For many years, with the love one has for a brilliant but troubled offspring, I bestowed this title on Emerald. Its brittleness and highly included nature make it prone to breakage, which, in turn, has led to a plethora of treatments to hide its flaws by filling them up, with anything from the traditional oils in use for hundreds of years to various synthetic materials in modern times. Emerald forms in complex geological environments and its rare ingredients are cooled rapidly, leading to imperfect crystallization. From one viewpoint, one judges it inclusions as jardins (gardens), no more objectionable than flaws in fine leather. But the market, made up of consumers used to clarity standards based on diamond, has driven demand to emeralds of high clarity, as well as the more legitimate criterion of color. This market tendency culminated in the infamous Fred Ward case in 1997. Ward wrote cover articles for National Geographic on ruby, emerald, and sapphire. As the owner of a private salon in the Washington, D.C. area, he sold a 3.65 carat emerald, mounted in a ring, for $38,600 (with a cost of $28,100) to a woman who subsequently struck it a blow on her kitchen counter. She filed a claim with her insurance company, State Farm, who rejected it on the grounds that it had been treated with a synthetic epoxy resin called Opticon.  Then she sued Ward on the basis that the emerald had always had a fracture, undisclosed at the time of sale and hidden by the Opticon. (He advised her when he sold it that it had been treated with oil only. The gemological facts are in dispute to this day.) A jury ordered Ward to buy the ring back for the purchase price and pay the plaintiff attorney’s fees of $180,000; he eventually settled with the plaintiff for $58,000. His company went out of business. Emerald went into a long nuclear winter in the world’s gemstone markets. Rare and beautiful stones were brought up out of the earth, fashioned with care, and sat in dealers’ inventories. Only gradually has emerald emerged, as its treatments have become more easily detected.

 What of Ruby? When a major new find of corundum, the mineral stuff of which ruby is the red variety by virtue of a trace of the transition element chromium, was made in the late “90s, we now had an infusion of this rarest of all the commercially important gemstones, but with two problems not present in “pigeon-blood” stones from the storied Burmese mines sixty miles to the northwest: color too purple (with a blue core, to boot) and fractures open to the surface. Thus the gemstone doctors of Bangkok began to work their magic in ways more arcane than the heat treatment that had been used on corundum for centuries to improve color. Borax was used as flux to make the new material flow under great heat, along with alumina, the principle constituent of corundum, with the outcome at first that the open cavities were glass-filled by the transformed borax. The next evolution was that the walls of the breaks themselves were dissolved and re-crystallized as synthetic ruby filling in a natural ruby host.

We see the final descent in the bogus ruby of East African origin that is so full of glass or flux that more than half by weight in a given stone is no longer corundum, giving rise to a material that is so bizarre that it has never been seen before. What to call it has been an ongoing debate in the gemological community, reaching a crescendo in the past twelve months or so: composition ruby, hybrid ruby, ruby with glass, and the winner is – composite ruby. We ask ourselves, is it really ruby? Is it really a gemstone at all?  It has entered our society from thousands of armed services veterans returning from service in the Middle East, but also from the department store Macy’s, which has sold it without disclosure at times.

These are the facts of history, briefly sketched. I know from my own work that ruby has become more and more difficult to sell. It is saddening. If, as the old saying goes, nothing “greens greener” than emerald, then it may be even truer to say that nothing reds redder than ruby. Nature has seen to it that a very fine ruby weighing five carats or more is some order of magnitude more rare than a comparable diamond. I have read that perhaps no more than three or four of them are available for sale in the world at any one time. It is considered permissible to apply heat treatment to ruby, as long as it is disclosed; a report from one of the major independent laboratories such as GIA is essential with a larger ruby (that is, two carats or more) of much quality. Still, little or no treatment is best.

I was especially delighted this year to sell the 2.04 carat ruby that you see pictured with this post. (It is unretouched, taken under fluorescent light, just hinting at its real beauty.) To see it is to come near a spark thrown off by this planet millions of years ago and know the happy circumstance that both gave birth to it and to the simple gift of our own awareness. Then we feel that we have come to the navel of the world.  

If you are shopping for ruby, let me be your guide.

“I am interested in getting some of my jewelry appraised so that I can sell it.”

“I own a diamond ring and wish to sell it; first, an appraisal is needed.”

“I have a platinum and diamond wedding ring that I wish to have appraised for the purpose of selling it.”

Well, do you really need an appraisal, complete with a specific value? One problem is: there is no specific value. No matter what you own, there is always more than one way to sell it: through private sale, consignment, or outright sale to someone in the business (who might be anything from a retail jewelry store to a pawnshop, with stops in between at small “hip-pocket” dealers or brokers), or, sometimes, auction, live or on-line. Depending on which of these markets you employ and the time you allow them to work, the difference can certainly be half as much, or even more.

Next, within any single one of these markets for selling your jewelry items, a range of possible prices exists. Sales of personal property are much too few and far betweeen to yield just one magic answer to the question, “what’s it worth?” A competent appraiser will know this and, making adjustments for size and quality to the often scarce information about comparable items he or she can find, bracket the likely selling price of your item in as wide or narrow range as the data about the item dictate.

Think for a moment about how oeople actually price privately pre-owned (oh, all right, used) jewelry for sale. It is not a pure science, especially as the prospect of getting more money (from a private buyer, as opposed to a trade buyer) goes up. (This means from a possible private buyer.) Onefactor  I’ve already mentioned: the occasional nature of selling jewelry, new or used: one engagement ring maybe per lifetime, or two or three at most. This translates into how open to negotiating with your prospective buyer, a bird freshly flown in from the other one in the bush and about to alight near your hand, you will decide to be. This leads into the realm of sales psychology, which everyone in the jewelry business practices, at least to some degree. It's this: when you quote a price, and you look at the jewelry itself sitting in front of you, what sounds about right for what you see? Remember, in your case, your buyer knows you’re not a store and that the item isn’t new. That’s his or her market comparison, so you’ve got to create a sense of much better value than retail, while knowing you’re getting more, even much more, than someone buying it for re-sale will pay. So when you think within this collaborative range, can you allow a “cushion” over that without queering the deal? Is there any money in the designer’s name that you can take advantage of? Can you keep the dollars at a psychological threshold (for instance, $985)?

Some people want me to write an appraisal document for Retail Replacement Value. This is an expression drawn from the world of insurance and therefore highly subject to doubt and confusion, or contempt. These feelings are exactly the outcome if the appraisal is used as an opening gambit in a negotiation to set the proper re-sale market price for your jewelry item.

I might mention that there was a jewelry consignment shop here in Oklahoma City a few years ago that worked this way: an appraiser (who had no appraisal training) provided an insurance document (creating the impression of objectivity) and the shop simply cut the number in half to arrive at the price.  – whether selling or asking, I am not sure. Assuming no negotiating, why not just appraise item's value in that shop at that number, the one for which it actually sold? And if that number was only a starting point, perhaps after style and condition resulted in too slow a sale, why not use the real selling price as the  item's real value?

What is straight to the point is that utilizing Retail Replacement Value for re-sale appraisals is taking the long way home. Professional jewelry appraisal groups do not allow it, because they require us to learn how an appraisal document will be used; and then require us to present a value or range of values, that matches that use. We might use such language as Marketable Cash Value for this use, defining time and the kind of buyer (trade versus private) or even a range of values for each kind of buyer.

Sound too complicated? One way out is to offer you consultation, which I have described in detail elsewhere. This is designed to give you an idea of the range of the most likely selling prices for your jewelry, in a discussion in which I strategize with you the best way for you to sell it. This can be coupled with a written Quality Description, which gives buyer and seller an idea of what they're talking about (along with the photography I already provide).

In the next thirty days, I will implement this optional additional service, as I convert my appraisal practice to much more powerful and sophisticated professional appraisal software than I use now.

 I welcome your comments or questions!

Welcome to my completely renovated website! I used conventional mail to send my first newsletter in July 1998, and my last in that form in Spring 2004. One consistent feature throughout those twenty-five or so missives was "Estate Jewelry Finds," featuring some of the best pre-owned jewelry that happened my way. Often they were from trade sources; but, as is always the case, the best values came from private owners, who have entrusted their pieces with me to sell on their behalf since I opened my own business in May 1991.

With this post, I rededicate myself to the beauty and value of estate jewelry. I will do this by providing buyers and sellers with an on-line consignment venue for estate jewelry, in an environment safe for both sides, free of the uncertainty that surrounds gems and jewelry - in other words, a professionally vetted marketplace that assures sellers they  are not selling too cheap and buyers they are not buying too dear. (My work appeals to my love of balance.) More about my on-line consignment shop here.

Back in the old days, I indulged my love of writing (looking back now, I think I crossed over into vanity press at times) by describing the estate jewelry as best I could.  When I first went on line in 2000, my imaging capabilities were weak.

One thing I hope to do now is to present the jewelry items I receive from private owners as accurately and beautifully as possible, so that their true character shows through. I am excited by the prospect of learning how best to photograph these special objects, to whom light is as water to living things.

My field is as broad and deep as the earth and all the people in it; these many challenges are faced by the modern science of gemology and the professional discipline of appraising. Now, to bring gems and jewelry and their true value to you in beautiful pictures is a most wonderful and delightful challenge.

In the end, each piece of jewelry is a vessel of meaning filled with our personal history: where things started, when, what we do together each day, the promise that we'll continue. What her eyes looked like when I gave it to her, and the spark I've seen ever since; the feeling she gets each time she sees it on her hand.

This is the true value of jewelry, and I hope many of you will walk with me as we explore all that it means.