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INTRODUCTION

The  moment  the  box  is opened  is  one  every  jewelry  lover lives for.  You take in the faint click of the mechanism and the soft creak of an antique hinge. The smell of the leather. And then the surprise of what has been hiding inside, the sharp glint of a gem that light first touched decades or even centuries ago.

In my life studying, valuing, curating, and most of all loving gemstones, I have often been thrilled by moments such as this, not knowing what I am about to see but having a hunch that it will be special. Working in the auction business, you can be sent to value a collection with little more than a name and a blank sheet of paper. Sometimes your eyes are the first in years to appreciate a remarkable jewel that has been living behind the walls of a safe. This joy, of meeting an object you instantly recognize, or immediately clocking the value of something unheralded, is one of the many reasons to relish the work I have been lucky enough to call a career.

That career was one I had never considered before it started. And it might never have come to pass but for an intervention from my father. Having just finished my Classics degree and decided that I didn't want to follow the corporate route, nor to pursue my interest in archeology professionally, I returned home at a loss. I told him I had no idea what to do with my life, except that I wanted to be happy. His response was a burst of unconventional careers advice, counting the options off on his fingers.

"Hair, makeup, clothes, jewelry. Pick one."

Far from being flippant, my father had struck a chord. While I had never considered what following my dreams might actually mean, the moment he mentioned jewelry I felt a tingle. One thing I knew for certain was that I had loved gemstones for almost my entire life.

Early photographs show me at age two, a white-haired, blue-eyed baby in my birth country of Kenya, bedecked only in my mother's beads and(matching, I'm glad to say) high heels. I was otherwise tupu-tupu—Swahili for stark naked. I was, I'm told, obsessed with anything sparkly, regularly decorating my toy rocking camel (our equivalent of a rocking horse) with whatever beads and bandeaus I could lay my hands on. When we came to England, I became a tomboy: climbing trees, scrapping with boys, and digging stuff up at every opportunity. Yet the obsession with everything that glimmered remained, and I would rush off to local jewelry shops whenever I could with all the pocket money I had scraped together.

So great was my desire for gems that, when I fell in love for the first time at the age of six, it was not with a boy but an amethyst geode: a mini crystal cave of piercingly purple gems that shone with seemingly impossible sharpness and depth. Unable to take my eyes off this treasure, I believed that destiny had brought the most beautiful thing in the world to a back garden in southwest England and placed its spiky symmetry snugly into the palm of my hand.

It was my first glimpse of perfection, hence my dismay when its owner—my godfather—gently told me that it couldn't be mine. I watched him place it out of my reach 6 feet high on a drystone wall at the end of the garden and wander back to the table. As soon as adult backs were turned, I ran to the wall and started my ascent. Before I could reach the top and claim my prize, my sneaky scrambling brought the whole thing down on me, trapping and breaking my leg. It was an early lesson in the irresistible attraction of gemstones, the lengths that people will go to pursue them, and the danger that can accompany these most exciting of objects. Not to mention the disappointment that is a perennial fellow traveler on the quest for gem perfection. I never did get to keep the amethyst.

A seed had been planted that day, and my interest continued to grow. Later, I found myself integrating the study of ancient jewelry into the tail end of my Classics degree. It was my archeology tutor who introduced me to Roman gems: tiny, precious, yet often overlooked ancient works of art. Not long afterward I was having that offhand conversation about a choice of career in my parents' kitchen, and within weeks I was on Bond Street, knocking on the doors of jewelry houses with a CV in my hand, as green as the emeralds on display. Soon I was having the pages pushed back at me over the table, by a man who very firmly insisted—twice—that he was "not looking for a secretary." Another dealer, who I ended up working for, initially told me to forget it: I was the wrong gender, wrong family, wrong religion. Why didn't I just become a lawyer?

It was my first experience of the rough edges that surround an industry dealing in some of the world's hardest objects. But it was also a suitably fiery introduction to a world full of bright and brilliant human gems: people driven by a passion for their subject whose sparks I had already felt igniting inside me. Another knock on a Bond Street door resulted in a much friendlier conversation, culminating with a visit to the safe and my first experience of the treasures of the trade. I still remember the jewels I saw that day. One diamond dealer showed me a 100-carat stone on the wheel as it was being polished by one of the last diamond-cutters left in London. This was a world I knew I wanted to be part of from the moment its door began to creak ajar. I signed up for night classes in the science of gemmology, and so began the greatest love affair of my life: the study of gemstones.