Mila Kunis is quick to say that she is still settling into her partnership with London-based Gemfields, the world’s largest supplier of colored stones: “I’m learning, I’m learning. The same way I learned about fashion over the past seven years, I’m now learning about jewelry.”

As part of her tutelage, Kunis, 29, recently traveled to Zambia to visit its facilities and community outreach programs. She saw the company’s mines, went to the schools they support, saw the medical infrastructure they’re building and the lakes they’re creating. “Instead of letting [the old mining sites] go to waste, they’re filling them up and putting fish in and letting them become their own ecosystem for the community,” says the actress, who is a spokesperson for Gemfields. The six-year-old mine-to-market corporation supplies its emeralds, rubies and amethysts to 37 jewelry brands—The Gem Palace in Jaipur and London’s Solange Azagury-Partridge among them.

“I didn’t know where gems came from—that an emerald comes from 500-million-year-old sediment and a diamond only comes from 100-million-year-old sediment—that there’s this amazing level of rarity and purity,” she says with a newfound appreciation for the process. “I’ve always looked at jewelry as a luxury. It’s something I’ve associated with a gift.”

For a girl who simply wears a necklace her mother gave her and a ring from her grandmother, she says it’s impossible to pick new favorites, but: “I now love emeralds because I’ve been able to go and actually mine for one. I appreciate the history of it…But I love rubies, too. They’re all so stunning!”

 

By Jenny Murray

Pictured: Kunis in front of the old Kagem emerald mine (Gemfield’s largest) that was filled with water and turned into a lake.
Photo by Theo Wenner.

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