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The Blue Topaz Market Has the Blues

By Jordan Clary

A year ago, when the NRC decided to enforce its long-ignored health and safety regulations for irradiated blue topaz, most retailers stopped selling this very popular gem until licensed testing facilities could be opened. Now six facilities are open—and no one seems to be using them. Why?

“Blue topaz?” the voice from the Nuclear Regulatory Committee (NRC) at the other end of the line said. “I haven’t thought about that for a long time. That’s sort of fallen off of the radar.”

It’s not only fallen off the NRC’s radar, but it seems to have fallen off the radar of most of America’s jewelry retailers. And since the United States accounts for an estimated 90 per cent of world blue topaz sales, the disappearance of sales raises as many questions as the disappearance of honey bees. After all, a year ago blue topaz was one of the biggest colored stone sellers; today those sales are at a near standstill.

Some blame the NRC for the market downturn.

Last year this federal agency placed accelerator-irradiated blue topaz under the same regulations as reactor-irradiated stones. That meant that just about every piece of blue topaz imported into America had to be tested to meet the world’s most stringent standards for residual radiation. [The NRC developed sets of what it calls “exempt concentrations” of radioactivity for every jewelry product—from gems to watch dials—which owe their hue or glow to this form of energy. Items that fail to pass clearance tests must be quarantined until they reach all-clear levels. Depending on the material and the dose, items can be kept in lockup for months and even years.]

Did this decision unwittingly kill the formerly laissez-faire blue topaz market with too much red tape?

“After the NRC informed the US public about the fact that every importer has to possess a license for the import and distribution of minerals treated with electrons or neutrons the sale of (blue topaz) stones in the U.S. has decreased by 80%,” says Helmut Zimmermann whose BCS Group in Germany and the U.S. was one of the first companies licensed to test and certify blue topaz.

The Big Chill

Photo courtesy Robert James/ISG.

To date, there are now six officially licensed testing and distribution centers. This should have meant greater trade and public confidence in irradiated blue topaz.

However, the opposite seems to have happened. Many people attribute the drop to a combination of fear and misinformation. Rick Krementz of GemClear, an independent gemstone testing laboratory in Dallas, Texas says, “There’s no doubt that blue topaz sales have declined. Mainly this is because of uncertainty on the part of merchants.” Merchants don’t want to carry anything that might prove to be a liability and the words “irradiated” tend to scare consumers.

Lisa Brooks-Pike, a gemologist and retail gem seller, believes the drop in sales is due in part to “unnecessary widespread panic created in the industry by misinformation.” This isn’t to say that responsible parties in the trade didn’t do their utmost to calm fears. But just calling attention to the problem may have worsened it.

In October, 2007, the Jewelers Vigilance Committee (JVC) issued a warning to retailers that the stones they were selling may not be in compliance with Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulations and that retailers may want to consider “alternatives, including but not limited to removing the product from their selling inventory stock.” JVC’s action was essentially to call a time out. But many in the industry read warnings into the group’s advice it didn’t mean to give or even imply.

Cecilia Gardner, president of JVC says the issue was always one of consumer awareness and disclosure, not about the safety of the stones. “There were never any allegations that the stones were unsafe,” she says. “The issue is that they were not being traded in accordance with U.S. laws. A year ago we had no licensed entity. Now there are six. That’s a big improvement.” A notice on the NRC website also states that they are “not attempting to scare anyone or disrupt sales; we are merely attempting to ensure the proper handling of gemstones.”

Money First, Morals Second

Photo courtesy Robert James/ISG.

The gemstone trade is one of the hardest trades to regulate. Maybe it’s because gemstones are easy to slip past U.S. Customs—especially nowadays when it is understaffed and overburdened. Brooks Pike likens the gemstone trade to the Wild West’s Tombstone—“only with no Wyatt Earps to come to the rescue.”

It’s often difficult to tell whether the certification regulations are being circumvented or simply ignored. Zimmermann believes that as much as “99 percent of the importers in the U.S. buy stones as before without certification” and that last year at the shows in Tucson and Las Vegas stones “with and without certification were offered.”

Why do importers break the law? “Economics,” answers one Maryland gemologist who asks for anonymity. “New testing procedures raise the cost of gems. And when you are talking about a gem as inexpensive as blue topaz, a mere pennies-per-carat difference in the cost of stones can put wholesalers and retailers at a competitive disadvantage, especially when some are shirking their duty to test stones in the USA.”

This could explain why at least one lab, GemClear, has found blue topaz certified to be in compliance with NRC regulations that measured above federal safety limits. Since these goods were well within internationally accepted standards, it is thought the importer didn’t bother to comply with what many think are overly rigorous U.S. standards. This raises questions as to how the material got into the American marketplace.

Quite possibly, Customs is working on a de facto honors system, simply checking paperwork without doing its own spot testing. Eric Braunwart of Columbia Gems, Vancouver, Washington, suspects the following: “If paperwork is included with the shipment and lists the license number and states all goods in the shipment have been tested, Customs will let it pass.” That may explain how GemClear found blue topaz that wasn’t yet commerce-ready allowed into the marketplace.

Of course, some people may be avoiding testing all together. One rumor circulating within the industry is that in Hong Kong anyone with unlicensed blue topaz is shipping it to America as blue quartz.

Braunwart suggests additional influences. “Sales are mostly down because of two reasons,” he says. “First, some companies have switched from irradiated blue topaz to surface diffused blue topaz. Second, the economy has severely affected purchasing by retailers from wholesalers and most blue topaz wholesalers are off shore, which significantly impacts imports.”

The Ignorance Factor

Blue topaz comes in three shades: sky blue, Swiss blue and London or denim blue. The two lighter shades have the lowest levels of radiation, while the London blue takes at least 18 months for the radiation to drop to the safety standard set by the NRC. However, with time, even London blue is quite safe. Nevertheless, an informal survey of several southern California jewelry chains and jewelry departments in stores like Macy’s and JC Penny showed that while all the stores carried some sky and Swiss blue topaz jewelry, none carried any of the dark London blue. “That’s odd,” said a Zales’ clerk when asked about it. “You used to see that dark blue all the time. Now no one has it.”

Clearly the decision to cease stocking London Blue came from outside the stores I visited. Most of the salespeople I talked to had no idea what type of treatment had been used on the stones. What’s more, most were oblivious to NRC regulations. Of the few salespeople who were aware of them, all but one erroneously believed they stemmed from widespread problems with “dangerous levels of radiation.”

Given such confusion and ignorance about blue topaz among jewelry store staffers, it’s easy to see why people cite so many different reasons for the drop-off in sales of this gem. Sadly, the decline didn’t have to happen. Brooks-Pike says that her customers “were never put off by the fact that topaz was irradiated to achieve its blue colors.”

Maybe the moral here is an old one: The jewelry industry has nothing to fear but fear itself.

In the mean time fear could spread. After all, blue topaz is not the only gemstone to be regularly irradiated. Yellow beryl, smoky quartz, pink tourmaline and others are also enhanced in this manner. If disclosure of this basic truth becomes as hard to swallow with other gems, blue topaz could be the first of many gem casualties in a market that lives in needless, somewhat hypocritical fear of the facts about the products it sells.

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