Dudley Blauwet (Dudley Blauwet Gems)
Since summer, business has been fine for Dudley Blauwet Gems, as many of his online customers have been doing well and are looking to fill specific orders or rebuild stock. Using WhatsApp, he has been able to continue communicating with and purchasing material from suppliers such as a Sri Lankan family the business has worked with for nearly 40 years. This has included viewing sapphires from photos or videos almost daily. He has also been working with Russian contacts to purchase unoiled emeralds (figure 1), alexandrite, phenakite, and some demantoid. A source in Southeast Asia has also been supplying gray spinel.
Sales have been predominantly natural sapphire, unoiled emerald, gray spinel, and Vietnamese cobalt spinel. He noted that other stones such as aquamarine, green beryl, and morganite have been popular. The persistent demand for sapphire has been dominated by requests for teal, green to icy green, peach to apricot, “padparadscha,” periwinkle, purple-blue, and light to icy pink sapphire, as well as for traditional blue colors. Recently, he has received numerous calls for Mandarin garnet from Loliondo, Tanzania; heated blue zircon from Cambodia; and to a lesser extent Malaya garnet from Mahenge, Tanzania. Mr. Blauwet’s business mainly offers untreated natural sapphire, but they have had steady demand for heated blue rounds and matched pairs.
With the 2021 Pantone colors of the year being “Ultimate Gray” and “Illuminating” (a medium gray and butter yellow, respectively), Mr. Blauwet has seen a bit more interest in yellow sapphire over last year and steady interest in gray spinel (figure 2).
Figure 2. Yellow sapphire, gray spinel, and gray moonstone represent popular gems matching the 2021 Pantone colors of the year. Gray moonstone: 3.94 ct cabochon from India. Yellow sapphire: 2.39 ct oval from Dela, Sri Lanka, and 2.90 ct long cushion from Gilamale, Sri Lanka. Gray spinel: 0.93 ct cushion, 2.81 ct pear shape, and 1.16 ct round, all from Mogok, Myanmar. Photo by Aria Agarwal; courtesy of Dudley Blauwet Gems.
They have also developed a good market for unoiled Russian emerald, with some vendors regularly restocking.Mr. Blauwet was able to provide some insight into the movement of material coming from mines around the world and the rough supply situation. With the political upheaval in Myanmar, Burmese gem production is expected to slow if not outright end for a while. Madagascar is opening up for travelers, but with a lack of express mail service, very little rough has left the island since last March. Some of the biggest gem mining operations in Sri Lanka are currently down. These combined supply slowdowns and stoppages have resulted in serious challenges—a very limited supply of rough worldwide and reduced movement of rough and gems to trading centers such as Bangkok or Hong Kong. As a result, the available supply of gems has been significantly dampened.
Mr. Blauwet mentioned that most of their trade shows for this year have been canceled, so they are handling increasingly larger orders and shipping 20 to 100 stones at a time to their manufacturing customers. Also, for the first time in Mr. Blauwet’s life, he has started a website to sell gems wholesale. His business is struggling to supply enough rough to its cutting factories to keep all of the cutters busy. Occasionally, they have been able to buy small rough to cut precision diamond melee in calibrated sizes, still a very popular product.
Finally, Mr. Blauwet shared with us some blue spodumene he has been storing in the vault. For decades he has been buying Afghan spodumene crystals, which have a strong blue color on the c-axis and a green color on the a- and b-axes. To avoid any exposure to daylight, these stones were wrapped in paper at the mines in Afghanistan. He has kept them in closed boxes to sell to customers specifically wanting spodumenes that have not been exposed to UV. As a test, he exposed several of them to Colorado sunlight in June and was able to literally watch them change to a full purple color down the c-axis and a pink color down the a- and b-axes within 40 minutes. Mr. Blauwet currently has several clean faceted stones in sizes up to approximately 300 carats (figure 3).
Figure 3. A 166.25 ct blue spodumene removed from storage. The stone is from Parun, a few kilometers from Paprok in Kamdesh District, Nuristan Province, Afghanistan. It was cut in Peshawar, Afghanistan, with the table perpendicular to the c-axis to achieve a blue color rather than green. Photo by Dudley Blauwet; courtesy of Dudley Blauwet Gems.
He has seen some dealers buy these crystals and take them to a show and watch in horror as they change over the course of three to five days from exposure to the various wavelengths of light present in the showroom—often the transition color before pink has strong unattractive gray tones. He reports that there are plenty of irradiated Afghan spodumenes on the market in Peshawar with a very strong emerald green color, including on the c-axis. The color is very unstable and with exposure to UV or daylight will change rather quickly, often turning an undesirable yellow-gray color. Mr. Blauwet described once making the mistake of buying a faceted example of these treated stones at a gem show in Peshawar from a dealer he did not know. When he unwrapped it years later, it had changed to an unattractive gray color with no exposure to UV or sunlight.
