Truly responsibly sourced coloured gemstones are even harder to identify than diamonds. Sadly, there isn’t an international standard that identifies a gemstone as “ethical”.

(By ethical we mean that the mining, cutting and polishing of the gemstones doesn’t exploit people, their work or their land, but gives back to the community that should rightly benefit from their land and skills).

Somewhere along the supply chain, we have to do something that has become increasingly harder to do: trust a stranger. This kind of supply chain is based on trust and human relationships. Our suppliers are either in direct contact with the miners or have a close relationship with the small companies that manage the mines, the cutting and the polishing phase. Each stage is documented, but there isn’t a third-party revision. Our suppliers can tell us the origin of each gem and where it was cut, we trust them.

To simplify our supply chain, putting the way a gemstone was sourced as the priority, we have limited greatly the gemstones we use. For our creative projects we only source Tourmalines and Sapphires at the moment. If a client requires a specific gemstone we will source it on a case by case basis. We don’t buy gemstones that don’t give us the assurances we list on our “supplier selection code of conduct”.

 

Our tourmalines supplier is Aurhen Ecofair, this Family led small company collaborates with the Soares family in Minas Gerais in Brazil. They have strict rules regarding above than average wages, pollution and having a positive impact on the local community. The mine they work with is Ökofair certified and the company has a “common good” certification. Their tourmalines are untreated and in no other way manipulated.  (https://aurhen.de/nachhaltigkeit/#zertifizierung).

Our only sapphire supplier is Wennick-Lefèvre (https://www.wennicklefevre.com). Wennick- Lefèvre offers completely untreated Sapphires from Madagascar. These sapphires come in all the shades of the rainbow and, like flowers, no two are the same. These dazzling gemstones are mined in Madagascar and cut and polished in the first women-owned cutting facility in Sri Lanka, Sunrise Facets. Wennick-Lefèvre offers a transparent supply chain that he happily shares with us and our clients.

We have decided to use only natural and untreated coloured gemstones as the technology isn’t able to offer us the same multifaceted brilliant variety of colours (yet).

Also, these gemstones contribute to educational and restoration projects. But most importantly pay a fair wage and help grow a more conscious and well-informed mining community.