All About Colored Gemstones Price and Value
We continue our discussion from my last blog on All About Diamond Price and Value and come to the valuation of gold.
The artistry of the jewelry piece is practically worthless. So, first find out the weight and purity of the metal – gold, silver or platinum, in the piece.
Here’s a free tool that will help you get the dump value of Gold, dump value of Platinum and dump value of Silver.
Now we come to colored gemstones. Colored gemstones do not have a great demand in the resell market. So, they are hard to resell. Still, we will consider the top three gemstones – Ruby, Emerald and Sapphire. First the lingo of the colored gemstone market:
Hue – just another name for color (e.g. blue)
Tone – the concentration of the color, that is, how dark or light it is (e.g. sky as in sky blue)
Saturation – gives the richness or intensity of the color (e.g. electric as in electric sky blue)
Cabochon – a gem cut having a rounded dome and a flat base
Facet – the flat surface on the gem
Transparent – a gem is transparent when you can see through it
Opaque – the opposite of transparent
Milky – translucent, between transparent and opaque
Window – this is when the gem is transparent and cut shallow so that you can not only see through it but also into it, like a window.
Country of Origin – apparently, for colored gemstones, this matters a lot. The best rubies come from Burma, the best sapphires from Kashmir, and the most of the best emeralds in the world come from Columbia. So, if the origin of an emerald is Columbia, it has greater value than the regular one.
Please keep in mind that GemsNY doesn’t recommend the customers to pay more price simply because of the origin. It is one of the biggest mistakes a novice consumer makes. Just because a gemstone is from a certain origin it doesn’t make it better than the one which is not from that origin. Where the value is derived in a gemstone is from its COLOR and NOT from the ORIGIN. However, the reason some origins are preferred over the other is because the most desired color that is coveted generally is found in gemstones from that origin but many times that is not the case!
Colored gemstones are classified into three grades of clarity:
MC – Microscopic Clean
EC – Eye Clean
NEC – Not Eye Clean
The quality of the stone is overall classified into Investment quality, Gem, Commercial and Industrial quality.
Here’s an excellent resource on Ruby and Sapphire prices that would help you in calculations.
Now you know how to calculate the worth of your colored gemstones. All that remains to be done is to find the guy who would give you this amount. Remember, you take nothing short of the dump value. So finding the guy who gives it to you will take some effort. We will look into it in the next blog.
