Ramon Cortes, Graduate Gemologist (GIA)
For nearly forty years, one and the same curiosity has guided my path: understanding stones, their origin and the bonds they have woven with people through time.
A journey to Jaipur, India, changed the way I looked at stones. A few months later, that curiosity led me to gemology studies at GIA in Santa Monica (1990), and in 1992 to a meeting with Professor Eduard Gübelin.
Knowledge then had to face the real world. In 1993, diamond prospecting in the Guinean savanna taught me that a stone begins long before the laboratory or the display case: in a land, a landscape and the work of people. In 2010, on the pearl farms of Rangiroa in French Polynesia, a farm director who was a marine biologist by training showed me that behind every pearl there is first a living creature, then years of care and patience. In 2016, I visited one of the last Yogo sapphire mines in Montana; seeing a stone in its original setting gives a very concrete measure of its rarity. And in 2022, an expedition in Lapland in search of the Muonionalusta meteorite remains one of my most demanding and most rewarding field experiences.
Today, this path continues in four books devoted to the diamond, the meteorite, the pearl and colored gemstones: the sum of nearly forty years of learning, professional experience, travel and encounters.