Bangkok Gem and Jewelry Fair
Allow me to first say that Metal Atelier is not a fancy enough brand to casually fly to South East Asia for a stone buying trip. I, however, am capable of booking a holiday in the sun and then seeing an add for the Bangkok Gem and Jewelry Fair which starts the same day and place as I land. Suffering from major FOMO every year when I see all my American buddies at Tucson, this felt like a sufficient consolation prize of 800 colored stone vendors.
Such is life, expectation and reality were very different things.
In my head, there were going to be sapphire vendors throwing beautiful stones at me, showering me in melee, for pennies on the Euro and I was going to walk out with pockets bulging and never have to buy a stone in Europe again. Although very little is mined in Thailand at present, it remains the trading and treated colored stone center of the world so an expectation of economical sapphires was not crazy, although my fantastical aspirations were.
These stones did exist, just not for me.
$5 a carat? I pay 60€ for the same stones in Germany! I will take 10 carats please.
Oh, that’s for the full parcel of 273 carats? How much for like 10-15?
Fine. I didn’t want your stupid stones anyway.
Day one was spent asking questions and taking cards. Unfortunately, none of the questions I asked involved minimum order quantities. And none of the notes I took involved the actual stand numbers. And none of the business names on the cards actually matched the business names on the registry and map.
Day two began trying to retrace my steps and find said stands from the day prior. Once that was abandoned, I dove in and started trying to ask questions and source the stones I needed. Unfortunately, gem stone trading is a very gender imbalanced sport. What happened at most stands is something as follows:
Hi, I am wondering what the price per carat is for these stones, and what the treatment is on them?
(Woman behind counter) Hold on
Woman goes to man at table, man looks me up and down, and then gives a price.
Sometimes the man would come give me the price directly. If the price was fair, he was immediately offended at how little I wanted to buy. If the price was inflated, he was still offended when I said I was taking cards and stand numbers and buying later.
It felt like wading thru DM’s of Instagram stone dealers, but in person. I gave out exactly one of my cards and am now receiving Whats App messages every few days asking if I want to buy any stones.
I met one seemingly lovely Sri Lankan dealer who had a wide variety of sapphires from Madagascar and a very calming demeanor amongst the hustle and bustle. His card was the only one I hade from Day One that had a stand number written on it. When I went back, the prices had jumped by about 25% (who knew inflation in Thailand is that bad), and when I was offered to come sit down to look at the sapphire slices I knew the end was near. I managed to blow about a third of my budget in the 10 minutes that followed, but did end up with the deep orange sapphires currently used in the Ember Bands and Jill Hoops.
I went to this show in search of little itty bitty sapphires that I could cast in place, and was not on the hunt for large or expensive stones. Nor was I particularly looking out for anything mine to market. The price points that I work with for said cast in place stones also do not allow for traceable stones. Anyone who has ever tried sand casting stones can feel my pain with the huge percentage of cracked and destroyed specimens and the subsequent tears.
However, I do not recall a single vendor offering me natural or untreated stones. In general, this does not bother me. Levi’s jeans are not grown on trees, cotton comes out of the Earth and goes through many treatment processes to become the clothes that adorn us. To me, a well cut stone with interesting natural inclusions will always beat something treated, but in the scope of the small stones I primarily work with, treatments are fine.
There were a huge number of vendors from or offering Burmese Rubies and Sapphires. Until about 2013 the country was officially a military dictatorship, followed by a brief period of quasi democracy, and then there was the Rohingya Genocide around 2016-2017, followed by a coup that returned the country to a military dictatorship in 2021. The US, EU, and Great Britain have had sanctions against the country since this time.
“Today, the mines of Myanmar are no longer producing large or gem-quality stones, but demand is high and supply very limited,” said Vincent Pardieu, a world-renowned field gemologist, explaining that the government suspended mining licenses in 2016. “Today, 99 percent of Burmese rubies found on the market were extracted decades, even centuries ago.” -NYT “Burmese Rubies: Costly and Controversial” November 22, 2021
I do not know if the stones on offer were freshly mined or reclaimed. Regardless, the allure of Burmese Rubies has lost its literal shine. I will be writing another post about Myanmar stones, but it is something that has always been very hard for me to swallow.
Ultimately I ended up buying a lot of the same things I can buy here at highly questionable exchange rates. The stones in the Ember Bands, Jill Hoops, and Neena Hoops came from this endeavor. I also have some sapphire slices that I cannot commit to a plan for and take out of the box, look at, and then put away every few weeks.
I think if you know your stones and have money to spend on bulk, this could be a worthwhile show. I would not make it a special trip, although if an entire Thai holiday could be written off as a business expense, it may be worth it. This does not constitute tax advice, and is probably not the best idea.
Links + Further Reading:
New York Times Article “Burmese Rubies: Costly and Controversial”
JCK Article “Despite Ban, Burmese Rubies Still Sold Here, Report Says”