Five years ago, I joined my father on a trip to a gemstone mine. I was only a teenager, but the images from that visit have stayed sharper in my memory than most classroom lessons.
The first thing I noticed wasn’t the gemstones. It was the ground: stripped of trees, red dust clinging to everything, and pools of water that weren’t clear but cloudy and metallic-looking. Trucks rumbled past carrying loads of rock, coughing out smoke that mixed with the dust in the air. I remember the bitter smell and how it burned my nose.
What struck me most were the people. Men with picks and shovels working in the heat, their hands blistered. Kids carrying buckets almost as heavy as themselves. No one was wearing gloves, masks, or anything close to protective gear. It felt wrong that something beautiful, polished, and eventually displayed in a glass case could start here, in such harsh conditions.
That trip planted a question I’ve been chasing ever since: How can jewelry exist without leaving scars behind? When I look at rings or necklaces now, I don’t just see the design. I see the mine, the dust, the smoke, and the polluted water.
It’s why I started selling eco-jewelry and why I built charts comparing mined and recycled silver. Because once you’ve seen the cost of extraction up close, you can’t pretend jewelry is just decoration anymore.
Yikai Markus Chen 
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