Anyone who has glanced at the jagged graph of gold prices over the past two months might mistake it for the electrocardiogram of a patient in extreme distress.
For those in the fine jewelry industry, however, gold’s recent volatility — the metal traded around $2,850 a year ago, peaked at $5,586 per ounce in late January, fell below $5,000 in early February and now sits around $5,100 — has been more than unsettling; it has created a level of confusion few have ever experienced.
“Nobody knows what’s happening from one month to the next,” Darren Hildrow, founder and director of NouvelleBox, a virtual and physical jewelry marketplace, said on a video call last month from his home in London. “People would usually increase the price of their jewelry once every couple of years. I’ve had multiple brands saying, ‘How do I price my jewelry? Because I’ve had to change my pricing three times in the past six months.’”
The speed and magnitude of price fluctuations in the gold market have seized headlines, but the yellow metal isn’t the only jewelry material experiencing “record-setting daily volatility,” Jim Wyckoff, the senior market analyst for Kitco Metals, where he reports on precious metals and mining, said in a phone interview in late February.
Silver prices increased by 60 percent in January, following a year of sustained gains. The white metal’s price peaked at $122 an ounce, then fell in early February and is at $87 today. The price of both silver and gold shot up again later in the month. Diamond prices are also in flux, as the natural and lab-grown sectors try to find their equilibrium.
“We’ve seen sharp moves before, most recently in 2008-09, 2011 and during Covid,” Charlie Betts, co-founder and managing director of Single Mine Origin, a company in Birmingham, England, that sells traceable gold, wrote in an email. “But the combination of speed and the broader sense of uncertainty around currencies, rates and geopolitics makes this time feel slightly different.
“This isn’t just a jewelry story,” he added. “It’s a macro story playing out through jewelry.”
A Bifurcated Market
Amid such market upheaval — amplified by ongoing challenges in the United States, including on-again-, off-again tariffs and the bankruptcy in January of Saks Global, the parent company to Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman — many jewelers accustomed to working in gold and silver are reassessing their collections.
Some are embracing alternative materials, including wood, steel and — in an example of the market’s topsy-turvy nature — platinum, long considered the most premium of fine jewelry metals and now, at roughly $2,200 an ounce, a relative bargain. (Just ask Pandora, the world’s largest jewelry brand by volume, which announced last month that in order to mitigate the effects of silver’s considerable run-up, it would make more of its charm bracelets using platinum.)
“Platinum is certainly benefiting from the gold hike,” Tim Schlick, the chief executive of Platinum Guild International, a jewelry trade organization, said on a video call last month from his home office on the Spanish island of Majorca. “Many manufacturers and retailers are taking the opportunity and, if you will, upgrading the consumer from white gold to platinum because of the price.”
Others, like the Los Angeles jeweler Lizzie Mandler, are leaning into bigger and bolder gold designs, where the value is self-evident.
“I respect how much money people are spending and I want to give them a product that’s worthy of the spend,” Ms. Mandler said by phone recently. “It definitely feels like the price of gold makes what we do more serious and makes me not want to produce things I’m not really passionate about.”
Abe Sherman, chief executive of Buyers Intelligence Group, a jewelry consulting firm in Napa, Calif., said the sharp rise in prices has not only caused retailers a great deal of stress, especially as they grapple with the costs of replenishing their inventories, but is also intensifying what has been referred to as the “K-shaped” economy — meaning a bifurcated market in which the wealthy continue to spend while those with less means scramble to make ends meet.
“Brands and retailers who cater to a higher-end clientele are doing quite well,” Mr. Sherman wrote in an email. “The attention that gold is receiving has actually created a desire, leading to bolder styles in jewelry.
“There is a clear trend toward higher price points,” he wrote.
Natural vs. Lab
The diamond market reflects that reality, at least when it comes to natural stones, said Martin Katz, a fine jeweler in Beverly Hills, Calif. Mr. Katz said that over the past six months, his bridal business has boomed thanks to an influx of female clients who have told him they are relieved their fiancés chose to buy them engagement rings set with natural diamonds, as opposed to larger but less expensive lab-grown stones.
“I think a lot of times their girlfriends were getting lab-growns at 6 to 8 carats and were flaunting them,” Mr. Katz said by phone last month. “These 20- and 30-something women find it a bit repulsive.”
Paul Zimnisky, a diamond industry analyst based in the New York metropolitan area, has also noticed the market split. “If you look at high-end diamonds, the people buying natural diamonds are buying large, high quality, fancy natural diamonds that are hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Mr. Zimnisky said on a recent phone call.
In the wholesale arena, the narrative is more complicated. When it comes to polished natural diamonds, 2-, 3- and 4-carat elongated cushions and ovals “are trading at multiyear highs,” Mr. Zimnisky said.
“Prices of those goods are up 15 to 20 percent over the last year,” he said. “Then you have medium-size diamonds that maybe polish into 1 carat — that’s the category getting hit hard. Because consumers that have a $5,000 budget could buy a medium quality 1-carat natural diamond or a top quality 4-carat lab diamond.”
Stuart Robertson, president of Gemworld International, the publisher of a gemstone pricing guide in Glenview, Ill., went a step further, warning that the lab-grown diamonds sector is due for a reckoning once consumers realize that the wholesale market has collapsed.
“We’ve monitored the pricing trends since 2017,” and wholesale lab-diamond prices have fallen 99 percent, Mr. Robertson said in early February at the annual gem shows in Tucson, Ariz. “We don’t have any other product in this industry that we’ve continued to sell to consumers when we knew that the price would only go down.”
In 2019, a top-quality lab diamond of nearly 2 carats cost as much as $5,400 at wholesale. “The vast majority of lab-grown diamonds selling now at wholesale are less than $200 a carat,” Mr. Robertson said. “And I’m talking one-carat, two-carat, three-carat stones. It is a problem.”
That may be true, but try telling that to the 61 percent of couples in the United States who in 2025 chose a lab diamond as the center stone of their engagement ring, according to the latest Real Weddings Study published last month by The Knot.
“Driven by economic pragmatism and evolving values, this shift has led to larger average carat sizes (1.9-carat) and lower average costs ($4,600), reshaping expectations around luxury and meaning,” the report said.
Innovation Ahead
Gwen Myers, founder of Eden Presley, a fine jewelry brand in New York that has long produced collections in 14-karat gold, said that the reality of a volatile jewelry marketplace has meant reshaping her own ideas about what her clients can, and should be able to, afford.
“My girl has a job, she’s buying jewelry for herself — I don’t want it to be $15,000,” Ms. Myers said on a call last month. “I want it to be attainable.”
For Ms. Myers’s newest capsule collection, In the Black, which she is debuting at a wholesale jewelry fair in Las Vegas at the end of May, she has opted to use a matte black steel paired with 14-karat gold for her pieces, which will retail between $2,000 and $5,000, she said.
“I want to put things out that look and feel quality but not have them be so expensive,” she said. “My manufacturer learned how to work with the steel and there’s not really anybody in the states doing it.”
Mr. Hildrow of NouvelleBox said he expected to see a lot more of that kind of adaptation.
“You’ll see more interesting, innovative things that are going to happen in the next couple of years as a result of the pressure,” he said. “But the funny thing about jewelry is that it will never go away. It’s the one thing that connects humanity, and people always want to buy it, whether there’s an economic slump or not.”
Shruti Chhajer Ranka, creative head of Shruti Sushma, an Indian fine jewelry brand with boutiques in Ahmedabad and Bangalore, struck a similar note.
“Jewelry occupies a unique position — it is both emotional and tangible,” Ms. Ranka wrote in an email. “When markets fluctuate, that combination can feel reassuring.”
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