Twenty-five years ago, I became a gemmologist, a career I might never have followed had it not been for my father. Having finished a Classics degree, I had no idea what to do with my life. His response was unconventional.
‘Hair, make-up, clothes, jewellery. Pick one,’ he said.
It sounds like a flippant assumption about women, but it was perceptive. I had always loved all of those things – and when he mentioned jewellery, I felt a tingle. I had loved gemstones for almost my entire life: photos of me as a toddler show me bedecked in my mother’s bead necklaces. At the age of six, I fell in love – not with a boy, but with
