Madagascar Sapphire: Ilakaka and the Modern Market

In 1998 sapphire was found in the gravels of the Ilakaka river, on the sandstone plain south of the Isalo massif in south-western Madagascar, and within a year a village of a few hundred people had become a town of tens of thousands with Thai and Sri Lankan buyers on every corner. It was one of the largest sapphire rushes in history. It changed the supply of blue sapphire for good, and it is still the reason a great deal of the sapphire sold in the world today has a Madagascar report and a Ceylon story.

What the ground is

The Ilakaka stones did not form where they are found. They weathered out of the island’s ancient metamorphic basement, travelled, and settled in the sandstone gravels, which is the same kind of secondary deposit that Sri Lanka’s gem fields are. That shared geology is the whole story of Madagascar sapphire. The stones are metamorphic, comparatively low in iron, and optically of the same family as Ceylon: lighter in tone, open, quick with light, often strongly zoned. A fine Ilakaka blue and a fine Ratnapura blue can sit almost on top of each other in the hand, and separating them afterwards is chemistry, inclusions and, in the difficult cases, an opinion with a qualification attached.

The deposit gives more than blue. Pink, yellow, purple, colour-change stones and material in the pink-orange range that the padparadscha argument has never quite settled all come out of the same gravels, which is why a Madagascar parcel opens four colours before the one you asked for.

What most of it goes through

Volume. Ilakaka produced sapphire in quantities the trade had not seen, and most of it was pale, milky or greyish rough that only became saleable in a furnace. The parcels went to Thailand and Sri Lanka to be heated and cut, and came back into the market as blue sapphire of no stated origin, which is how a Malagasy stone acquires a Ceylon story somewhere between the pit and the invoice. Heat is honest when disclosed and it is the condition of most of this material. Beryllium diffusion passed through the same channels early in the century and coloured a great deal of pale Madagascar rough into oranges and pinks that had never seen the ground that way. The report is the only thing that separates the three cases, and for Madagascar goods I read the treatment line before I look at the stone.

Where the bargain is

A small fraction of Ilakaka rough is fine as it comes: saturated blue, clean, open, never heated. Those stones are as good as anything from Sri Lanka of the same face, and they trade at a discount to it, because the word Madagascar on a report is under thirty years old and the word Ceylon is under three hundred. The laboratories price nothing. The trade prices the story. A collector who buys the stone rather than the story can own an unheated Swiss-certified blue of Ceylon quality at a Madagascar price, and I have placed several. The discount narrows every year as the market learns, which is the usual fate of a bargain that rests on a name rather than on the crystal.

How I buy there

Ilakaka is a buyer’s town with the atmosphere of one: fast, noisy, and full of parcels that have already been picked over by people who know exactly what they are looking at. The good rough goes early, to buyers with standing relationships, and the visitor sees what is left. I do not compete on the street. I work the same handful of families and Antananarivo dealers year after year, judge in my own light against masters, and buy the unheated exception rather than the heated rule. Then the stone goes to the laboratory, and only when the laboratory has spoken does a client hear about it.

Madagascar is a young name attached to old rock. The rock is what you are buying. Buy that, at a price that reflects the name, and let the name catch up.

Questions collectors ask

Is Madagascar sapphire good quality?

At its best, very. The finest unheated Ilakaka blues are metamorphic stones of the same optical family as Ceylon sapphire, and in the hand the two can sit almost on top of each other. The deposit also produces pink, yellow, colour-change and padparadscha-coloured material. The volume is enormous and most of it is commercial and heated.

Why is Madagascar sapphire cheaper than Ceylon sapphire?

Reputation and time. Ceylon has centuries of name behind it and Madagascar has under thirty years. The laboratories price nothing; the trade prices the story, and an unheated Madagascar stone with a Swiss report of the same face as a Ceylon stone trades at a discount that has more to do with the word on the invoice than with anything in the crystal.

Can a laboratory tell Madagascar sapphire from Sri Lankan?

Usually, from trace-element chemistry and the inclusion suite, but this is one of the harder separations in origin work because the geology is so similar. Reports on borderline stones come qualified, and a buyer paying an origin premium for Ceylon should want two houses to agree.