The "next wave" in the gemstone market is defined by vivid, expressive colors and rare varieties over traditional, sterile minimalism. Collectors and luxury jewelers are increasingly turning to unique alternatives that offer intense saturation, distinctive color-shifting properties, and bespoke, one-of-a-kind appeal.
Specific stones driving the current market include:
The Garnet Revival: No longer associated only with dark, Victorian-era red. Vivid purple Grape Garnets from Tanzania and autumnal Malaya Garnets (ranging from orange to orange-green) are highly sought-after for their distinctive clarity and color.
Grape Garnets
Orange to Orange-Green Garnets
Alexandrite: Famous for its mesmerizing ability to shift from a lush green in daylight to a plum-red or purple under warm artificial light, this stone is becoming a top choice for rare, investment-grade jewelry.
"Color Season" Gemstones: Inspired by personal color seasons in fashion, warm and luminous stones like peachy morganite, rich yellow sapphires, and neon tourmalines are surging.
Minimalist Moonstones: For those leaning towards "quiet luxury," moonstones are providing an ethereal, organic alternative to recent pearl trends, shifting gracefully from silvery white to subtle blue.
Ocean & Earth Tones: Reflecting a broader trend toward
grounding colors, hues inspired by water and earth—such as
aquamarine
deep blue apatite
moss agate—are seeing strong demand for their calming aesthetic.
The next wave in colored stones isn't one gemstone. It's the garnet family, and most of the market hasn't noticed yet.
When people think of garnet, they default to dark red. Pyrope. The kind set in Victorian jewelry, abundant, inexpensive, decorative. That association is accurate for one category of garnet. It's completely wrong for what's happening at the edges of the family right now.
Grape garnet from Tanzania is where the most interesting development is occurring. The color is an open, vivid purple: not dark, not muddy, genuinely saturated in a way that photographs well and reads as distinctive in a setting. The clarity on what's coming out of Tanzania currently is strong. And the volume, while still modest, is at a level where high jewelry brands can realistically source for collections. That's the threshold that changes a stone's trajectory. You need enough material to build around it.
Malaya garnet occupies a different color space: orange to orange-green, warm and autumnal, shifting slightly depending on the light. The color is unlike anything else in the portfolio of stones typically used by high jewelry designers. That uniqueness is an advantage. Designers looking for something that doesn't reference ruby, sapphire, or emerald will find malaya garnet gives them a palette they can't source anywhere else.
Grossular garnet in lighter green tones is the third category worth watching. The color sits in a space adjacent to tsavorite but lighter, more open, with a freshness that reads differently in a piece. Demand for green stones at high jewelry level has been consistent and supply across all green categories is tight.
The pattern across all three is the same: color that stands alone, clarity that meets high jewelry standards, and supply that is starting to reach the threshold where serious brands can commit. That combination, when it comes together, is what precedes repricing.
Garnet won't replace the big three. But it is building its own category. And the window before the broader market recognizes that is still open.
The Pirate Code Nobody Could Crack | The Pirates Treasure
For almost 300 years, a handwritten pirate cipher has baffled historians, treasure hunters, and cryptographers alike. It is said to have been written by the French pirate Olivier Levasseur – known as La Buse, the Buzzard – and thrown into the crowd moments before his execution in 1730. The message was simple: find the clues, find the treasure.
Swiss puzzle master Daniel believes he has finally cracked the code. His analysis of the Masonic cipher points to one specific island in the Indian Ocean: Mauritius. Using an 18th century map, a hidden system of geometric lines, and anchor points scattered across the island, he reconstructs what he believes is a treasure map hidden in plain sight.
The stakes are enormous. When La Buse captured the Portuguese ship Nossa Senhora do Cabo in 1721, the haul included Indian silks, Chinese porcelain, and precious gems. Estimates from contemporary sources range from 300 million to over 2 billion euros in today's money – making it one of the richest captures in the history of piracy.
But the search on a remote mangrove island delivers more than expected. Hidden stone walls, ancient markings carved into rock, a hand-built well and the ruins of what appears to be a settlement – archaeological discoveries that have never been documented before.
(Please do watch the whole video, however if you want to see an unknown big archaeological site on Mauritius Island, then scroll to 46:00)
(A Possible Templar or Masonic Symbol on a wall of rocks at 37:24)
Video
A Pirate settlement with treasure deposits remains to be seen, but it's definitely an archaeological site on Mauritius Island.
Cadiz as the location of Atlantis's capital city begins with Plato
Ten Years of Fieldwork and the Atlantis Discovery Nobody Can See Yet, ft Michael Donnellan
Michael Donnellan is the producer and director of Atlantica - a three-season documentary series ten years in the making, currently in a distribution bidding war, with Sky History Channel filming an episode at the site in June. George Howard, who attended the Cosmic Summit premiere of the first episode, has been sitting on the story for nearly a year while the rest of the world waits. This conversation is a wide-ranging update on everything that has happened since. The case for Cadiz as the location of Atlantis's capital city begins with Plato himself. The Timaeus and Critias name the area of Gadis - modern Cadiz - as the location of the capital. Michael notes that in Plato's time this was not an obscure reference. The Greeks had already colonised the coastline, founded the city of Portus Menesthei at what is now El Puerto de Santa Maria, and vacationed in the region regularly. Saying Atlantis was near Cadiz in 360 BC was the equivalent of saying it was near New York. Everyone would have known exactly where you meant. What Michael and his team have spent a decade documenting is the physical evidence: structures visible only at low tide along the coastlines of Sanlucar de Barrameda and the surrounding area, older foundations beneath the famous Phoenician fishing corrals, a submerged city 3.5 kilometres offshore at 20 metres depth, and a rocky outcrop visible from the cathedral whose Arabic name - Sal Medina, meaning the lost city - tells you that even a thousand years ago local people knew something had once been there. The February 2025 storms stripped sand from a clay sediment layer that had not been exposed in thousands of years, revealing cut marks resembling those found in Malta and, crucially, elephant bones from the Upper Palaeolithic period - physical confirmation that the elephants Plato explicitly mentions as part of the Atlantean economy were genuinely present in this region at the relevant time. The Tartessos - the mysterious pre-Phoenician Iberian culture whose origins could extend back six to seven thousand years, whose script remains undeciphered, and who possessed written laws that Greek historian Strabo dated 6,000 years before his own time - are Michael's candidates for the post-catastrophe survivors of the Atlantean civilisation. Their naval expertise, metallurgy, and trading networks mirror the Atlantean characteristics Plato describes precisely. The Younger Dryas catastrophe, which Michael personally favours as a cosmic impact event, would have driven coastal survivors into the caves now found throughout the mountains of Andalusia - caves that show evidence of human habitation across 35,000 years, including prehistoric paintings of industrial-scale fishing fleets pursuing orca. The megalithic culture that subsequently emerged - concentrated more heavily in southwestern Iberia than anywhere else in Europe, with the oldest dolmens in the world among its remnants - represents, in Michael's reading, the engineering knowledge of a pre-catastrophe civilisation reasserting itself through the hands of people who remembered what their ancestors had built. The episode also covers the archives of the Palace of Medina Sidonia, which Michael was finally granted access to two months before this recording. The last Duchess wrote extensively on the evidence that Columbus was not the first European to cross the Atlantic - knowledge preserved in one of the oldest private archives in Europe, held by a family whose name encodes the Arabic words for city of Sidon, and whose position controlling the trade routes in and out of the Mediterranean placed them at the centre of the pre-Columbian Atlantic knowledge network. In the third season, Michael says, he will prove it. The conversation also touches on the second Sphinx debate, the Egyptian priests of Sais who told Solon that both Greeks and Egyptians were descended from the Atlantean civilisation, and the straightforward strategic logic of why any maritime empire controlling the Mediterranean would have placed its capital exactly where Cadiz now stands. Discover more from Michael Donnellan and Ingenio Films: https://ingeniofilms.com/films/atlant...
