Colored gemstones are still as popular as ever and then some.

Finally, everyone is catching up to my own personal jewelry tastes.

Diamonds may be a girl's best friend, but colored gemstones are edging there way up to the top of her list of buddies.

To underline this movement to colored gems is a new motto, or mantra if you will, from Philip Zahm & Associates: "Live Your Color."

Here is more from a Diamond.net report followed by a few pieces (rings, earrings, and brooch) from the company's website:

Brother and sister jewelry designers Ryan Vaughn-Zahm and Carly Todisco were quite young when their father Philip Zahm started exhibiting at the JCK Las Vegas show more than a decade ago. But now the two have come along way, in age and experience, in designing their own jewelry for the family business. [...]

Vaughn-Zahm describes their clients as, first "they need to fall in love with color to buy it and be in love with it to sell it." All of the gemstones used in jewelry designs are natural color and roughly 95 percent of settings are white gold.

The two described regional differences in how they see distribution trends: "The coastal areas are usually of smaller (stones,) elegant and simpler pieces," Vaughn-Zahm said. The Midwestern consumer in the United States desires a "bigger look with more splash" while the northeastern part of the country prefers traditional jewelry using colored gemstones, he said.