A crystal price has three parts: the mineral, the work that shaped it, and a claim attached to it. Only some of that can be checked from where you are standing, and on common material the shaping is a large share of the number.
The smallest object I own cost the most by a wide margin. It is a moldavite, a piece of natural glass small enough to wear on a cord, and it was $130. The largest object I own is a raw rose quartz roughly 25 centimetres across, heavy enough that moving it is a decision rather than a gesture, and it was $55. Everything else on the shelf, the geodes and the towers that visitors notice first, sits between $30 and $60.
Nothing about the two objects on the table predicts that. A price is made of parts, and the tag names none of them, which is why the number can invert against the objects and still be correct.
Six of the things that set a price
The US Geological Survey publishes an annual chapter on gemstones, and the 2003 edition opens its section on prices like this: “Gemstone prices are governed by many factors and qualitative characteristics, including beauty, clarity, defects, demand, durability, and rarity.”
Those are six examples out of many. GIA, writing about the same question, reaches seven and includes country of origin and quality of cutting, which the USGS sentence does not name. The six still sort neatly by who can see them.
Beauty, clarity and defects are in the object. You are looking at the stone, so you hold the same information the seller holds, and your judgement about whether it is a good-looking piece is as good as anyone’s. Durability is a property of the mineral and takes thirty seconds to look up: how hard it is, and whether it will still look like this in ten years on a sunny shelf.
Demand and rarity are the other kind. They are claims about the world outside the shop, and they do a lot of the work in any price that surprises you. Only one of them leaves public evidence.
That one is rarity, and for a small number of stones it is genuinely checkable. Larimar, the pale blue banded stone from the Caribbean, is the clearest case. A 2017 paper in Boletin Geologico y Minero records that it “crops out in a very small area (< 0.3 km2, Los Checheses-Los Chupaderos mine or simply the Larimar mine)” in the Dominican Republic. Under a third of a square kilometre, at one mine. Tanzanite is the other well-documented case, and GIA states it is “mined commercially only in one area of the world: the Merelani Hills of Tanzania.”
That is what a scarcity claim looks like when it can be tested: a named deposit and a paper you can open. Where a seller invokes scarcity for a stone with neither behind it, the word is doing the work of a figure without being one.
Price does not track honesty either, and the two get run together constantly. The cheapest specimen in my records, a grape agate cluster at $30, grape agate being the trade name for a botryoidal purple chalcedony, came from the local dealer I trust most. The dearest came from a collector. Neither number told me anything about the person.
What a polished shape is buying
GIA’s article on colored gemstone value factors gives the yield from cutting as anything from “as high as 50% (very rarely) or as low as a few percent”. The remainder is dust and offcuts, and somebody was paid for the hours that produced them.
The same article says “The impact of cutting on a gem’s value is proportionate to its rarity”, and then gives an example that points the opposite way from where that sentence seems to. An extremely rare piece of rough sapphire selling for tens of thousands “does not necessarily double in price when cut”, and the cutting “adds only a small percentage”. Set against that is what GIA calls “the value added to a piece of ametrine rough that may have cost a few hundred dollars but is then cut by a named artist”. Ametrine is the bicoloured purple and yellow quartz, and it is cheap rough. GIA stops there rather than putting a number on it, and notes elsewhere on the page that gems from named artists can carry significant additional value.
What I take from the example, and this is a reading rather than the text, is that on expensive rough the cutting is a small addition and on cheap rough it can be most of what you are handing over. What is being described is also easy to stretch. A faceted gem shaped by a named cutter is a different object from a machine-turned tower out of a workshop that makes hundreds a week. The principle travels. The size of the premium does not.
What this gives you is a question with a real answer. On a common mineral you are largely buying a shape and the hours that made it, so compare the shape against other shapes instead of the mineral against other minerals. An even polish and a form with no flat spot where the wheel stopped are both visible from where you are standing, and they are what the money went on.
The part of the price that is a sentence
The last piece of the number is a claim attached to the stone and the shape, and it arrives as a word like charged or activated, meaning the seller says an intention has been set on the piece or its energy reset.
UK advertising has already been through this. CAP, which writes the guidance behind the advertising codes, says a lucky charm may be promoted “as a gimmick, a piece of jewellery or fashion accessory or a prompt for consumers to remind them to think positively about things that might trouble them”, and should not be described as having unproven powers or properties such as improving a wearer’s luck. CAP’s own page notes that this is the CAP Executive’s advice rather than legal advice and does not bind the ASA, so read it as the clearest available statement of where the line sits rather than as a rule.
Whatever you make of the practice itself, and I am not asking you to make anything of it in particular, the pricing consequence is plain. A premium for charging is a premium on a sentence that regulators have already looked at hard. The stone underneath it is the same stone.
Before you accept a scarcity claim, read that mineral’s entry in the Crystalance Mineral Library. It takes a minute, and a minute is cheaper than the premium.
Then name which of the three parts you are buying, out loud if it helps, before the card comes out. If the answer is beauty, the price is asking what the object means to you, and that is a question you can answer.
Sources
- USGS Minerals Yearbook 2003, Gemstones, by Donald W. Olson, for the price factors: usgs.gov
- Boletin Geologico y Minero 128(3), 2017, petrographic contribution on the larimar host rock, for the outcrop area: web.igme.es
- GIA, Tanzanite, for the single commercial source at Merelani: gia.edu
- GIA, Colored Gemstone Value Factors, by Al Gilbertson, for cutting yield, the rarity line, the sapphire and ametrine comparison and the seven factors: my.gia.edu
- CAP, Lucky charms, for what a charm may and may not be advertised as: asa.org.uk
