The Jewelry District, Episode 139: Guests Richard and Billie Hughes

By Kathy Passero | January 29, 2025

On this week’s episode, JCK editor-in-chief Victoria Gomelsky and news director Rob Bates interview The Jewelry District’s first-ever father-daughter guest duo, Richard “Dick” Hughes and Billie Hughes, cofounders of Lotus Gemology, a full-service colored gemstone testing lab based in Bangkok. They give listeners an insider’s guide to the complex world of colored stones. Why is describing faceted color gemstones “pure hell,” in Dick’s words? (“It’s like trying to describe the wind,” he says.) How do experts really detect treated stones? Bonus: Find out how you can learn more from these experts in Tucson.

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Sponsored by IGI: igi.org

Episode Credits
Hosts: Rob Bates and Victoria Gomelsky
Producer and engineer: Natalie Chomet
Editor: Riley McCaskill
Plugs: @jckmagazine; igi.org, lotusgemology.com

Show Notes
02:23 Like father, like daughter
09:21 Lab notes
14:17 Talking color and nomenclature
18:33 Color block
21:39 Hot off the presses
23:30 Next stop: the Tucson gem shows

Show Recap
Like father, like daughter
Victoria and Rob welcome Dick and Billie Hughes of Bangkok-based colored stone testing lab Lotus Gemology and ask how gems became a Hughes family tradition.

It began with wanderlust. When Dick graduated from high school in Boulder, Colo., he and a friend set off to see the world. They traveled around Europe, then Dick went on to explore Nepal and other parts of Asia. He fell in love with Thailand and never left.

“All the way across Asia, I was offered gems to purchase,” he says. “And then in Burma, I saw my first piece of jade and thought, ‘This is really neat stuff.’”

He was teaching English in Bangkok in the late 1970s when an ad for a local gemological school caught his eye. Intrigued, he signed up for a class and found not only his future career but also his future wife (and Billie’s mother).

Gemology is “a great unifier,” Dick says. “You get to meet people around the world, and you get to see how similar we are in most respects.”

Dick became an expert on rubies and sapphires, because they were the only stones being traded on the market in Bangkok when he completed his gemology studies. His career in gems took him from wholesale to TV jewelry sales to a sapphire mine, where he cut stones. “Most gemologists are just gemologists and don’t get involved in the trade side,” he says. “I’ve done a bunch of different things, and it’s made me a better gemologist.”

Billie was born and raised in Thailand and grew up immersed in the jewelry world, accompanying her parents on trips to mines from the time she was a toddler. Attending college at UCLA, she had no plans to follow in their footsteps. “I was always really interested in traveling and experiencing different cultures and meeting people around the world,” she says, “but I don’t think I put it all together until after university.”

Working in a family business can be a challenge. “But the positive side,” says Billie, “is even when you’re disagreeing, you know it’s because everybody’s passionate about what they’re doing…. We’re working toward the same goal, even if we have a different way of getting there.”

Lab notes
The Hughes family founded Lotus Gemology in 2014 to fill what they saw as a void in the market. Most gemological reports are so dry they’re “about as exciting as a urine test,” says Dick. “We thought we could bring a little flavor into them.”

Lotus provides an extensive list of informative articles as well as a Hyperion inclusions database, created by Billie and available to the public on the company’s website. Users can search by stone type (natural ruby vs. synthetic, ruby vs. emerald, etc.), country of origin, enhancement, or keyword.

“It really started as a way to help myself,” Billie explains. “[My parents] had a lot of experience when we opened the lab, [and] it was hard for me to catch up.” To help herself along the learning curve, she started taking pictures of inclusions in stones to use as study notes. Slowly her collection grew into the current 1,000-image database.

While the industry is concerned about newer treatments performed at higher temperatures, Billie says “sometimes the trickiest stones [have] the more traditional treatments because they’re performed at lower temperatures, and so it’s easier for treaters to evade detection.”

Dick notes that the industry’s experience with lab-grown colored stones can illuminate what’s currently happening with lab-grown diamonds. “I’ve studied the history of synthetic ruby,” he says, “and it was pretty clear what was going to happen with synthetic diamonds, that the price was eventually going to plunge. And, unfortunately, the gem and jewelry trade got greedy and they didn’t understand the crisis of confidence this would cause in the trade. It’s particularly true in China, where the consumers have lost confidence in the jewelry business in general because of the debacle of synthetic diamonds.”

Talking color and nomenclature
Jewelers heading to Tucson this month can learn more during talks by Billie and Dick. Billie’s “Trick or Treatment” presentation at the NAJA conference will cover methods used to detect treatment on rubies and sapphires. The idea for the session sprang from clients’ often misguided notions about what goes on in gemology labs, she says. For example, one client expected her to produce an “origin machine” that would pinpoint where his stones came from.

“This was really educational for me,” she says. “I realized that there’s a big disconnect between what we do in the lab and what the market perceives that we do.” People think it’s all about buying the most sophisticated instruments to test a stone, but gemology is more akin to medical diagnostics. “When you go to the doctor, they don’t just run one test that diagnoses you. They do a series of tests. They check your blood pressure. They could do an X-ray. They’ll use more traditional tests, and they’ll use more advanced technology and combine all that to come up with a diagnosis,” Billie says. “That’s really more what we’re doing in a gemological lab. This talk is about communicating that to an audience.”

Billie and her dad will give a joint presentation at AGTA GemFair about the fundamentals of color science and the challenges of describing faceted colored gemstones. “When I was younger, I believed that we could develop colored stone grading systems,” Dick says. Now he realizes that was hopelessly naive.

“The reason is really simple, but it’s so easily overlooked,” he says. You can try to describe the hue, the tone, or the saturation, but “faceted colored gemstones are not one color. They’re a mosaic of colors in three dimensions, and those colors change if you change the light source, or the position of the stone or your eye. It’s like trying to describe the wind. There’s nothing we argue more about in our lab than color, and how to describe color.”

Dick recalls training sorters at a sapphire company years ago. Even though they were working with dark blue sapphires from Australia, all cut symmetrically, “it was pure hell to try to match the stones,” he says. “You would get them all lined up and they’d look great, then you’d rotate the sorting tray 90 degrees, and you’d have to start over.”

Color blocks
What of famous color descriptors like pigeon’s blood? “Color terms are wildly popular among traders,” Dick concedes. “However, there is no consistency from one lab to another.”

“There are times when it’s hard to even be consistent with yourself,” Billie adds. “You can look at the same stone in the morning and in the afternoon, and it’ll look different. Some people have suggested that what we need is standardized lighting as a solution, but I don’t think [that’s] realistic because dealers don’t just buy stones in one standardized lighting condition, and people definitely don’t wear their gems and jewelry in only one lighting condition.”

Hughes says no one knows where the label “pigeon’s blood” comes from, but it’s believed to have originated in Burma—and it’s part of a scale of similar descriptors like “rabbit’s blood.”

Hot off the presses
Dick’s new book, Broken Bangle: The Blunder-Besmirched History of Jade Nomenclature, grew out of his frustration with incorrect terminology for jade, a material he has loved since he first saw it in Burma decades ago.

“It’s mineralogically incorrect to use the term ‘jadeite’ because we’re dealing with a rock,” Dick explains. He and several contacts in the industry collaborated on a paper arguing this point, but after a major gemological publication refused to send it out for review, they expanded the paper into a book.

Next stop: the Tucson gem shows
Looking ahead to Tucson, Victoria asks what issues and news might dominate talk and business at the annual gem shows. “In Bangkok a lot of people are saying it’s become very difficult to find good material and high-end material,” Billie says. “There’s not a lot coming out right now. And that means when there is nice material, the prices are really high.”

Any views expressed in this podcast do not reflect the opinion of JCK, its management, or its advertisers.