Fancy-color diamonds gain momentum as Khepri Jewels spotlights rarity

Retailers looking for a cleaner story than standard white diamonds are finding one in fancy color, where rarity does the selling. Reema Chopra built Khepri Jewels around that idea after a mentor pushed her away from stones on the Rapaport Price List and toward diamonds “you can’t find on a list.” Chopra was a former banker and recent Gemological Institute of America graduate in 2016 when she was selling diamonds to retailers; Khepri says she founded the brand in 2023 and now hand-selects fancy-color diamonds and emeralds for color and cut.

That positioning is gaining traction because fancy-color diamonds are genuinely scarce, and scarcity still carries weight at the counter. GIA says the rarest and most valuable hues include saturated pinks, blues, greens and reds, while yellows and browns are more common. Only about 1 in 10,000 carats of fashioned diamonds shows fancy color, and intense color is rarer still at about 1 in 25,000 carats. GIA also points to India, South Africa and Australia as the key historical and current sources, with Australia’s Argyle mine especially associated with rare pink diamonds.

The pitch is not just about romance. The Natural Diamond Council says fancy-colour diamond prices have grown at a compound annual rate of 5.7% over the past 20 years, a figure that helps explain why some jewelers are treating color as an investment-minded alternative to conventional white stones. But the market has also been uneven: the Fancy Color Research Foundation’s index fell 2.2% in 2024, the steepest annual decline since the index launched in 2014, and a later market note put the Q2 2025 index down another 0.5%. That softening suggests color is still a specialized category, not a broad replacement for the core diamond market.

Even so, the broader natural-diamond business offers a reason to think retailers can make room for it. The Natural Diamond Council’s 2025 U.S. trends report said specialty-jeweler holiday jewelry sales rose more than 6% to end 2025, based on more than four million transactions from 2,500 specialty jewelers. In a market where shoppers are still buying, but looking harder at distinction, fancy-color stones give retailers a sharper point of view: smaller inventory, stronger storytelling, and a category that can feel both wearable and collectible. For now, that makes fancy color less a mass-market pivot than a smart, selective assortment shift.