Our Story

Oria Gems exists because the gemstone trade has too many hands in it.

Most coloured stones pass through six or seven owners between the pit and the buyer. A rough parcel is sold to a broker, then to a sorting house, then to a cutting factory, then to a wholesaler, then to a dealer, then to a retailer. Each one takes a margin. None of them ever cuts or sets the stone themselves. By the time a sapphire reaches a customer, most of what they paid went to people who never touched it.

Where we come from

We began buying rough directly in Ratnapura, the town in Sri Lanka's Sabaragamuwa Province that has been the centre of the island's gem trade for centuries. The pits there are small, family-run operations. Some are no more than a shaft dug into a riverbed, worked with a bucket and a rope. Others are shallow open casts beside the paddy fields.

Buying at the pit means seeing the gravel the day it comes up. It also means paying a fair price to the people who dig it, rather than to whoever happens to be holding it three months later.

Sri Lanka has been called the Gem Island for more than two thousand years, and the reason is geological rather than romantic. The island sits on a Precambrian highland that has been folded and metamorphosed for so long that it produces corundum of unusual clarity — the sapphires and rubies the trade has bought from Ceylon since antiquity. We work inside that geology, not around it. Every stone we describe as Ceylon was mined on the island and cut in our own workshop in Colombo.

What we do with it

Rough goes to our own workshop in Colombo. We cut, we polish, and we grade. When a stone is good enough to stand on its own we list it as a single stone. When it is small, or part of a matched run, we sort it into calibrated parcels for jewellers, or set it ourselves in silver, platinum and gold.

Nothing is bought in and rebadged. If it is listed on this site, we cut it or we set it.

What we will not do

We do not sell synthetics. We do not sell treated material without saying so. We do not describe a stone as “Ceylon” unless it was mined in Sri Lanka, and we do not describe a stone as unheated unless we are certain of it.

Where a stone has been heat treated we say so and we price it accordingly. Heat treatment is a normal and accepted part of the trade. Silence about it is not.

The house in brief

Sourcing	Ratnapura and Elahera, Sri Lanka — bought at the pit, never through a broker chain
Cutting and setting	Our own workshop in Colombo, Sri Lanka
Legal entity	Ningbo Junyao Trading Co., Ltd., trading as Oria Gems
Registered address	D216, Room 501, Building 1, No. 88 Meishan Qixing Road, Meishan Subdistrict, Beilun District, Ningbo City, Zhejiang Province, China
Warehouse and dispatch	Room 706, Building 22, Haijinyuan, No. 38 Jinshui East Road, Ninghai County, Ningbo City, Zhejiang Province, China, 315600
What we sell	Loose Ceylon sapphire, ruby, spinel, chrysoberyl cat's eye, aquamarine, garnet and moonstone; fine jewellery set in 925 sterling silver, 18K gold and platinum
Certification	A signed grading card with every stone; GIA, GRS, Lotus or GIC reports arranged on request before dispatch
Shipping	Worldwide, insured and tracked, free on orders of $300 or more

Where we are

Our sourcing is in Ratnapura and our workshop is in Colombo. Our warehouse and customer service are in Ningbo, China, which is where your parcel is packed and where your emails are answered.

We ship worldwide from China or Sri Lanka, and we answer our own emails.

Talk to us

Questions about a specific stone are best sent by email, with the product name in the subject line — we can usually reply with extra photographs or a daylight video the same day.