How Hong Kong’s Jewellery Fairs Are Shaping the Future of Coloured Gemstones
There are moments in an industry’s history when everything shifts at once — when energy, intention and opportunity converge into something undeniable. For the world of coloured gemstones, that moment is now, and its address is Hong Kong. Imagine a room where a Burmese ruby catcher from Mogok stands across the aisle from a Gen-Z jewellery designer who sources her spinels via Instagram Live. Where a fifth-generation sapphire dealer from Sri Lanka compares notes with a Vietnamese e-commerce entrepreneur whose customers skew under thirty and buy tourmalines the way previous generations bought gold chains. That room exists — it is called Hong Kong — and in 2026, it is about to become more vibrant, more ambitious and more relevant than ever before.
Informa Markets Jewellery has announced that Jewellery & Gem ASIA Hong Kong (JGA) in June and Jewellery & Gem WORLD Hong Kong (JGW) in September will both place coloured gemstones front and centre. More than a curatorial choice, this is a statement of conviction: that the world’s appetite for colour — for the deep velvety greens of Colombian emeralds, the electric blues of Paraíba tourmalines, the fiery pinks of Padparadscha sapphires — is not a trend. It is a transformation.
“These initiatives serve as a catalyst for meaningful dialogue, stimulating innovation and collaboration across the entire coloured gemstone world.” — Celine Lau, Director of Jewellery Fairs, Informa Markets Jewellery
Three bold new programmes will unfold in the months ahead, each targeting a different pressure point of the industry — and each promising to reshape how the trade thinks, creates and connects.
Programme I — ICA Plus: Asia Redraws the Map
The International Colored Gemstone Association has long been the industry’s conscience and its connective tissue — a body that brings discipline, ethics and camaraderie to a trade that spans some of the most remote corners of the earth. Its biennial Congress is a prestigious forum for the coloured gemstone industry. But ICA Plus is something different, and its choice of Hong Kong as its debut location is intentional.
Asia is no longer simply a manufacturing hub or a downstream market. It is a source of taste, of capital, of consumer culture — and of ideas. China’s jewellery buyers are among the world’s most sophisticated. Southeast Asian consumers are discovering coloured stones at a pace that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. Live-selling platforms in China, Thailand and Vietnam are creating entirely new supply chains, where a gem can travel from a Bangkok trading floor to a buyer’s wrist in a matter of hours.
ICA Plus will dig into all of this. Think of it less as a conference and more as a concentrated dose of clarity: where the markets are heading, who the next consumers are, and what they want from the stones they wear. Running from 19 to 21 September during JGW, the event will bring together ICA members from nearly 50 countries, alongside buyers, exhibitors and industry stakeholders. A Welcome Reception will set the tone — warm, connected, charged with the particular electricity that only a room full of people who genuinely love gems can generate.
Programme II — NextGen Excellence Awards: The Next Wave Takes the Stage
Every industry that endures does so because someone, at some point, decided to pass the torch properly. Not hand it over reluctantly, not extinguish it in a slow transition, but truly, generously, pass it — with mentorship, with platform, with recognition.
That is the spirit behind the NextGen Coloured Gem Excellence Awards, and it arrives at a critical moment. The luxury market is undergoing its most significant generational shift in decades. Younger consumers are not simply buying different jewellery — they are buying differently. They want provenance, not just provenance documents. They want stories, not just certificates. They want to know the miner’s name, the village’s name, whether the environment was respected and the workers were paid fairly.
The awardees — professionals and entrepreneurs aged 45 and under — are already answering these demands. They are building traceable supply chains, developing digital-first brands, forging direct relationships with artisanal mining communities. By celebrating them on the stage of JGW’s Fair Reception on 17 September at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, the industry sends a signal to itself: this is where we are going, and we are proud of it.
Programme III — The Design Challenge: Jewellery Beyond Gender
The Gender-Fluid Coloured Gem Jewellery Design Challenge is, on one level, a design competition. On another level, it is a provocation — a deliberate and joyful refusal of the idea that certain stones, certain silhouettes, certain ways of wearing jewellery belong only to certain people.
Consider what this means for gemstones specifically. A deep alexandrite that shifts from teal to burgundy under candlelight. A faceted imperial topaz that catches the evening light like a small captured sun. These are not feminine stones or masculine stones. They are extraordinary concentrations of the earth’s beauty, and the designers who approach them without inherited assumptions about who should wear them will find creative territory that is genuinely unmapped.
The challenge invites entries across three categories — earrings, rings and brooches — with a submission deadline of 30 April 2026. Finalists will be unveiled and publicly voted on at JGA in June. The winning pieces will then be physically realised by industry sponsors and presented at JGW, where they will stand as proof of what happens when creativity is given permission to go further.
What makes all of this remarkable is not any single programme in isolation — it is their coherence. ICA Plus addresses the trade’s commercial intelligence. The NextGen Awards address its human capital. The Design Challenge addresses its creative identity. Three different lenses, all trained on the same question: what does a thriving coloured gemstone industry look like in the years ahead?
The answer, it appears, is this: it looks like Hong Kong in 2026. Alive with possibility, buzzing with the energy of a new generation, and lit — quite literally — by the most extraordinary colours the earth has ever produced.
“With new initiatives and ideas emerging, the coming months are anticipated to bring interesting opportunities for the coloured gemstone industry.” — Celine Lau, Director of Jewellery Fairs
For those of us who have spent careers in love with tourmalines and tanzanites, with the blue-green flicker of a fine aquamarine held up to northern light, with the impossible depth of a Burmese pigeon-blood ruby — this is not a moment to observe from a distance. It is a moment to be inside of, fully, hands and eyes open.
The coloured gemstone industry has always known something the rest of the world is only now catching up to: that colour is not decoration. It is meaning, memory, identity, desire. The stones we choose say something about who we are and who we want to be. Hong Kong, in 2026, is giving that truth the platform it deserves.
