what I believe

Jewelry elevates our time on this earth and expresses who we are. It’s also a form of wealth. It’s been part of the human experience for thousands of years.

Even as children, we were drawn to beautiful things that come from the earth. Why do we care about gems and jewelry? Whoever made the first shell necklace around 100,000 years ago believed that it gave them some sort of control over a frightening and mysterious world.

Amulets came from the same impulse — they were literally the first “charms” and were worn as magical objects that summoned invisible forces to protect their wearers.

For millions of people through the centuries, jewelry has marked milestones along the road of life’s journey. They are signs of power, social status, and love.

In ancient times, gold became the first money, with silver close behind. “Nature’s warehouse,” as one writer called it — the earth itself — also grudgingly yielded gemstones, which, like precious metals, were beautiful, durable, and rare, but in much more highly concentrated and thus portable form. They remain as permanent stores of real wealth today.

Today, we know more about how the world works. We understand that the only magic is the hope for a better world which people keep alive in their hearts. We are the world’s conscience.

In my business this means that we care about the effects of gold, diamond, and gemstone mining on the environment. So we insist that the big mining companies improve their practices. They want the public’s goodwill just as much as we do, so they have made great progress towards clean, responsible mining.

We also want jewelry to be a force for good in the lives of the thousands of people in the poor countries where these precious raw materials mostly come from. Their livelihoods depend on the health of our industry. We want the wealth that jewelry creates to be shared with them. This desire is the source of the initiatives towards ethical social impact throughout the jewelry supply line.

I support these values. I source the products I sell from companies that recycle gold and guard against trading conflict diamonds. I am a member of several professional societies that strive for environmental, social, and governmental justice in the jewelry business.

I educate the public on these matters by writing about the jewelry business’s ethical and moral issues. See my blog about lab-grown diamonds, which discusses many of our industry’s current problems and possible solutions.

I believe that my most important contribution is the way I do my work. Our economic system depends on trust among its participants and in the things we value. Gems and jewelry pose a challenge to that trust. They are small objects in which subtle differences often make dramatic differences in value. Bad actors have used them to deceive an unsuspecting public.

So what is value? Is there really such a thing? Is it only a matter of one person’s opinion? The answer is that our society creates the value of jewelry every day, with every proposed price and every completed transaction.

The role of the appraiser is to study the forces that create value and the patterns that reveal it. Even with all our knowledge, the world still has its doubts and fears. I hope that, in some small way, I have increased the level of trust in our world in the value of jewelry.