Market

Gold Priced Out the Casual Buyer. Fine Jewelry Kept the Serious One.

Record gold prices pushed global jewelry volumes down through 2025, and the houses gaining ground in 2026 are the ones selling a maker and a story, not just a gram count.

By Leah C. Peterson·Jul 31, 2026

A hand wearing gold rings and a bangle reaches toward a gold-clad skyscraper above a sunlit city skyline.

Gold closed 2025 having set 53 new all-time highs, according to the World Gold Council, with the year's average price running 44 percent above 2024. Total gold demand reached a record 5,002 tonnes, and central banks alone accounted for 863 tonnes of that total. By the Council's own account, those prices constrained affordability everywhere, and global jewelry volumes declined even as value-based purchasing held up. Fewer people bought fine jewelry in 2025. The ones who did spent more, and meant it.

That split, between shrinking volume and resilient value, is the fact anyone reading this category into the second half of 2026 needs to sit with first.

A Category Outrunning Its Peers

Bain's June 2026 outlook puts the wider personal luxury goods market at only 2 to 4 percent growth this year, with a flat outcome still on the table, following two years of contraction. Jewelry is beating that baseline. Richemont's Jewelry Maisons grew sales 8 percent in fiscal 2025 to 15.3 billion euros while the wider group grew 4 percent and its watchmaking division lagged well behind. The pattern held into fiscal 2026: group retail sales, which make up 71 percent of Richemont's total, rose 12 percent at constant exchange rates, with the Jewelry Maisons strong across every region the company reports and Europe up 9 percent on the same basis.

LVMH's Watches and Jewelry division tells a more mixed version of the same story. Revenue was essentially flat in euros in 2025, at 10.486 billion euros, down 1 percent, but up 3 percent organically once currency effects are stripped out. The gap between Richemont's jewelry performance and LVMH's combined watch and jewelry number says less about the category overall and more about mix: branded jewelry with a distinct identity is absorbing the gold cost story better than the watch complex sitting next to it on the same balance sheet.

Three Markets, Three Different Stories

China's National Bureau of Statistics reported retail sales of gold, silver, and jewelry up 12.8 percent to 373.6 billion RMB in 2025, though the bureau's own release flags that figure as nominal rather than price-adjusted, meaning higher gold alone accounts for a real share of that growth. Online retail sales in the category rose 8.6 percent, which is where the sell-through is actually happening.

The Americas look like the cleaner growth story. Bain's base case names the region the lead engine of the 2026 recovery, driven partly by buyers under 35 treating jewelry as a self-purchase category alongside beauty and casualwear rather than waiting for a bridal or gifting occasion to justify the spend.

India shows the strain from the opposite direction. Gem and jewelry exports for fiscal 2025-26 totaled 27.72 billion dollars, down 3.32 percent in dollar terms even as they rose slightly in rupees, with the Gem and Jewellery Export Promotion Council pointing to a shift toward more diversified markets. The pressure is sharper in the most recent data: plain gold jewelry exports fell 40.11 percent year over year in April and May 2026, a decline the council attributes to the gold price itself alongside supply constraints, while studded gold exports, the higher value-added category, rose 6.71 percent over the same stretch.

Trust has become part of the product itself. The Gemological Institute of America now laser-inscribes the words "Laboratory-Grown" directly onto lab-grown stones alongside the report number, a disclosure standard that matters more as buyers weigh mined and lab-grown diamonds side by side at the same counter. Add a G7 ban on Russian-origin diamonds that took effect in January 2024, with European Commission guidance now spelling out the traceability evidence importers must keep on file, and provenance has moved from a marketing line to an operating requirement.

“My read is that 2025 was the year gold jewelry stopped being sold by the gram and started being sold by the story. The volume decline the World Gold Council recorded is not a demand problem, it is a filtering mechanism: buyers who would have purchased on impulse at a lower price point stepped back, and the ones who stayed were paying for design, provenance, and a maker's name. I expect that filter to tighten through the rest of 2026, and I expect it to reward houses that can document where a stone came from as readily as they can describe its cut.”

None of this points to an easy rebound. Bain's flat downside case is still live, metal cost volatility is not going away, and a market this concentrated in a handful of regions and a handful of houses can turn on a single currency swing or trade decision. But the direction of the filter is clear enough to plan around. The houses gaining share in 2026 are not the ones carrying the most inventory. They are the ones that can tell a buyer, in plain terms, exactly what they are paying for.