Fair Luxury is a UK-based campaign group advocating for transparent and responsible practice across the luxury jewellery industry. It was founded by a group of jewellers in 2016 on the conviction that fine jewellery - an industry built on the extraction of rare and precious materials from some of the world's most vulnerable communities - has a particular responsibility to account for its supply chains. Through its ground-breaking ethical jewellery conferences, webinars and award-shortlisted Pledge initiative, Fair Luxury shares knowledge and campaigns for certification, transparency and accountability.

Arabel Lebrusan is a founding member of Fair Luxury. Her involvement is an extension of the same position that shaped Lebrusan Studio from the beginning: the belief that beauty and responsibility are not opposing, and that an industry which pretends otherwise is making a choice to shirk responsibility. Through Fair Luxury, that argument is made not just through individual practice but through collective pressure on the industry's larger players, its trade bodies, and its regulators.

Art jewellery is jewellery in which the making carries meaning beyond the object itself - where the choice of materials, the process of creation and the conceptual thinking behind the work are as present as its final physicality. Art jewellery walks the continuum between adornment and art practice, refusing to resolve neatly into either box.

For Arabel Lebrusan, this boundary is largely blurred. Though articulated in different languages, her jewellery and her sculpture share a common root: a sustained attention to matter, where it comes from, those whose hands have touched it, and the various states in which it has existed.

What distinguishes art jewellery from highly designed jewellery, however, is function. Whilst jewellery is usually designed to serve its wearer, art jewellery serves an idea. Occasionally, Arabel's art jewellery tends to both purposes simultaneously; more often, it is not designed to be worn at all.

Fairtrade Gold is a certification scheme developed by the Fairtrade Foundation for gold mined by artisanal and small-scale mining communities. It guarantees a minimum price for the gold, a Fairtrade premium paid directly to the mining organisation to invest in community development, and independently audited standards covering safe working conditions, fair wages and environmental responsibility.

The scheme emerged in 2012 from a recognition that the vast majority of the world's gold miners work in small-scale operations - often without protective equipment, access to fair markets, or any share in the value of what they extract.

Arabel Lebrusan was among the first jewellers in the world to offer Fairtrade Gold, and played a founding role in bringing the certification to the UK jewellery market. She later moved exclusively to Fairmined certification - a parallel scheme developed by the Alliance for Responsible Mining, which she holds at both standard and Ecological level - because it most closely reflected the studio's sourcing standards and the communities it works with directly.

The Fairmined Standard is a certification system that empowers artisanal and small-scale mining organisations by setting strict benchmarks for social development, environmental protection, safe labour conditions, formal legality and supply chain traceability. Arabel Lebrusan has held Fairmined certification since 2011, later adding Fairmined Ecological Gold accreditation. What makes Fairmined Ecological Gold a different entity is the additional step it takes beyond baseline regulations for managing toxic chemicals; it goes as far as ensuring zero toxic chemicals are used in extraction and processing. Organisations with Fairmined Ecological Gold certification must also actively rehabilitate native ecosystems. For buyers like Arabel, funding these stricter ecological practises means paying a higher premium for Fairmined Ecological Gold (approximately 50% more than standard Fairmined Gold.)

As a trained gemmologist and founding voice of the ethical jewellery movement in the UK, Arabel Lebrusan's answer is yes. In the case of vintage old-cut diamonds, which were cut by hand, a reclaimed stone is an opportunity to invest in a fragment of history, enjoying the quiet depth of sparkle and unrepeatable character that modern machine-cut diamonds cannot emulate. More broadly speaking, opting for any recycled diamond means avoiding new extraction altogether, which is often preferable for those seeking jewellery that is minimal in environmental impact. Whilst reclaimed diamonds are not as easily traceable as newly mined diamonds, Lebrusan Studio can always guarantee their recycled nature with 100% certainty and can offer documentation on the cut, clarity, colour and carat weight of many of its pre-loved stones.

Arabel Lebrusan's TEDx Talk was hosted by TEDxBedford in 2014, and was the very first talk on ethical jewellery beneath the TED Talk umbrella. In spite of a well documented genocide in Sierra Leone back and chemical spillage on the Somes River in Romania during the early 2000s, Arabel observed that ethical dilemmas around the sourcing of precious materials were still not a driving force in the decisions of consumers. At the time of delivering, 'sustainability,' 'traceability' and 'origin of materials' were novel words within the jewellery sector. Long before ethical jewellery began to trend, Arabel Lebrusan's TEDx Talk highlighted the environmental destruction and human rights violations embedded in traditional, untraceable jewellery supply chains. She urged consumers to leverage their purchasing power to demand transparency and drive systemic change towards a more ethical industry.