ories, driven by emotional purchases rather than functional needs. However, I can’t help but feel something is stirring. Beneath the surface of polished stones and recycled gold, there’s a quiet transformation underway, and one that will redefine how emotion, technology and ethics intersect in luxury. The most interesting part? It’s not even loud yet. What’s going to come next in jewelry isn’t the trend cycle you’ll read in a glossy trade report but a new emotional infrastructure that most brands won’t see clearly for another six to eight months. As a result, I want to deep dive into five of those shifts and why the smartest brands are already adjusting their lenses. The after-sale becomes the story For decades, jewelry retail has been built on and around the moment of purchase. The velvet box opens, the light hits the stone and the transaction, both emotional and financial, somehow feels complete. But the brands that will really thrive next aren’t going to stop there. They’re beginning to treat aftercare as an emotional service, not a maintenance function.  Data from De Beers shows that over 70 per cent of fine jewelry buyers return for service or resizing within three years, yet fewer than 20 per cent of brands have structured aftercare programs. Polishing, resizing, re-engraving, and re-mounting aren’t chores. They’re actually memory touchpoints and every time a customer brings a piece back, the brand gets another chance to deepen its presence in that person’s life. A reminder email that says, “It’s been a year since you bought your ring and we’d love to clean it for you”, does more for loyalty than a dozen discount campaigns. In the next year, we will expect to see the rise of ‘heritage refresh’ programs and small, ritualized services that extend both the physical and emotional lifespan of jewelry. The clever part is that this strategy scales slowly but compounds heavily over time. Simply because it turns ownership into a relationship. The digital try-on grows up In the past few years, every brand, from fast fashion to fine jewelry, has experimented and played around with augmented reality. I think most would agree it all felt a little gimmicky, flat images floating above a camera feed, with no weight or texture. But the technology is maturing fast, and when it reaches emotional realism with things like light reflections, depth, even micro-shadowing, it will quietly unlock a new dimension of trust. Virtual try-on tools are forecast to influence nearly 30 per cent of all online jewelry purchases by 2026 as realism and adoption accelerate across luxury retail. The emotional barrier in jewelry e-commerce isn’t price; it’s presence. People want to see how a piece feels on them, not just how it looks. As AR becomes more tactile, the hesitation between desire and decision will shrink pretty quickly. Boutiques will start blending digital into the physical, and we can imagine an in-store ‘try-on’ walls where customers can visualize combinations, tablets that let you preview how a pendant sits before you even handle it. Let’s not get this confused, though. The winners won’t be those with the slickest tech, but those who make it feel human and not filtered. Material truth becomes the new baseline Sustainability once sounded like virtue signalling, and now it’s the baseline. But the shift happening beneath that is much deeper; it’s about material truth. Customers no longer just want a ring made from recycled gold; instead, they want to know where that gold came from, who made it, and what the brand stands for in the whole process. A 2025 Deloitte study found that 60 per cent of Gen Z luxury consumers research sourcing and ethical standards before purchase, compared with just 35 per cent five years ago. Transparency is fast replacing aspiration as the currency of trust. Lab-grown gemstones, traceable diamonds and fair-trade metals aren’t niche talking points anymore, but the proof of moral intention. In the same way ‘farm-to-table’ reshaped food, ‘mine-to-market’ will reshape fine jewelry. This matters because jewelry carries ethical intimacy. You wear it close to your skin, and it represents love, milestones and legacy. So the material story must absolutely match the emotional story, or that cognitive dissonance (confusion and doubt) becomes impossible to ignore. The next wave of brands will use sourcing as storytelling to reinforce their brand position, transforming traceability from compliance into a source of pride. Design with heirloom intent Some of the most progressive designers are no longer designing jewelry for a single owner but instead designing for succession. This idea of heirloom intent could redefine how the category thinks about time. Instead of building static pieces meant to be locked away, jewellers are beginning to design more modular, transformable or reworkable forms. Things like rings that can evolve into pendants, necklaces that separate into bracelets, basically, settings that can be refreshed without losing sentimental value. It’s a subtle but profound shift from permanence to adaptability and from preservation to evolution. This approach turns jewelry into a living object and acknowledges that the meaning of a piece changes just as the wearer does. When a mother’s necklace becomes a daughter’s bracelet, it carries more than just gold, it holds continuity. That’s what real longevity looks like: emotional adaptability designed into the object itself. The emotional economy of lab-grown stones Lab-grown gemstones are moving quickly from curiosity to cultural legitimacy. But the real conversation isn’t about chemistry, it’s about emotion. For a long time, natural stones carried the emotional premium signal of rarity: They were valuable basically because they were hard to find. But the modern consumer is quietly reframing that equation and value is no longer about where something came from but about what it represents. Lab-grown diamonds now represent roughly 15 per cent of global diamond sales and are forecast to exceed 25 per cent within five years, Bain & Company reported. Lab-grown gems now sit inside a new emotional economy – whether we like it or not – of care, craft and intention. They appeal to a generation that values ethics and expression over exclusivity. When colour, cut and conscience align, the emotional reward replaces status as the reason to buy. The next phase will be hybrid, natural and lab-grown stones designed together, not in competition but in conversation. If brands can frame this intelligently and as evolution, not rebellion, we will see it shape the cultural tone of the category for years. The emotional future of jewelry What we are seeing with every one of these shifts points to the same thing. jewelry’s future won’t be defined by what it looks like, but by what it feels like to own. The emotional architecture is changing and it’s going from momentary sparkle to lifelong relationship, from secret margins to open stories and from ‘special occasion’ to daily self-expression. The irony here is that these aren’t futuristic ideas at all. They’re deeply human. Care. Truth. Continuity. Presence. These are all the qualities that made jewelry meaningful in the first place and they are finally being engineered back into the business model. And while most of the industry will spend the next six months debating AI, AR and algorithms, the real opportunity lies in what can’t be automated and that’s the way a piece of jewelry makes someone feel. Those brands that slow down long enough to make you feel something will always be the ones that endure. You can’t automate meaning. That’s why jewelry will always outlast the algorithm. Nick Gray is the founder of I Got You Global consultancy (iguglobal.com). Further reading: What Lululemon’s crisis teaches every growth-obsessed brand