Welcome to the Jewelry District, a podcast by J.C.K. brought to you by the De Beers Institute of Diamonds.

Today, Rob Bates and Victoria Gimelski talk about Victoria's recent custom ring design experience,

Rob's thoughts on the state of the art jewelry summit, and they reflect on 100 episodes of the podcast.

Hey, everyone.

Welcome to the 100th episode of the Jewelry District.

I'm Victoria Gimelsky, editor-in-chief of JCPay and J-CK Online.com, calling in from

Los Angeles, and I'm with. Rob Bates, news director of J-C-K and J-C-Online.com, calling in from

hot, sweaty New York City. It's July. Of course it's hot here. Oh, my God. It's not like that over there, right? Well, it's not sweaty, but it's hot. And luckily, we haven't gotten the heat wave that the southwest, other parts of the sunbelt have gotten, but it is hot. It's sort of scary to see the heat that people are experiencing right now. Yeah, it's really bad.

I know a lot of people who actually went to Phoenix for random reasons this week, and I think,

oh, my God, all the times to be in Phoenix, mid-July seems like a very bad call or serendipitously

bad for them.

So I spoke to people who went to this Dubai conference for lab grown diamonds. Oh, when

when was that? I didn't even realize that was yeah that was I think it was this week the week that

we're taping. Somebody said it was on a look. They said it was 123 degrees. I mean, I don't think that's so

atypical for Dubai. What is that like maybe 45 degrees Celsius. What is that? Yeah, around probably. But they have all those shop, you know, they're prepared in a way. They don't, not a lot of outdoor stuff in Dubai unless you're out there in December, which is a lovely time to be there. But, you know, they've got massive shopping malls, lots of activities. Everything's chilled, chilled very nicely. So I don't

think we're quite as prepared as they are for these soaring temperatures. So I haven't traveled that

much lately, at least not in the last couple weeks, but I did spend my birthday weekend, which was

the weekend of June 30th and July 1st with my twin sister and about 25 of our friends in Santa Barbara

Wine Country, which is just two hours north of L.A., and there's a lovely little town called Los Alamos,

and it's got wine tasting rooms and a sweet little hotel called the Sky View. We parked

ourselves there and had a couple really lovely dinners and just hung out. And the reason I'm

telling you about it, first of all, it was a big birthday, turned big 50, my twin sister and I. And I did,

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