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And, of course, consumers, the key to this new market, are responding: “I think it’s the wow factor,” says Aditya Jain of Los Angeles’ La Reina Collection, which kicked off its rough line at Couture and sold through before the end of the show, then repeated the performance with 150 pieces at Basel. “This jewelry makes such a strong statement.”

“A lot of the sale is about education,” says Diamond in the Rough’s Anjanette Clisura, who defines her typical client as the “ladies with the big 10 carat rings looking for something new. And I spend much of my time in stores doing exactly that. How the rough is sorted and valued, which the customer never really knew about, then moving to factors that make some rough more valuable in jewelry. How those gorgeous octahedrons out of Russia look almost polished as they come out of the ground, or about that beautiful green skin of certain central African diamonds. It adds value, even though it would be the first thing that came off on the wheel. You’re already deep into the story, and the initial resistance begins to fade.”

“There can be can quite a bit of initial resistance,” says Hamida Belkadi of De Beers, currently launching phase two of “Valley of Diamonds,” the high-end jeweler’s third rough collection in four years. “And overcoming that is all about the story. But once they get it, they really get it. These are the most successful collections we’ve had to date. And it’s not just fashion. Or something new, or a return to nature, or to the way that kings and maharajahs wore diamonds for millennia. Or even about value. It’s a gift of love. We even had one client special order a rough diamond set in an engagement ring.”

And what exactly are they getting? “Different things for different people, I’m sure,” says Belkadi. “But at the end of the day? I think what we’re really doing is reclaiming the mystique of diamonds. And I say that not as a marketer, but as a lover of these diamonds, and the proud owner of one.”

THE SHOCK OF THE NEW

That mystique has guided the two decades given to rough diamonds and rough diamond jewelry by Colorado designer Todd Reed, perhaps the category’s seminal figure. His explorations began, he recalls, with questions about perceived value, beauty, and perfection, the latter being perhaps the question most deeply harbored. “People talk about having the world’s most perfect diamond, the world’s most perfectly cut diamond,” says the self-described “mid-30s post-hippy,” a pioneer in recycled metals as well as uncut stones. Originally marketing in Colorado Springs, Durango, “and the all-important Grateful Dead concert,” Reed (whom De Beers consulted on an early foray into rough jewelry) is now an 11-man shop, where everything happens in-house.

Currently setting a 248 carat natural black in a pendant, Reed fashions pieces that hew to clean, undisturbed lines. He’s a master of that balance of detail and simplicity. His pieces can range from delicate earrings to necklaces of 600 to 700 carats, with two constants: 1. Diamonds enter his jewelry as they came out of the earth. Other rough jewelers may cleave, slice, drill, or polish a few bezels into crowns. Or the sky: Reed is a lover of natural blacks, and an adherent of the theory that they are asteroidal. 2. His diamonds are the best, most “perfect” nature offers, be it “the steely grays coming out of Diavik these days, or those deep browns erring to pink in some Australian stones,” or pinks out of a local mine north of Fort Collins, Colorado.

“But the slightest cut, even a window for clarity and color,” says Reed, “means a loss of beauty and perfection. A perfect cube, which we now understand as diamond’s root crystal form, with its perfect crystalline coating and trigons. An octahedron’s exact isosceles triangles. The sphericalness of a true ballas. It’s sacred geometry. From a design standpoint, it was, and still is, very exciting to be working on the only real new thing out there—though, of course, this is how mankind wore diamonds for millennia, and though, of course, it’s not quite so new now.”