The Exceptional Allure of the Emerald
Vivienne Becker
MARCH 12 2024
Financial Times
Green is good this spring
As co-president and artistic director of Chopard, Caroline Scheufele has seen and handled a king’s ransom’s worth of fabulously rare and ravishing gemstones. Yet when she first set eyes on the 6,225-carat rough emerald now named Insofu, she was left speechless. “For reasons that escape any form of rationale, some gemstones blow you away immediately,” she says. “It is profoundly moving to be confronted with the beauty and mystery of such a treasure, collected from the depths of the Earth, formed millions of years ago.”
Scheufele was determined to create something remarkable from the stone, which was found in 2010 in the Gemfields-owned Kagem mine in Zambia and acquired by Chopard in 2018. She brought expert emerald cutters from India to Chopard’s atelier in Geneva and, after weeks studying the rough, they began the cutting process, which took nine months.
During this time, Scheufele invited Julia Roberts, Chopard’s global ambassador, to co-design a high-jewellery capsule using the polished gems yielded by Insofu. Roberts took inspiration from India’s floral necklaces, mixing the emeralds with cherry-hued rubellites and turquoise in a suite comprising a ring, necklace and chandelier earrings.
The collection points to a new emerald frenzy. Miuccia Prada took a bow at her AW24 show in an impressive emerald set, if proof was ever needed of the stone’s new cool. Like Chopard’s, Gucci’s new Allegoria high-jewellery collection features a necklace centred on a 10-carat hexagonal emerald, and theatrical earrings are set with a fan-shaped emerald fringed with diamonds and tipped with coloured tourmalines. Jody Wainwright, Boodles’ director of diamonds and precious gemstones, sees emeralds gaining momentum. “We have always looked at sapphires, rubies and emeralds in that order of importance for many years. But we now have more emeralds than rubies in Boodles.”
To read Vivienne Becker’s full story on the emerald, tap here for the Financial Times
