CIBJO’s Centenary Congress in Vicenza put a century of jewelry standards behind one surprisingly contentious decision: what the industry should call a diamond made in a laboratory.
There is a moment at a trade show when you stop taking notes and just look around.
Mine came in the Palladio Theatre at the Fiera di Vicenza, somewhere in the middle of CIBJO's Centenary Congress. Four hundred-plus people from every corner of the industry — Italy, India, Dubai, Japan, South Africa, the United States. A hundred years of an organization that started in Paris in 1926 as BIBOA, a European club that wrote some of the first unified rules for telling the truth about gemstones. And I looked down my row, and then across the press section, and I did the math I always end up doing.
I was, as far as I could tell, the only voice in that press group speaking for the Latin American diamond and jewelry industry.
Not a complaint. A data point. And the reason this recap exists.
What actually happened in Vicenza
Let's set the scene.
Vicenzaoro September ran September 4–8 at the Vicenza Expo Centre — 1,300 exhibiting brands from 40 countries, nearly half of them international, and 910 hosted buyers from 73 nations, up a third over last September. T.Gold ran alongside it. For a show that likes to call itself "the trend show," it earned it this year.
But the reason the whole world showed up was CIBJO.
The World Jewellery Confederation held its 2026 Congress in Vicenza from September 4 to 7, and declared it the Centenary Congress — 100 years since the organization's founding in 1926. Gaetano Cavalieri, CIBJO's president, walked the room through the whole arc: BIBOA in Paris, the 1960 Paris congress that reimagined the structure, the 1961 restructuring into CIBJO, and — this is the part I sat up for — the moment the by-laws opened membership beyond Europe, to the Americas, Asia, Africa and Oceania.
The Americas have technically had a seat at this table for sixty-five years.
Sixty-five years, and I still counted myself as the one Spanish-language voice in that press corps.
Italy's Enterprise Minister, Adolfo Urso, addressed the opening remotely and called Vicenza the cradle of Italian gem and jewelry craftsmanship. Maurizio Ermeti, president of Italian Exhibition Group, was blunter about the moment we're in: jewelry is going through a complex time, and CIBJO choosing Vicenza for its hundredth was something the Italians were visibly proud of.
Then Gareth Penny — former CEO of De Beers Group — opened the program, and the complex time got a name.
The word: "synthetic"
Here is the headline you'll be hearing about for the next two years.
On Sunday, September 6, CIBJO's Diamond Commission — chaired by Udi Sheintal, with Jean-Pierre Chalain as vice president — formally proposed removing "laboratory-grown diamond" and "laboratory-created diamond" from CIBJO's nomenclature, leaving "synthetic diamond" as the sole recommended term. The Coloured Stone Commission, under Charles Abouchar, voted the same way for colored stones.
Cavalieri described the debate as emotional. I'd call that generous. Wesley Hunt, who chairs CIBJO's Laboratory-Grown Diamond Committee, told the congress he'd received a letter asking for the decision to be deferred. The lab-grown sector wanted more time and wanted "laboratory-grown" kept on the table.
They didn't get it. On September 7, after the congress closed, CIBJO's Board of Directors approved the recommendation. The Blue Books will be revised so that synthetic is the sole descriptor for a created product with essentially the same chemical composition, physical properties and structure as its natural counterpart.
Sheintal's line was the one everyone repeated afterward: this isn't about marketing, it's about telling the consumer the truth. He made the point with food — a Peking duck is a duck, a Bombay duck is a fish — which got a laugh and then got very quiet, because everyone understood the analogy was about our industry's labeling problem, not lunch.
What this actually means for you, in plain language:
- CIBJO acknowledged that "laboratory-grown" and "laboratory-created" are consumer marketing terms accepted in certain jurisdictions, and that national law takes precedence where it applies. So no, your U.S. retailer's website isn't illegal tomorrow.
- What CIBJO recommends is that when you're communicating to an international audience, "synthetic" is the least ambiguous word available.
- This doesn't happen in a vacuum. France legislated "synthetic" as the mandatory term in 2024. Russia followed in 2026. The World Federation of Diamond Bourses voted unanimously for "synthetic diamond" at its congress in Singapore in July. The London Diamond Bourse signed on days before Vicenza. AGTA updated its own code.
- Meanwhile, the U.S. and India have gone the other direction, favoring the softer consumer language — and in the U.S., synthetic stones now account for more than half of engagement rings sold by volume.
So we now have a global industry where the single most commercially important product category is legally described one way in Paris and another way in Dallas. Fragmentation is the polite word for it.
My position, for the record is that the word matters less than the disclosure. A client who knows exactly what they're buying and pays a fair price for it has been served well, whatever you call the stone. A client who finds out in five years — at an appraisal, at a resale, at an insurance claim — has been failed, no matter how gentle the vocabulary was.
And this is precisely where Latin America gets left behind. Terminology decided in Vicenza and legislated in Paris gets translated into Spanish by... whom? Retail vocabulary in Mexico City, Bogotá, Buenos Aires and Miami is already inconsistent. If nobody is doing this work in Spanish, the gap between what the standard says and what the consumer hears just gets wider.
That's why I was in the room.
Color came back, and it isn't subtle
If synthetics owned the congress, color owned the floor.
Colored gemstones were one of the named market-opportunity tracks in Trendvision's programming, alongside gold and precious metals, diamonds, bridal, pearls and high jewelry. Paola De Luca launched the Trendbook 2028+ on the show's opening Saturday — the twenty-something-th edition of what the trade genuinely treats as its forecasting bible.
But you didn't need just the book. You needed eyes.
Saturated emeralds. Sapphires well past the safe blues — teals, greens, parti stones. Rubies used as the whole point of a piece rather than an accent. Stones chosen for how they feel rather than for what the traditional hierarchy says they're worth. Roberto Coin brought back and reimagined Cobra, one of his 1990s collections, and it did not read as nostalgia.
The other thing I kept noticing: statement pieces styled down. A white shirt, a black dress, and then one extraordinary object. Nobody is saving the good jewelry for the gala anymore.
Two more notes worth your time. Pearls had a real moment, and not a nostalgic one — there's a serious Italian-led conversation happening about the future of Akoya, driven by the uncomfortable fact that rising sea temperatures are pressuring the oysters and production is well below where it was twenty years ago. Scarcity is coming for pearls, and the market hasn't priced it in yet.
And on the business side, Federpreziosi put out a number that should reframe how you think about Italian retail: foreign tourists spent an estimated €910 million in Italian jewelry shops in 2025, roughly 13% of those shops' annual revenue. The jewelry store as an ambassador of Made in Italy isn't a slogan. It's a line item.
The bow
One more, because it's the thing people will actually ask me about.
Bows are everywhere, and they've graduated. What started as the coquette-ribbon moment — soft, young, a little costume — has been rebuilt in gold and stone and moved from the hair to the throat. Bow necklaces, worn high and close, sculpted rather than draped. Some articulated so the loops move. Some set so the pavé does the work of satin.
It works for the same reason the color story works: it's a piece with personality that doesn't require an occasion. A bow at the neckline is doing what a great brooch used to do. And it photographs beautifully, which is not a small thing in 2026.
If you're building a collection this season and you want one trend piece, this is the one I'd bet on.
The row I was sitting in
I keep coming back to the press section.
Latin America buys. Latin America inherits. Latin America has a relationship with gold and with heirloom jewelry that is older and deeper than most of the markets represented in that theatre. Our clients are not a niche and they are not an afterthought.
And yet, when the industry gathers to decide what words we're all going to use — the words that end up on a certificate, on a receipt, in a conversation between a scared buyer and a salesperson who may or may not know the difference — the room mostly talks in English, and the questions from a Spanish-speaking perspective get asked only if somebody there is thinking in Spanish.
For a hundred years, CIBJO has been building the vocabulary of trust. I intend to make sure that vocabulary arrives in Spanish, intact, with nothing lost in translation and nothing softened for a sale.