatory cut grade for coloured stones. Corundum arrives in too many shapes and habits for a single proportion standard to be sensible, and a badly designed grade would do more harm than the silence does. What we are saying is narrower: the measurements needed to form your own judgement are cheap, objective and already recorded by whoever cut and weighed the stone. There is no good reason for them to be withheld.

We have called this report The Orientation Premium because that is the thing being quietly transferred. When a stone is well oriented and well proportioned, the buyer receives a premium in performance that they did not pay for and were never told about. When it is not, the buyer pays for weight and colour that the geometry then declines to deliver. The premium exists either way. It is simply not itemised.

Here is how to find it without a laboratory.

1. Get the measurements, in millimetres, all three

Length, width and depth. Not “approximately 8mm”. Three numbers. A seller who cannot supply them either has not measured the stone or would prefer you did not do the arithmetic. Both are informative.

2. Run the depth percentage

Divide depth by width. As a first filter, expect roughly 60–70% for coloured stones with acceptable crown and pavilion angles. Well outside that band in either direction is a question to ask, not a disqualification — some shapes and some rough legitimately sit outside it, and a beautiful stone that reads 74% is still a beautiful stone.

3. Compare millimetres to carats

Two sapphires of the same weight can differ substantially in the area they cover. A stone cut with a deep pavilion carries its weight below the girdle where you cannot see it; a shallower stone spreads that same weight across the finger. Neither is automatically better — but if you are paying by the carat and wearing by the millimetre, you should know which one you are getting.

4. Look at the stone face-up, in ordinary light, at arm’s length

Not under a jeweller’s lamp, which is designed to flatter, and not in direct sun. Ask yourself two questions. Is there a pale patch in the centre through which you can nearly see the surface behind it? That is a window. Is the stone predominantly dark, with colour visible only at the edges? That is extinction dominating. A good stone shows a lively mix of bright and dark, with colour reaching the centre.

5. Tilt it

Rock the stone gently. Windows tend to appear and disappear as the angle changes; the pale patch will swim about. Colour zoning often reveals itself the same way — a band that was hidden face-up will slide into view. Ten seconds of tilting tells you more about a stone than any photograph.

6. Read the treatment line before the origin line

Origin is the glamorous field on a report and the one most likely to be waved at you. Treatment is the one that changes what you are buying. Both should be stated plainly and in writing. If a seller volunteers treatment before you ask, that tells you something about the seller as well as the stone.

The two questions

Finally, two questions that are worth asking precisely because they are unusual, and because the answers are revealing whoever you are buying from.

“What are the three dimensions, and what is the total depth percentage?” This asks the seller to hand you the tool for checking their own stone.

“Was this stone cut for weight or for colour?” Almost nobody is asked this. An honest dealer will tell you the truth, which is often that the rough dictated it. A dealer who does not know did not cut it and has not asked.

What we have changed at our end

It would be poor form to publish this and not act on it. Every loose stone we offer carries its three measurements and its treatment status on its own page, so that any reader can run the check in section 2 against our inventory without asking our permission or taking our word for anything. We would rather be measured than trusted.

We would also rather be corrected than admired. If you run these checks on one of our stones and reach a conclusion we should hear, the address is at the foot of this report, and we will publish the correction.

A report that asks buyers to measure things should be willing to show its own workings.

Method

Every factual claim in this report was traced to a named source with a printed publication date, and the supporting wording was read on the source page itself rather than taken from a search summary. Claims were then re-checked independently against the original page, with quotations compared word for word and figures compared digit for digit.

That process removed material. Several plausible and widely circulated statistics did not survive it, and are absent from this report as a result.

What we rejected, and why

• A frequently repeated figure of a 60% rise in sapphire prices over a four-month cycle. It is real, but it is from trade reporting published in June 2023, and it circulates without its date. It describes a different market from the one this report examines.
• Every “2026 sapphire price chart” of the kind produced by content farms and affiliate sites. These publish per-carat tables with no stated methodology and no attribution. None was used.
• A specific numeric yield figure for sapphire rough to finished stone. Plausible numbers are widely quoted; we could not trace one to an authoritative source, so we have not given one.
• A documented before-and-after account of native cut versus Western recut. We could not verify one and have not implied one.

Limitations

Four, stated plainly.

The 60–70% depth benchmark is long-standing trade guidance, not a standard. Its clearest published statement dates from 1998. We regard it as sound as a first filter and have presented it as nothing more.

The practice of placing a colour zone near the culet is an inference. The optical basis — that colour reads more intensely near the culet than near the girdle — is directly sourced. The cutting practice that follows from it is our own reading, informed by our factory, and is not quoted from a published authority.

We have not established what GIA, SSEF and Gübelin coloured-stone reports do and do not state about cut. We attempted to and could not confirm it from those laboratories’ own documentation within this study. Our argument therefore rests on the trade’s general position and on AGL’s published grading, not on a claim about any of those three laboratories.

We are not disinterested. We sell sapphires and we operate our own cutting factory, so an argument that cutting matters is an argument that flatters our business model. Readers should weigh the sources rather than the source of the report. Every one is linked below and every one can be checked without us.

Sources

All sources were live at the date of publication.

1. World Gold Council, Gold Demand Trends Q2 2026 — Jewellery, 30 July 2026.
2. World Gold Council, Gold Demand Trends Q2 2026 (overview and Table 1), 30 July 2026.
3. Richard W. Hughes, Pleochroism in Faceted Gems — An Introduction, Gems & Gemology, Vol. 50, No. 3, Fall 2014, pp. 216–226 (Lotus Gemology).
4. Richard W. Hughes, Brilliance, Windows, and Extinction in Gemstones, Gemological Digest, 1 February 1988 (Lotus Gemology).
5. Richard W. Hughes, E. Billie Hughes & Wimon Manorotkul, Colored Stone Grading: A Heretic’s Guide, Lotus Gemology, 1 January 2017.
6. Richard B. Drucker, Techniques for Grading Colored Gemstones, JCK, 1 October 1998.
7. Sam Cooley, The Middle of the Gem Market Hasn’t Disappeared. It Changed Addresses., JCK, 12 August 2026.
8. Richa Goyal Sikri, An Incongruous Moment for the Gemstone Industry, Rapaport Magazine, 28 January 2026.
9. Lauren McLemore, Colored Gemstone Experts Talk Tariffs, Trends in Tucson, National Jeweler, 17 February 2026.
10. Natalie Francisco, State of Design: Only the Innovative Will Survive, National Jeweler, 3 June 2026.
11. Michelle Graff, White Diamonds Lead Sotheby’s Auction, Blue Diamond Does Not Sell, National Jeweler, 14 May 2026.
12. Beyond the Blue: Sotheby’s Geneva High Jewelry Sale Delivers Plenty of Surprises, Roskin Gem News Report, 4 June 2026.
13. GemGuide Pricing Update: Sapphire Charts in September/October Show Notable Changes, Roskin Gem News Report, 25 August 2025.
14. Gemworld International, Value Factors, GemGuide, 15 May 2017.
15. CIBJO, Seventh pre-congress Special Report considers standards required to ensure integrity of gem lab reports (Gemmological Commission, Dr Hanco Zwaan), 6 August 2026.
16. CIBJO, Fifth pre-congress Special Report extols boundaries placed on language used to describe coloured gemstones (Coloured Stone Commission, Charles Abouchar), 23 July 2026.
17. National Gem and Jewellery Authority of Sri Lanka, Gem City Ratnapura 2026 (no publication date printed).
18. Sri Lanka Export Development Board, Industry Capability Report: Sri Lankan Diamonds, Gems & Jewellery Sector, January 2025 (export figures attributed to Sri Lanka Customs).
19. American Gemological Laboratories, The Prestige Report with Grading and The Prestige Report (no publication dates printed).