Colored gemstones dominate INSTORE Design Awards as small makers shine

Colored gemstones set the tone at the 2026 INSTORE Design Awards, where a new small-batch category and a surge of vivid entries showed how quickly the market is moving beyond the standard birthstone script. The competition, now in its 11th edition, drew 229 entries, matching last year’s total, but INSTORE said colored gemstones were hotter than ever, with far more submissions in the category than in previous years.

The strongest signal came from the new Best Small Batch Colored Stones category, created for makers with five or fewer employees. That split mattered: it gave smaller studios room to compete on originality, not scale, and the results made the case for artisanal color. Daria de Koning took first place with Estuary earrings in 18k yellow gold, built around 57.10 carats of azurite-malachite, 14.60 carats of iolite and 1.76 carats of mint green tourmaline, with a clip-and-post back and detachable drop priced at $16,500. Judge Catherine Fitzgibbon said it was great to see an artist use the natural characteristics of the gems as the focus of the design. Mary Murray said the azurite-malachite’s veining reminded her of seeing the Earth from above, while John Mead called it one of the prettiest examples of malachite he had seen.

That praise points to what is changing in personalized jewelry: buyers are responding not just to color, but to character. Melinda Lawton Jewelry placed second and won Retailer’s Choice with Nocturne en Opale, a vintage-inspired 14K yellow gold ring centered on a 5.30-carat oval harlequin opal and framed by tourmaline, blue-green zircon and champagne diamonds, priced at $15,000. Original Eve Designs took third with Bloom earrings in platinum, using three tones of marquise-shape aquamarine and round brilliant-cut diamonds at $6,820. In each case, the stone itself does the storytelling.

The market data backs up that shift. The Plumb Club’s 2025 Industry and Market Insights survey found that 65% of 2,000 U.S. consumers ages 25 to 60 seek jewelry with their birthstone, 39% prefer bright-colored gemstones, and 69% say personalized jewelry is important or extremely important. Neutral gemstone tones fell to 34%, down 12 percentage points from the prior study. Taken together, the numbers and the awards suggest that next season’s birthstone shopping will lean less literal and far more expressive, with opal, aquamarine, tourmaline, iolite and even pattern-rich stones like azurite-malachite poised to shape what feels desirable, personal and worth collecting.

That appetite for distinctive color was already visible around Tucson, where AGTA held GemFair Tucson from February 2 to 6, 2026, at the Tucson Convention Center in Tucson, Arizona, and described the show as color’s premier showcase for natural colored gemstones. The lesson from both the show floor and the awards podium is the same: small makers are increasingly setting the pace, and consumers are following the stones that feel most alive.