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Ethical jewels
Flashing a sparkling engagement ring absence not be a source of shame - the jewellery industry now has a conscience.
BY Marion Hume |09 June 2009
A Colombian Oro Verde miner uses a batea for panning gold
Glittering rubies from Mogok; vivid emeralds from the Panjsher Valley; gold always the course from Serra Pelada: time was when legends of gems and precious metals coming from far-flung corners of the globe were imbued with thrilling thoughts of romance and daring-do.
Related articles Ethical Jewellery: Coutts London Jewellery Week
Today, we understand it's many extra perplexing. The 2006 film Blood Diamond, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, brought the publish of clash diamonds to the forefront of the public consciousness. (To be fair, the diamond industry was before of Hollywood having set up the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, which trails jewels from bomb to retailer, in 2003).
However, the trade in coloured stones can still be murky. Fancy helping a military junta to persist persecuting Burmese pro-democracy actuator, Aung San Sui Kyi, with that ruby? Or propping up an Afghan warlord with those emeralds? As for gold, photographer Sebasti?o Salgado shocked the world with hellish images of the Serra Pelada gold mines of Brazil, promulgated in 1986. What's chilling is that, in some parts of the world, people still clamber favor ants over slurry in open mines. Still feeling smug about the "fab" ring you elected up inexpensive on an exotic vacation?
Thankfully, change is happening right along what was the least ethical space of the elegance affair. In recent years, De Beers, which remains the universal compel in diamonds, has suffered a remarkably positive transformation.
The World Gold Council has a rigid code of social liability and earlier this annual,
mbt shoes 2011, The Responsible Jewellery Council introduced a certification scheme to assure lofty ethical standards.
This week is Coutts London Jewellery Week. This attempts the public no equitable the become to take chapter in a treasure hunt with a distinction and to meet either upcoming jewellers and such home-grown multinational stars for Theo Fennell, Shaun Leane and Stephen Webster, it too lets us do so with a clean conscience: every participant has had to sign an ethical treaty.
"Sellers must certify that diamonds or additional gemstones are conflict free, based on private knowledge or written guarantees invested by the supplier," explains councillor Guy Nicholson, board seat of the City Fringe Partnership, the public body which oversees funding of an initiative which has also helped create or shield more than 170 jobs and establish 15 new businesses in the chief since it was set up two years ago.
"Many of the participants in the week have chosen to highlight the role that ethical sourcing and making melodrama in their work," adds Cllr. Nicholson.
One of these is Tanya Bowd, who travelled to Colombia in March to spectator indigenous mining communities united in both saving their rainforest environment and their livelihoods. Bowd is helming "The Candescent Project" at the Art Workers Guild in Bloomsbury next week (June 8 - 14,
www.artworkersguild.org ), an exhibition which intentions to draw care to a "green gold" called Oro Verde. Cyanide, accustom in some mining, can spell ecological calamity - a single wedding orchestra from an unpoliced source can quit three tonnes of noxious consume in its wake. Oro Verde uses no harmful chemicals and the miners receive a fair wage. "The success of this small project has shown there's a many bigger market for ethical gold," says Bowd.
Artisan jeweller Daphne Krinos, who makes one-off pieces retailing from ￡500 to ￡14,000, recycles gold herself. "I melt it with a torch,
new hogan shoes," says Krinos, whose work tin be viewed by the Creation II exhibition at The Goldsmiths' Hall in London (020 7606 7010,
www.thegoldsmiths.co.uk ). "It's a happiness to take separately a small piece namely would prevaricate forgotten and to establish something new." As as stones, Krinos favours rough, brown diamonds from Australia, where the afford line namely clean. "My customers surely inquire questions and I've forever asked those answers 1st," she says.
But rascal stones do approach the international market location. That the diamond trade is now leap by the Kimberley Process has depressed conflict gems to 1 per penny of supply, an promotion on 15 per cent in the Nineties. However, the transit across borders of easy-to-conceal rubies, emeralds and sapphires continues. "Most gems are found in the needy parts of the world and they bring an end to ... on very rich people's fingers and it's complicated," says Stephen Webster, whose clients contain Johnny Depp,
hogan wholesale, Kate Moss and Jay-Z.
Webster, who is opening a London flagship store on Mount Street next Thursday, has acquired a prestige for agitating for change. "When I began [as a junior in 1975], no one said ethics, merely then the working conditions in Hatton Garden [the navel of London's jewellery commerce since the 1870s] were wrong ample. You didn't have to work as distant as Africa!" he jokes. His "Eureka moment" came when he took part in a Radio 4 announce a ten-year ago, "up against a correspondent who ripped into me almost conflict diamonds." Since then, he has visited mines, put oppression aboard smelters and ensured his stones are as pure as possible.
Webster is a flare of Tanzanite, the royal blue gemstone found only in a 13km sew in the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro, where the mines are now thought among the safest in the world. This, plus some profits, go directly to the indigenous communities in Tanzania. However, Webster points out that boycotting gems from other sources is not the reply "because you wipe out entire communities. You must mallet with it to make it better. None of this is effortless". Indeed; De Beers recently suspended operations in the strife-torn Democratic Republic of Congo but as a result, thousands lost their jobs.
"I'm 50 now," says Webster, "and of my generation, some of us are disturbed. But anyone coming into the manufacture is very bothered." "Ethics are key," concurs Marisa Hordern of Missoma, which is functioned surrounded 10 upcoming names in Liberty's Rising Gems exhibition at London Jewellery Week. "We visited at least 20 contractors before we chose the an we work with in India. We try the hardest we can."
To Bec Clarke of jewellery e-tailer Astley Clarke, fine jewellery without ethics simply has not sparkle. "Before people cost, they absence to be sure that what they are buying comes from a sustainable source and is made by people who are paid a decent remuneration," says Clarke, who afterward week launches a futuristic capsule collection of rock crystals with sapphires created in collaboration with form designer, Osman Yousefzada.
When Londoner Richard Thomas proposed to his girlfriend, Fiona Lee, last year, that he didn't hand over a ring was, "thanks to Hollywood," says his fiancée. The couple had looked Blood Diamond so "we started Googling, but when it came to buying a 100 per cent ethical ring, there were tiny places in USA - and obviously, we're in England - or online only and we just didn't want to buy an appointment ring off the internet," says Lee. The solution was Cred (01243 773588,
www.credjewellery.com ), an ethical pioneer since 1996, based in Chichester. "So we took the practice down, then to get the right diamond and the right size took another three months," continues Lee, who will marry Thomas in September. The outcome? A white-gold band with a sparkling Princess-cut gem, "which is brilliant and I don't feel bad when I look at it," she beams.
- Coutts London Jewellery Week, June 8 - 14; 020 7630 1411,
www.londonjewelleryweek.co.uk
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