Purple pyrope-almandine garnets

In early 2016 purple garnets from East Africa started to appear. The source was Manica Province in central Mozambique. The deposit is located about 60 km northeast of Chimoio, near Gorongosa National Park. The area is under the control of the Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO), an armed rebel group.

What's special about these garnets is the color - an intense purple with red flashes that is called Royal Purple. The Mozambique material has strong color with extreme brilliance. The garnets also display a color change, from grape under daylight to cranberry with magenta flashes under incandescent lighting.

The government of Mozambique has now closed the area to mining making further supply uncertain.

The material with the best color is found in smaller sizes, under 3-4 carats. Since the color saturation is so intense, larger stones are too dark. The highest grade material has come from the Mozambique deposit, with some stones coming from Tanzania. Both display the distinctive color change.

Black Argillite

Argillite Eagle box by Haida artist Bill Reid

Argillite is a fine-grained sedimentary rock composed predominantly of indurated clay particles. Argillaceous rocks are lithified muds and oozes. The Haida carvings of Haida Gwaii (formerly the Queen Charlotte Islands) along the coast of British Columbia are famed aboriginal art treasures created from a type of a hard, fine black silt argillite.

Black argillite occurs in only one place in the world, at a quarry on Slatechuck Mountain on Graham Island. Graham Island is the largest island in the Haida Gwaii archipelago.

Argillite Otter Bowl by Lionel Samuels

There is one distinct difference in Haida Art compared to other West Coast native art cultures, Argillite. Black Argillite is only found on Haida Gwaii and is carved by many Haida artists.

High Jewels III

Moussaieff Bvlgari

Louis Vuitton Cartier

De Beers

Buccellati

Morcha

Dior

Jacob

Breguet

Chaumet

Piaget Van Cleef & Arpels

Chanel

Dior

Giampiero Bodino

Giampiero Bodino spent 12 years as art director for the luxury conglomerate Richemont Group, "ghost-designing" jewellery and watches for the likes of Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels, Piaget and Jaeger-LeCoultre. Before that he worked alongside Gianni Bulgari at the most famous of all the Italian jewellery houses. Each piece is a one-off, designed by Bodino and created in the Richemont Group’s Parisian high-jewellery ateliers. Each piece takes between a year and 16 months to craft.

Swarovski unveils lab-grown coloured diamonds

The 16 stones have names referring to their colours, like Gothic Cognac (a deep orange), Cubist Sky (sky blue), Androgyny Flamingo, (vibrant pink), and Heavy Metal Cherry (a deep red). Swarovski isn't the only big name tapping into man-made jewels, the De Beers Group unveiled its laboratory grown gemstone collection in 2018.

Alrosa sells 6.21-carat fancy intense pink purple diamond

Alrosa has sold its 6.21-carat cushion cut fancy intense pink purple diamond to Larry West, a New York-based collector of exclusive pink diamonds. The stone originates from Yakutia, where it was discovered and polished by Alrosa. The GIA system for color-grading fancy color diamonds is designed to rate color strength with the intense and vivid colored diamonds being the most rare. The 8 grade intensity scale begins with very soft colors and progressively displays a richer color stone.

The Maltese Falcon

The iconic lead statuette of the Maltese Falcon from the 1941 film of the same name. One of two known cast lead statuettes created for use in John Huston's screen version of The Maltese Falcon, the "bent tail feather" bird, and the only one confirmed by Warner Bros to have been used in the film.

It sold for $4,085,000 in 2013.