cowsruleusall

Good question! Yes the price difference is a status thing. Natural rubies are rare as fuck, so they're very expensive. Lab rubies can be made for cheap.

For appearance differences...The short answer is "not really". The medium answer is that lab rubies look much more like high end rubies - the less expensive ones are more dark red and don't have that "glow", but expensive rubies and lab rubies do.

The long answer is complicated. There are four major methods to growing rubies. Flame fusion basically just drips molten ruby onto a "seed crystal", and the droppings stack up to make a cylinder of lab ruby. This stuff looks like natural ruby but can be a touch hazy due to microscopic bubbles and uneven in colour in very large sizes. The Czochralski method dips a seed crystal in a vat of molten ruby and pulls it out slowly, meaning no bubbles, making a flawless cylinder with even colour. Both of these methods distort the crystal lattice a bit, meaning that although the hardness and physical properties are thebsame, some of the fine details are a tiny bit different. With the flux method, rubies are dissolved in molten metal then crystallized back out. This gives almost a perfect ruby, but just had tiny particles of molten metal trapped inside. The best method is hydrothermal, which perfectly mimics natural growing conditions, but this shit is insanely expensive.

If you go with a flame fusion lab ruby, you'd never know the difference between that and a natural one. If you have each of these four types of synthetics next to eachother, you'd think the hydrothermal looks the best, the flame fusion looks the hziest, and the others are about the same.

Excellent question! I've taught a lot of people how to cut gems, and there are some excellent resources available. If you're interested in getting started, I always recommend three things. First, sign up for the Gemology Online forums - that's the friendliest and most used peer-to-peer source of info. Also, buy Tom Herbst's book "Amateur Gemstone Cutting, Vol. 1" on Amazon, and watch my low-production-value YouTube series "Faceting 101". That should give you the full rundown of what to look for in gem materials, what the equipment is for cutting gems, and how to actually do the process.

To answer your questions:

1a. Gemstone rough (uncut gems) shouldn't come from eBay unless you're buying lab-grown material. There are a few good resources I'd recommend for beginners, including TMS Gems in San Diego (also online), Garsow Gems somewhere in CA (also online), WesternGem (online only), and to some extent New Era Gems (also online). All of these folks are well-used to having beginners, and will know exactly what materials to send your way.

1b. In rough, you want a piece that's "blocky" (not too long, narrow, or thin) and "clean" (not a lot of junk in the stone; should be transparent). It should pass the "white paper test" (if you put it on white paper, it shouldn't look black) and the "mirror test" (if you put it on a flat mirror, the light reflecting back up through the stone should give the stone a nice colour).

1c. It's a dud if the stone is black in normal ambient lighting, full of junk, or super thin or super long and narrow.

1. You need a "faceting machine". The Graves Company makes the most inexpensive one that's still appropriate for beginners, if cost is a major concern. You'll also need "laps", the metal disks that you put diamond onto, which actually do the grinding work. And you'll need "dops", the metal rods that you glue the stones to, in order to actually do the gemcutting.

2. The best beginner stones are inexpensive red garnets, clear or straw-coloured sunstones, very pale aquamarine/heliodor/morganite (the beryl family), or "laser gem" (borosilicate glass).

3. The best tips/hints I can offer are to have you check out those resources I mentioned above, before you start doing anything in the gem world :)

You know, this is a really good question. I'm not super-deep into the diamond side of things, but from what I've heard the inflation is way less than it used to be, given that there are now a bunch of sources outside of the control of DeBeers.

As for the cost of diamonds if monopolization wasn't a thing... there's no good way to predict that, as far as I'm aware. The cost of luxury goods is a fickle thing to predict.

Oooooh, this is a good question. Diamonds are sold by carat weight, with listings frequently including the millimeter size. Coloured stones (all transparent faceted gems other than diamonds) are sold by both carat weight AND millimeter size.

You bring up a good point; two stones can have the same carat weight, but one can be shallower and therefore wider. The problem with this is that changing the height-to-width ratio significantly affects the stone's end appearance. The crown (top part) can be changed without much issue, but the pavilion (pointy part) is much more sensitive to changes in height. If you start going too thin and too wide, your stone will become less fiery ("dispersive"), and once you pass a critical threshold the stone will basically die. All the light will leak out the bottom and cause a "window" or "fisheye", and that can actually be mathematically calculated out given the refractive index of the material.

When you cut with a mildly wider, shallower stone, you're getting a more brilliant stone that looks bigger face-up, but it will have less fire. If you go too wide and too shallow, you'll get something that looks like glass.

I'm not the diamond person, but I'll chime in because I love the lab-grown "exotic diamond-like materials". We can ignore carat weight, because we're assuming comparison between two stones of the exact same size and shape. We can ignore clarity, because moissanites are almost all entirely flawless unless you're getting the "bottom-barrel" stuff from China or India.

For colour, moissanite comes in blue, green, pink, yellow, orange, brown, and now comes in extremely high-quality whites ("F" equivalent). For cut...diamonds and moissanite from chain jewellers will have the exact same cuts. However, moissanite is something that a custom/precision gemcutter can work with, and can cut the material into a unique cut that you'd never see anywhere else.

When we talk about the basic appearance, moissanite is substantially more fiery, more than double that of diamond. Some people think it looks more "interesting", while others think it looks "weird" or "fake". That's more of a matter of personal preference.