Most of the world’s commercial sapphire – from Australia, Thailand, Nigeria – forms one way: magmatic, carried up from the earth’s mantle by basaltic volcanism. Sutara didn’t form that way at all.

It sits along a small river of the same name in Russia’s Far East, near the Chinese border. Gold prospectors found its gray and blue fragments in the river gravel in 1943, and had no interest in them. It took until 2009–2011 for the Far East Geological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences to study the deposit properly.

Sutara sapphire formed where granite pegmatites met dolomite-rich marble, through a slow metasomatic process that left corundum behind instead of quartz. A metamorphic genesis, documented in only a handful of places anywhere – and published in Gems & Gemology, GIA’s own research journal, in 2016.

Almost every stone from this deposit carries dense internal inclusions – rutile needles, zircon, mica, growth zoning. Where the rutile needles align along the crystal’s natural axes, they scatter light into a star. So most of what we cut is cabochon, cut to show that star – in black, blue, green and yellow.

The faceted stones are the cleanest material, and almost always under a carat. Every Sutara sapphire we sell is untreated: no heat, nothing added – exactly as it came out of the ground. Each is covered by our Authenticity Guarantee.

The deposit no longer exists in any working sense. When it was still active, we bought up the corundum-bearing material that came out of it, and we have been cutting through that reserve ever since. Nothing new has come out of the ground.

In every practical sense, we are the first and only hands this material will ever pass through.

We are still cutting through the Sutara reserve, and new stones come from it a few times a year. Leave your address and we will write when they do.