The Gem Vault

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If you are a colored stone enthusiast or a member of the trade and you are interested in what happens in gemstones and jewelry in Thailand, please add your e-mail to our list.  On average once per month I send a newsletter that is generally entertaining and informative to people involved with gemstone in one fashion or another.  I never spam, and over the last year I have averaged less than one e-mail per month.  I might do more than that this coming year but your inbox will NOT be inundated with junk from Tip Top Gem.

Motorcycles are all about, weaving in and out of traffic and leaving their signature VROOOOOMMM and trail of exhaust fumes behind them. As we walk the short distance from our hotel in the center of the gem district to the trading floor it is apparent that the political upheavel in Bangkok is taking its toll. The street scene is bare and what would have been a bustling market is slowed considerably. There are a fraction of the normal street vendors selling fried chicken, fresh flowers, and pork-on-a-stick. The main trading floor is very quiet and I am one of only a handful of foreigners here.

There are a lot of empty chairs and the number of brokers walking around presenting stones is unusually small. As the daylight pours over the rows of desks and the buyers and sellers chatter in Thai, small pockets of action are seen as sellers gather around a foreigner and his Thai dealer. In a flurry a dozen or so parcels of stones are presented and rejected in rapid succession. “Too expensive” the Thai dealer tells the broker after a short exchange with her client and a brief pause to translate his English. “Too dark”. “Big window”. As quickly as the crowd gathered it has dispersed. A false-start has dashed their hopes- both buyer and sellers.

This trip marks my sixth year of buying in Chanthaburi; my first was 2004. As time passes the challenges of meeting on quality and price are no less difficult. Dealers are scrambling to sell a stone and make a buck as are foreign buyers. Everyone- owners, brokers, and buyers- looks for an angle. Every headline extolling the beginning or end of this economic cycle or that seems to have some meaning for us all. China is booming- surely they are eager to buy at higher prices. Europe is in a shambles as is America; this must bring prices back to earth. One successful Thai sapphire dealer told me that she has been waiting for a great year since Saddam Hussein was ruling Iraq and she has yet to see one.

Not everything is so grim. Melanie and I had a great show in Tucson and the sales were much better than expected. Orders have been very strong since we arrived here. Some local dealers in Chanthaburi are still selling enough to sponsor the local soccer team, or so it would appear.

The overarching question is when the global economy will recover from the credit market implosion and subsequent drop in colored stone demand. One can only speculate, and wonder whether the coming Chinese real estate market correction or the American commercial real estate market will be the next shoe to drop.

The local calibrated sapphire factories seem to be in a holding pattern. Some have closed, as could be predicted, but the larger operations are working toward whittling down inventories while neither adding nor paring their workforce. To buyers like me it seems to be business as usual for the big dealers but the smaller ones are having a difficult time.

Some local industry seems to be booming but the money poured into projects like this new apartment complex is likely to be generations old. As the struggle in Bangkok seems to indicate, Thailand is a country where people of great wealth and those with nothing live an uneasy coexistence. The land of smiles may preach a Buddhist “mai pen rai”, or “nevermind” kind of attitude, but the bloody conflicts tell a different story.

As the wealthy urban elite comes to grips with its role in the conflict there seems to be as much denial as there is awareness or reconciliation of these different lifestyles. Red shirt protestors are rural, poor, and wanting. The elite’s prime minister Abhisit is still in power as of this writing but this may not be true in a few hours or days. Rhetoric is tossed from both sides but root causes are not examined in any media article that you will see in Thailand. Poverty is not discussed nor is the utter lack of any social safety net. The red shirt hero was a reckless spender who worked the masses with impossibly cheap promises and pocketed giant sums of cash while he spent the government’s money.

But the furnaces are continuing to churn out stones and the skillful cutters here in Chanthaburi continue to shape them. The buyers still come even if in a reduced number. The trade is alive here owing partly to capital investments from the elite and partly to cheap labor from those that side with the red shirts.

Rough stone is still coming from Africa and money is still coming from the West so likely things will continue in this town for a while longer. But as the tables at the market are colored by ruby and tsavorite garnet, the atmosphere here seems colored as well. As in history, politics, and business there are the pervasive colors of blood and money.

***If you are not already a member of the Jewelers Ethics Association please register at the link below so you do not miss my article on glass-filled Mozambican ruby that is coming soon***

Jewelers Ethics Association

I was thrilled to see this e-mail in my mailbox. There are just a few lines of text but what an amazing story of triumph in areas of the world where people are struggling to meet their most basic needs. Please consider making a loan to a group on Kiva.org right now.

What a wonderful way to celebrate Easter! You can take an active, highly significant role in the growth of small businesses in the third world and you can do it right now with an amount of money that, while trivial to you, can have an incredible impact on the lives of these amazing entrepreneurs.

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Rasool Siddique Masih Group in Pakistan (Activity: Fruits & Vegetables)
You Loaned: $25.00
Newly Repaid: $4.58
Total Repaid So Far: $17.19 (68.76% of your loan)

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Bendia Group in Mali (Activity: Crafts)
You Loaned: $25.00
Newly Repaid: $4.17
Total Repaid So Far: $16.67 (66.68% of your loan)

This Easter please celebrate by sharing your blessings. Melanie and I spend a lot of time in the undeveloped and developing world- please understand that your loan goes a very, very long way in these countries. Your participation might seem insignificant but it is actually very dramatic for these people who are not seeking a handout but simply need credit to grow their small business that feeds and clothes their family.

Also in the spirit of Easter please remember that these poorest of countries are also places where terrorist groups come knocking. They offer a way out of poverty- cash, a home, and a future- for jihad. Every government has a political aim and an agenda to satisfy. Every offer of help comes with strings. But microfinance is a way to use the internet to move beyond politics and terror and poverty. It is an olive branch as much as it is a loan of money. Please give now.

If the old investing axiom to “buy when there’s blood in the streets” is to be taken seriously, now might not be a bad time to buy gemstones. Forget the banking and unemployment problems scouring the developed world- Thailand is a mess right now. So far all of the blood is donated- by some estimates, the “red-shirt” reformers have given 300,000 cc’s of their own blood with which to make their political statement- which boils down to dissolving the current government and holding elections to restore democracy.

This past weekend saw some 100,000 protestors swarming the streets of Bangkok wearing their trademark red clothing and waving red flags of all shapes and sizes. This might be a city approaching twenty million in population, but when the protestors are mobile on scooters, motocycles, the trademark 3-wheel “tuk-tuk” open taxis as well as piled into the back of pick-up trucks, it makes one heck of an impact on a person. As we went about our business it sometimes seemed like the sea of red was everywhere- major thoroughfares and small streets alike.

One thousand hotel rooms per day are being canceled right now according to official sources as tourists, business people, and convention-goers decide that the risks are too high. Whether Abhisit’s government falls as a result of the current wave of protests remains to be seen, but as buckets of donated blood are being poured out at the prime ministers home and office it sure leaves an unpalatable impression of Thailand on the world stage.

All of the images you see here were shot from my cell phone camera this past weekend on Saturday, March 20th. While the security situation is in flux and nobody knows for sure if the government will fall, I have to say that Thailand is pretty darn polite when it comes to political upheaval. Until things get really out of hand, Melanie and I are happy to be here buying stones and taking your requests.

Yes, things are a mess in Nigeria. We didn’t need to see the footage of extra-judicial killings that spilled onto the internet recently in order to know that there are a lot of problems there. As part of the commitment that Tip Top Gem has made to source countries that produce stones that we sell, we have made loans to two Nigerian entrepreneurs on the Kiva.org site.

We are blessed with wonderful opportunities to live rich, full lives here in America and for a very small amount of money (we loaned $25 to each of the entrepreneurs shown below) you can make a serious impact on individual lives. Remember that hope is highly contagious. What is a small or modest amount of money to you can impact someone in Nigeria for a lifetime. You aren’t just loaning money, you are spreading hope to people who have precious little of that commodity to go around.

Tip Top Gem will continue to make these contributions because we feel that miners in source countries are not getting a fair share of the profits. Nigeria plays a major role in the availability of untreated collector stones like tourmaline and garnet. If you are able to help someone in a gemstone source country please do so via Kiva.org or the microfinance institution of your choice. The entrepreneurs that we have chosen have not yet received their full loan amount as of this writing so feel free to help out Nneka or Rashidat in Nigeria! This is not a handout- Africa is evidence that handouts are not the solution. This is empowering an entrepreneur to grow their business by giving them a basic tool that many business owners in the West take for granted. Financing is often the fire that sets a business alight with growth and this is an incredibly powerful tool for entrepreneurs in the third world who are struggling to keep their family fed with a simple business plan like buying and reselling food, soap, or grain.

The Tucson show was an incredible success for Tip Top Gem and we are extremely excited for today and for tomorrow. But at the same time we are acutely aware that pain and suffering are a part of daily life in gem-producing countries like Nigeria, Mali, Kenya, Tanzania, and Pakistan. We have helped finance entrepreneurs in those countries and will continue to help entrepreneurs in colored-stone source countries when their gems help us to make a profit.

This post could very well have been called “Why should I buy a hearts and arrows CZ” because that is precisely the question that I am going to answer. But I am also going to tell you why an aspiring gemologist should buy one of our premium-quality CZ’s. Or, even if you have no aspirations to be a gemologist but you want to learn more about stones this applies to you as well. If you want to be a better consumer of stones this is every bit as important.

First, to get this out of the way, we only sell one grade of CZ. This grade has different designations depending upon the manufacturer, but the tolerance is unmistakable. It is held to within 1/100th of a millimeter for most sizes. Some manufacturers call it AAAAAAA or 7A grade, while others call it hearts and arrows 5A. The bottom line is that it is the most precisely cut cubic zirconia that you can buy anywhere at any price.

But let’s get to the meat of this argument that you should buy one. Quick- is a stone dense or not? Huh? Uhhhhhh. Yeah, that’s what I thought. You don’t have a reference and that is why you don’t use this test. You need to heft a stone by bouncing it on your palm a few times- toss it and catch it. Get some air between your palm and your stone- at least 12 inches. Feel it hit your palm- always the same palm. Now look at your stone. Is it opal? Is it diamond? Is it CZ? Well, if you practice this test with a CZ that you buy from Tip Top Gem you will have a very good reference for what “dense” is. A CZ will feel heavy compared to a diamond of the same size and especially compared to an opal. Do you think you don’t need this test, or this reference? You’re wrong. It is fast, easy, and free. It is also very accurate if you practice it, and it can help you separate CZ from some other colorless stones. It can also help you separate yellow CZ from sphene, or yellow CZ from yellow sapphire. Get to know the density of CZ and you are well on your way to getting a feel for many other stones.

Answer quickly now- no peeking. What is the luster of stone “A”? Uhhhhhh. Yeah, again. Well, CZ is an excellent example of subadamantine luster. If you know that a model stone like CZ is subadamantine you will surely be able to separate vitreous luster from adamantine. I know that by now all of the CZ you have seen in my listings seems like a bargain, and you are kicking yourself for not buying any in the past. I forgive you. Go bid. Remember, diamond has adamantine luster- in fact, adamantine means “like a diamond”. That makes sense. But also remember this. Vitreous luster is the most common luster for gemstones to have, so if you can spot subadamantine luster with one hand tied behind your back you are well on your way in the Gem ID game. Remember very few stones have adamantine luster- diamond and zircon are perhaps the most common of these. Demantoid garnet can also display adamantine luster.

If you don’t have a lot of experience judging luster, or it is not clear in your mind, remember these basics. You have to look at the reflection of the light from a stone’s surface. There are varying degrees of “crispness” or “whiteness” of that reflection. Vitreous means “like glass” so you can expect the reflection to be a bit grayish and not perfectly bright and crisp when it is reflected from the surface of a gemstone that has vitreous luster. Adamantine luster is like a diamond, and it is the ultimate brightness or crispness and it has the least amount of grey. It is a clean, very white reflection. Subadamantine is less than this, but it is not as far down the scale as vitreous. It will be between vitreous and adamantine on the scale. It will not be as white and crisp and bright as the reflection of light from the surface of a demantoid garnet or a diamond or a zircon. But it will not fall down the scale to the point where it has a grey tinge like a vitreous stone shows. Remember that polish marks, burned facets, or any number of surface defects will affect luster. When we say a demantoid garnet has adamantine luster, that means that it is the highest luster that it can expect to achieve with good polish.

Please allow me another word on luster. Now that every idiot and his even less intelligent brother can sell online we are inundated with people talking about the luster of gemstones. Stop, people. Luster is NOT brilliance. Luster is a property that can be observed when viewing the reflection of light from a gemstone’s SURFACE. It is also constant- diamond is virtually always adamantine, CZ is virtually always subadamantine, and quartz is virtually always vitreous. There is some wiggle-room, of course, as luster can vary from specimen to specimen of the same variety. But let me be clear on this point: you can not recut a stone to give it better luster! A well-cut stone does not have better luster than one that is poorly cut- they are the same. You can re-polish a stone to give it a better luster. But you will not be able to change the pavilion angle to improve its luster because luster only deals with the reflection of light from a stone’s surface.

If you are interested in learning to judge brilliance, and anyone who wants to be a better gemologist or a better gemstone consumer should be, the hearts-and-arrows CZ is an excellent control stone. This can show you what is possible. If you expect a stone to be better than this, your expectations are too high. If you have never seen a stone with nearly 100% brilliance, you are in for a treat as well as a learning experience. Just like your CZ can serve as a barometer for density, it can also serve as a model for perfect brilliance.

In the colored stone world we know that we have to live with imperfection. Beauty and perfection are entirely different, and few would argue that how beautiful something is depends upon how close it comes to perfection. But the hearts-and-arrows CZ that we offer is a superb model for perfect polish. You are not likely to find any polish lines, those little parallel lines on facets that tell you that the cutter was not so diligent when he was creating a gleaming luster on the stone’s surface. Each facet of 7A grade CZ is polished to perfection. There are no scratches, polish marks or lines, in fact- there is nothing to interfere with the stone’s subadamantine luster. It is universally shiny from one edge of a facet to the other. If you need a model for polish or if you want to learn to judge polish accurately then buy one of these stones.

Another aspect of a stone’s character that you will be asked to assess when doing a basic ID is the stone’s dispersion. Here we get into another tussle with the online salesfolk. Fire has a very specific meaning in the world of gemology, and if you sell colored stones online you should know what that meaning is. The ability of a stone to break up white light into its component rainbow colors is called “fire” or “dispersion”. They mean the same things to gemologists and to qualified, knowledgeable salespeople. Fire is not brilliance. A stone cut from quartz may have a huge amount of brilliance, but it will not have any fire. When you look at it you can not see rainbow colors like you can with diamond or (to a greater degree) CZ. Remember that CZ has more dispersion, or rainbow-colored fire, than diamond. It has- some would say- too much. If you bounce a stone on your hand and it is too heavy for the size, and then you notice that it has a lot of dispersion- it might well be a CZ.

Are you still unconvinced? Well, for fun you could tell your friend (spouse?) that your 10mm hearts-and-arrows CZ is a world-class 3.66 carat diamond. Yes, unlike lesser CZ ours really does appear very transparent and is an equivalent to a “D” color diamond- which is totally colorless. There is not the slightest shade of yellow, nor are the stones “milky” as some CZ tends to be. And just to make my point about density- note that this 10mm stone looks like a 3.66 carat diamond. You could take a 3.66 carat round diamond out of its mount and put this stone in, no problem. But how much does this 10mm stone weigh? Well, hold on to your teeth Ethel- about 6 3/4 carats!!! Yes, CZ is heavy.

If you have any questions about Gem ID, or about our CZ, or about anything at all gem-related please feel free to send me a note. There is a contact form link in the margin over on the right side and your message will go straight to my inbox. I would be happy to help in any way that I can!

Here is a link to some new stones that are currently for sale…and you can ONLY find them on Gembusters.com!

http://z11.invisionfree.com/gembusters/index.php?showtopic=477

You get the same 31-day money-back guarantee that you get on eBay but you also get fabulous prices. There are no fees to list on Gembusters so I am putting some premium material there at low buy-it-now prices. Please take a look at the listings, and also look over to the right to see our Facebook and Twitter badges. These are great ways to keep tabs on us. When we have exciting new material we will broadcast it there.

Right now we have a nice lot of the fire agate from Calvillo, Aguascalientes, Mexico as well as some really beautiful Ethiopian chocolate opal including the most highly coveted leopard spot pattern. No other Ethiopian chocolate is so highly prized- this is stunning material that will engage your eyes and your heart!

Remember to bookmark this page- and also on the right margin you will see links to sign up for our newsletter. This is invaluable if you want to keep tabs on the market here, or if you want first chance at our premium stones of all varieties. Also note that we will be adding more and more stones to our BluJay store very soon so you may want to bookmark that as well:

http://tiptopgem.blujay.com

Thanks for coming by the blog- we appreciate you so much.

As many of you know, Melanie and I love the idea of micro finance. We target specific countries that produce the gemstones that we sell because often miners are getting a disproportionately small share of the end price. Since we buy from the wholesale market and sell to the consumer, who better than us to give something back to those folks? Here is a picture of our latest loan recipients who hail from the West African country of Mali- home to, of course, Mali garnet!

Apparently this group of women makes crafts to sell. I can’t read French so I don’t know for sure, but just being from Mali is good enough for us. We have loaned money to people in Pakistan, Tanzania, Kenya, and finally we have made our way around to Mali. If you have not clicked on the Kiva.org badge in my sidebar, please do that today and give them a try. If you would like, you can throw your hat in the ring for these women from Mali. They still need additional cash before their loan is totally funded and the money is distributed to them. Please join us on this quest!

In the coming holiday season we will make another loan to a gemstone-bearing country and we would be thrilled to have some of our readers follow. If you enjoy the gemstones that are coming to you from these places what could be a better way to give something back than by helping an entrepreneur earn their way to financial independence?