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Apr. 6th, 2018 08:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynWhen I was at the trunk sale last December, a gentleman of what appeared to be Indian ancestry talked to me for a bit about some of the work I was doing with wire and blue goldstone. He was apparently some kind of vaguely New Age life coach type- I didn't get the specifics, but he said something about giving people metaphysical advice. I chose to believe he meant that as a professional thing rather than simply saying he went around offering unsolicited advice on how to clear spiritual influences out of your life. I remember him noticing the beads I was working with and complimenting me on the use of blue, because blue was a powerful color for me, and I remember him inquiring about one of the stones I was working with- he'd never seen blue goldstone before.
Lessons I took away from that incident: people who do metaphysical life coaching are often not prepared for someone who cheerfully talks about the manufacturing process for their favorite stone-that-is-really-a-kind-of-glass. And they get even more off balance if they find out that the attractive orangey beads you're also working with are man-made amber, of which there are at least two or three different varieties*.
People get kind of weird about gemstones that didn't come out of the earth. They're a little better about gemstones that look like they should have been created by making a mollusc suffer but weren't, if only because those are almost always billed as 'glass pearls' or 'crystal pearls' and seem to be classified as glass-that-looks-like-pearl rather than unnaturally-derived pearls.
Which leads me to the part where I was looking at Rio Grande's web site the other day- they're a jewelry supply company whose wires and metals are trusted by every single seller I know, including the body piercing types who get extra fussy about their metal quality- and poked my head into the area where they sell lab-created gemstones. (They don't seem to like 'synthetic' as a term.) I haven't seen the stones personally, so it may be a question of color saturation or something, but... if you go looking at, say, star sapphire cabochons? A lab-created stone of a given size and weight sells for half the price of a mined stone of the same size and weight.
Like I said, maybe there's variations in quality between the two, maybe there's some weird visual thing that bothers people, like the Uncanny Valley but for rocks, I don't know. It just... feels like something that took all the might of materials science to derive and produce probably ought to cost more than something that took a lot of prospecting rocks, then whacking at rocks and sorting through rocks, to produce.
Regardless, this is, I think, where I part ways with the new age life coach types again. I have no issues with pretty rocks being produced in a lab, as long as they are of similar physical and visual quality to the original kind.
*Some kinds of manmade amber are purely synthetic resin. Some are made by taking chips of actual amber and sticking them together with resin of appropriate color and texture. Some involve cheating with copal, which is also derived from old tree sap but which is younger by probably an order of magnitude and is usually a lot softer.
Lessons I took away from that incident: people who do metaphysical life coaching are often not prepared for someone who cheerfully talks about the manufacturing process for their favorite stone-that-is-really-a-kind-of-glass. And they get even more off balance if they find out that the attractive orangey beads you're also working with are man-made amber, of which there are at least two or three different varieties*.
People get kind of weird about gemstones that didn't come out of the earth. They're a little better about gemstones that look like they should have been created by making a mollusc suffer but weren't, if only because those are almost always billed as 'glass pearls' or 'crystal pearls' and seem to be classified as glass-that-looks-like-pearl rather than unnaturally-derived pearls.
Which leads me to the part where I was looking at Rio Grande's web site the other day- they're a jewelry supply company whose wires and metals are trusted by every single seller I know, including the body piercing types who get extra fussy about their metal quality- and poked my head into the area where they sell lab-created gemstones. (They don't seem to like 'synthetic' as a term.) I haven't seen the stones personally, so it may be a question of color saturation or something, but... if you go looking at, say, star sapphire cabochons? A lab-created stone of a given size and weight sells for half the price of a mined stone of the same size and weight.
Like I said, maybe there's variations in quality between the two, maybe there's some weird visual thing that bothers people, like the Uncanny Valley but for rocks, I don't know. It just... feels like something that took all the might of materials science to derive and produce probably ought to cost more than something that took a lot of prospecting rocks, then whacking at rocks and sorting through rocks, to produce.
Regardless, this is, I think, where I part ways with the new age life coach types again. I have no issues with pretty rocks being produced in a lab, as long as they are of similar physical and visual quality to the original kind.
*Some kinds of manmade amber are purely synthetic resin. Some are made by taking chips of actual amber and sticking them together with resin of appropriate color and texture. Some involve cheating with copal, which is also derived from old tree sap but which is younger by probably an order of magnitude and is usually a lot softer.
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Date: 2018-04-06 07:58 pm (UTC)Especially since my mother recently had a ring resized and told me about the process, so I know her ring size, and since I remember her mentioning a fondness for star sapphires in the past, even though she's never actually owned one, and since Mother's Day is coming up.