Gemological Institute of America

We're doing computer modeling, like here's a sapphire.

What happens if we add each element of the periodic table? We're taking natural sapphire, getting chemistry data from our colleagues over at GIA and saying, okay, here's this natural sapphire with this stuff in it.

Do our computer models say that it should work? And can we grow a lab sapphire that looks identical to this natural one? And then the kind of like sneaky backdoor option is that, you know, there's some research scientists who've already done some of this stuff and they publish a little bit of data that we can kind of pick apart and figure out what they're doing and kind of reverse engineer things from there.

So, you know, the like the tenebrescent sapphire that starts out yellow and you hit it with a UV light, it turns purple for like 10 hours.

There's almost nothing in it.

So stuff like that, pretty easy to model.

But if you're looking at like if you're looking at like umba sapphire there's a whole bunch of stuff in there and like there's the typical things that we think about that cause color like chromium vanadium iron titanium but then there's a whole bunch of other stuff like some of these sapphires have like lead a lot of them have gallium a lot of them have other things that like people are like oh this doesn't cause color and then we're modeling it and it's like oh but this does have an impact on color And even GIA published, I think, about a year ago, GIA had to issue this like new publication saying, oh, hey, we screwed up about yellow sapphire.

Everybody was like, oh, there's no nickel in sapphire.

The shop is in Brightleaf Square, Durham's restored historic tobacco warehouse district.

Hamilton graduated from the Gemological Institute of America and remains one of downtown Durham's most devoted boosters.

But she has something almost no other jewelry store has, and even fewer specialize in.

Modernist jewelry.