The Jewelry Edit To Host A Celebration Of Peridot In New York

New York ethical jewelry concept store The Jewlery Edit has teamed up with Fuli Gemstones to host a Celebration of Peridot later this month, featuring jewels by a host of prominent independent jewelry brands and a talk by gemologist and jewelry expert Joanna Hardy. Designers including Pippa Small, Lorraine West and Lizzie Mandler will showcase exclusive jewels created using peridot, a stone that until recently, was little used.

“When I was first asked to talk about peridot, I wondered if there would be enough source material to delve into,” says Joanna Hardy, who is a Fellow of the Gemmological Association and Trade Warden of the historic Goldsmiths’ Company in London. “But I couldn’t have been more surprised. I found endless references of peridot dating back to the 1^st Century AD, I was hooked.” Hardy, who is fresh from a trip to the Fuli Gemstones mine in China’s Changbai Mountains earlier this year, promises a deep dive into the history and significance of the stone, which has fascinated royals from Ancient Egypt to the modern-day Princess of Wales, via Queen Victoria.

Popular during the Art Deco period and a Cartier favorite, the stone subsequently fell out of fashion, but is now back in vogue and has appeared in parures by Chanel and Boucheron in recent years. Today’s designers are also captivated by the hypnotic green stone, thanks in no small part of a designer collaboration program run by Fuli Gemstones, the Anglo-Chinese company that controls the biggest known peridot deposit in the world. Independent jewelry designers and makers including Stephen Webster, Annoushka and Joy BC, have each created original works showcasing the grass-green gem’s unusual beauty.

Fuli Gemstones is a colored gemstone mining industry disruptor. Through a host of innovations, it plans to run the most environmentally responsible gemstone mine company there is, by becoming zero-waste and zero-carbon at its facility in China. The by-products of peridot mining – olivine and basalt – are tremendously versatile, and once crushed down to a powder, olivine in particular can be re-used to actually remove its own mass of carbon dioxide from the environment. The host rock at the mine, basalt, is mineral-rich and commonly used in construction as well in farming as a mineral-rich fertility boost for soil, that also sequesters carbon while decomposing.

Such strong sustainability credentials appealed to The Jewelry Edit’s founder, Rosena Sammi, an entrepreneur known for championing designers who believe in diversity, creativity, social responsibility, accountability and female empowerment. “What’s exciting,”she said in a recent Instagram live event, “is that through Joanna, we will be able to visit the mine. Change is notoriously slow in the jewelry industry, but events like these can help get the message out there — we’re excited that consumers will be able to learn, too.”

You can book tickets to A Celebration of Peridot with Joanna Hardy, Thursday, October 26, 3023 6pm-8pm, at Wyndham Garden Chinatown, New York.