flameswithin

That was brilliant, I'd never have considered that, and I'm in the industry!

I'd add one other thing to Arya's answer. Right now, treatment of rubies has become so ubiquitous that it's almost dangerous to work on any piece of ruby jewelry. Rubies are now and always have been in incredibly high demand, so there are high market pressures to bring as much to market as possible. To that end, mines and manufacturers in asia will take any and all ruby rough and treat it in any way they have to to bring it to market looking nice and glowing red. Heat treatment is common, as is glass filling now. Glass filling is a crappy way to treat a stone and a simple dip in a jeweler's pickle or ultrasonic can ruin its appearance. If you know someone who is really entrenched in the industry and can get rubies that are absolutely guaranteed to be untreated, go for it. But I personally wouldn't purchase a natural ruby these days under any circumstances.

I'd like to suggest that it's at least somewhat the latter. Before I entered the jewelry industry I worked in screenprinting, and it became trendy for flat printing operations to sell their "overprints." They even got written up as "the art of the random." Printers keep scrap paper and board on hand to do a quick test print of a screen on to make sure everything's printing well, or even to clear out some gunk with a heavy stroke. When layers of random prints get built up, they do look cool. But by selling these, printers essentially found a way to make money from something they keep on hand that would otherwise be trash.

I think that black diamonds (also known as bort) is very much analogous to these over-prints. The diamond industry had a ton of lower grade material around, and found a way to market it.

I've been using etsy for about 6 years or so now. It's worked pretty well for me. There is no magic market place for precision cut gemstones and it takes a long time to build up your business no matter where you start.

As for pricing, gems are typically sold by weight, but, I've ultimately come to realize that the price-per-carat pricing model doesn't work for me, and these days I simply price by the piece or by the job. Here's an example of what I mean. Let's stay you typically sell citrine for $30/ct and it takes you about the same amount of time to cut a 1 or 3 ct round brilliant. So pricing per carat, one stone would be $30 and the other $90. $90 might feel like a fair price for that 2-3 hours your put in cutting the 3ct, but ho can you possibly sell the 1ct for only $30? You're making $10/hr, or actually less when you consider time to photograph the stone and market it.

/u/cowsruleusall, /u/stagandfinch, /u/atelierveiuxpont I'd love to hear yall's thoughts on this.

Same!