FROM BLOODLETTTER (the Sisters in Crime newsletter)

Eight plotting women stood in the lobby of a building just around the corner from the largest diamond district in the world. They chatted about the weather, the wind was especially cruel that morning, and watched people move in and out through the entrance. They looked at their watches. It was time. Each one took out her picture ID. There was no turning back.

What were these women up to? We were on a Sisters In Crime field trip to the Gemological Institute of America (GIA), on Fifth Avenue and 47th St., an internationally recognized training facility in the gem and diamond industry. Jewelry is the third largest industry in New York City and GIA is located in the heart of it. We squeezed into a small well padded elevator, and I knew everyone was anticipating the opportunity to ask their questions about gems, and have them answered by Dan Campbell, a geologist and the Director of Education at GIA.

The GIA facility, as it turned out, was a honey comb of tidy classrooms and offices on two floors. We were escorted to a back stairwell that led down to a room where, out in the open on a table in plain sight, stood a large tray of valuable gems in little plastic containers. Microscopes, and other instruments, that we learned are used to teach students how to identify and grade gems, marked the workspaces as if we’d walked into a biology lab. In this room we were given demonstrations on the identification and grading of a gem by how light passes through it. Mr. Campbell demonstrated how, by using such equipment as refractometers and polariscope, the experts separate synthetic, treated, assembled, and imitations from natural gemstones. We learned that there are 4 Cs in determining the value of a diamond - color, clarity, cut and carat weight, and we saw how a trained eye can recognize a synthetic diamond by using magnification and UV fluorescence.

We got a little bit of information about all kinds of gems, not just diamonds. For instance, we learned that a natural ruby contains iron and a synthetic ruby does not, and that under UV fluorescence the natural gem and the synthetic reflect a different color, making it easy to determine which one is authentic. Someone asked if there had been any new gems discovered. The answer was, no. But, he told us that in Paraiba, Brazil a new color of tourmaline had been discovered. It’s an electric green-blue color. Mr. Campbell said that in Burma rubies had been found with black centers. And he told us that a new, and pretty substantial, deposit of diamonds had been discovered in Canada. This new mine, called the Eketi Mine, rivals the South African diamond mines.

Several Sisters asked specific questions that related to the jewels in the plot line of their novels in progress, and they got some interesting answers. It would be completely uncool to reveal any of the answers here, but I can tell you there are some interesting jewel-oriented plotting going on in the minds of some of the women who attended the field trip. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the information that we received at GIA didn’t end up in a story. I know it helped me. I have an old story about a diamond smuggler, just sitting in a drawer, that I wasn’t sure what to do with. Maybe, I’ll have him take a trip up to the wilds of Canada and take a look around.

For more information about individual gems Dan Campbell recommended reading Gem Stones of the World, a book that the GIA always has in stock in their book store. American Gem Society and Jewelers of America were two professional associations he recommended to contact for more information regarding gems and the jewelry industry.