- ScRoTo TuRbOtUrD
- Jan 21, 2007
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Haven't made this thread in some time, so let me introduce myself. My name is Raz, and I've been a jeweler at a small jewelry store outside of Boston for a little over 7 years. During this time my typical tasks have varied between being a bench jeweler/repairman, buying and selling precious metal, diamonds and gemstones, custom design in both metal and wax, watch reconditioning, repair and tuning, then nonsense that comes with running a store, such dealing with people who spent 3 grand on fake jewelry and buying stuff that turns out to be stolen. Short of traveling the country with a sack full of giant diamonds, I've done or dabbled in most of what there is to be done when you call yourself a jeweler. So I guess I'll start with the gist of what I know.
Metal This is shiny hard stuff. Most of what fine jewelry is made of is relegated to Silver, Gold and Platinum. Other metals are used time to time buy they're not really part of the norm.
Silver is, well, silver in color. It's cheap, running about $17 an ounce on today's trading market. It's a far step up from the cheap base metals used to make costume jewelry, but nothing super expensive is made from it. Meaning that it ends up easy to work with, is cheap enough to make some funky pieces with, and won't turn your skin green like Brass or Copper.
Silver jewelry is always made in Sterling silver, which is a term denoting that it's 92.5% Silver, 7.5% copper. That little bit of copper or other metal mixed in goes a long way in making it harder and less brittle, also it helps it hold a shine a bit more. Still, silver tarnishes, turning from a bright white, to a hazy, white, eventually to a dull brown over the course of 6-12 months. Fun fact: If you're wearing silver and it turns black, you sweat has traces of sulfur.
Gold is the big daddy of the jewelry industry. It runs about $1,200 as of this post, which is near the highest it's ever been. Compare that to $280 in 2001 or $600 in mid 2007, if you'd invested in gold 10 years ago you'd be doing pretty well right now.
In jewelry, gold purity is measured by Karat, which is a number out of 24. I'm not sure why it's based around the number 24, but just divide a gold's karat by 24 and you'll have the percentage of it's purity. Most gold jewelry (Near 80%) is made from 14k(arat) gold, which is 58% pure. The other 42% is base metals, usually brass or copper. You can mix in Zinc, steel, silver, palladium, or a host of other metals to change it's color, giving you White, Pink or Green gold. Still, as long as it's the same karat, or same amount of pure gold in it, it's worth the same amount. 14k White and 14K yellow gold are worth as much as each other.
Then there are less common alloys. Irish gold is 9k, usually only used to make Irish wedding bands (Claddaugh rings), 10K is used to make most cheap jewelry, the kind Kays or Zales sells in rings for $50. 18K is a higher purity and cost, usually made into very well made pieces, and is used more often in Europe than America. They like nice things I guess. Portuguese gold is 19k, then as you go east, places like India prefer 21,22 or 24k jewelry.
The difference in karats is a bit more than cost. Gold in inherently a soft metal, so the more you alloy it, the lower the karat gets, but the harder the metal is. Then again, as it gets harder, it also gets brittle, or more likely to break cleanly. 10K gold is harder to scratch or bend, but will break if you smack it into something hard enough. 18k will bend and scratch, but is soft enough to bend without too much hassle. High karat gold like 22 and 24 you can often bend by hand, which makes them too soft to be taken seriously for jewelrymaking in the west, though in places like China, they'd rather not buy gold that's almost half copper. It's a culture thing I suppose.
Platinum is the serious stuff. At $1700 an ounce it'd better be. It's always super white, is usually alloyed to be 90-95% pure, and is almost twice as dense as gold. What that means is that for any ring in 14k gold, the same ring in Plat will weigh more and be 80% more pure precious metal, meaning it'll cost 2-3 times as much. Meanwhile it's soft, not unlike high karat gold, doesn't hold a great shine when polished, and has a super high melting point, which makes it a bitch to work on. Still when you're putting some massive rock in a ring, this is what the ladies are told they want. It's also used in industrial applications because it doesn't react to acids or volatile chemicals, but that hardly makes a difference to us. Just helps make it more expensive I suppose.
Stones With precious gemstones, everything sort of falls into 3 Categories, Diamonds, Precious, and semi-precious stones. Yes Diamonds are precious but they are pushed aside here because they're in their own little world.
Diamonds: These are white and small and expensive. People in Africa have a great time digging them out of the ground just for fun, then they're handed out fairly to everyone (None of this sentence is true). They range from tiny stones that I can buy for $0.20 (And stores sell for $30) to normal stones that cost $2,000 to retardedly big ones that you'll never be good enough to look at no matter how successful you become.
Now when it comes to Diamonds, there are 4 things to consider; The size, the clarity (How much poo poo is floating around inside it), the color (White is nice, yellow is mellow, brown flush it down), and the cut (Shape, Like circles and squares and triangles and stuff.) What I'll do here is get you familiar with these 4 things, then I I'll explain how to put it all together and you'll be a diamond expert. Yes it's that easy.
Carat: Notice how it's spelled with a C instead of Karat, like gold. That's because they're not the same. Still, it's confusing. Let's just try to get that out of the way. A diamonds size is measured by Carat weight. Yes size is measured by weight, because diamonds are all equally dense. Two equally cut diamonds of the same size will always be the same weight. Now, like pennies in a dollar (Or pence in England, pesos in Mexico, Beaver pelts in Canada) A carat is split into 100 points (pts). 50 points is a half carat, 33pts is a third, 2 pts is a 50th, 175pts is a carat and three quarters, that sort of thing. The price of a diamond goes up exponentially as the size goes up. To give you an idea, 2 half carat stones are not equal in value to a 1 carat stone. You'd need 3 or 4 to get the same money. A ring with 1 carat in 1pt stones will be worth a small percentage of a single 1 carat stone.
Clarity: This is what's inside the diamond. A good diamond looks like a piece of clear window glass (But you know, shaped like a diamond instead of like a window). It's clear inside with no blemishes. Typically, this isn't what you see. You put one of those tiny magnifiers up to your eye (Called a loupe, pronounced loop) like in the movies and look inside the stone. You'll see little bits inside that look like salt and pepper floating around. These are white and black carbon spots, and are in almost all diamonds. The more you have in the stone, the more they interfere with light going in and coming out, the less brilliant the stone will be, the less it's worth.
Cut: This is how the stones cut, but it means two things. First is the shape, if it's a round, square, pear shaped, rectangular, triangle. Once you've called it a specific shape, it pertains to how close to that shapes specifications it is. For example, a square diamond (Typically referred to as "Princess Cut", though it's just a square) could be 3.1mm on the top and bottom side, and 3.3mm on the left and right sides. It won't look uneven, but it will hurt it's value.
But as far as shapes go, the main things to consider are if you like it, if it has value now, and if it will hold it's value. Today's round diamonds, referred to as the Modern Brilliant, is regarded as the best way to cut a diamond. The cut maximizes brilliance, doesn't create dark spots in the stone and minimizes waste when cutting. Whenever you cut a diamond, if it's not a round modern brilliant, it's a "fancy cut", which is a way of saying that diamond shapes come in 2 categories, rounds, and everything else. The reason being that 30 years ago, a Marquise cut diamond, whose shape resembles a football, was super popular. They fetched a premium over round stones at retail because they were what every woman wanted. 10 years later, everyone had them, they were out of fashion and the Pear shape (like a teardrop) was in. Nowadays the princess cut is popular, wildly so, but if history is any example there'll be a new fad before long. Pears and marquis diamonds I can almost give away they're so cheap nowadays, whereas I can actually get decent money for a princess cut, especially something like one that's exactly a carat, set in white gold. Expect the popular style to change within the next few years, as these things usually get set off by some pop sensation getting married or cheated on and receiving some ridiculous million dollar stone that everyone suddenly wants to emulate. Not that the retail jewelry industry doesn't help new things catch on as much as it can.
Color: If you're colorblind this will not matter to you, otherwise this is way simpler than other factors. Diamond color is graded on a alphabetical scale, only it starts at D for a perfectly white diamond, and trails down the numbers the darker and more yellow it gets. Typically D, E or F grade diamonds are extremely white. G is good, but once you hit H or I, you begin to see a slight tinge of yellow. J and K is even Yellower, and once you hit M and beyond, you're looking at a nasty, almost beige diamond. Then you have specialized colors like Canary diamonds which are blindingly bright yellow, or blue, pink, or whatever else diamonds. You will almost never see these as they are mega rare and cost more than your house. What you will see is the crap runoff of terrible diamond mining. Brown, amber, black, sickly looking stones referred to as "Chocolate", "Cognac", "Champagne" diamonds. These are just nasty diamonds that are set in mass produced rings and named after things that women typically like. It makes me sad to think about how often it works. If I had a nickle for every time some woman tried to sell me a "Chocolate" diamond that she paid out the wazoo for, only to find out it's worth 10% of that in the real world.
Colored Stones This includes all the colored stuff you may be familiar with. Rubies and Emeralds and stuff. It basically runs in 3 categories; Precious(Expensive), Semiprecious(less so), and very-semiprecious (cheap). There are literally hundreds of stones to list, but I'll give you a rundown of the most popular.
Precious;
Sapphire/Ruby - These are the most common colored stones. Sapphire is most commonly blue (Except at the mall where cheap blue sapphires look almost black), but their mineral makeup can stay the same and come in over 50 colors, aside from red. When a sapphire is red, it's a ruby. They're super hard to scratch, and can be worked with pretty easily.
Emerald - Almost always green, and way softer than most stones. I typically break one of these every 5th time I try to set one, as they're so soft and hard to work with.
Tanzanite - Deep Purple, these gained some popularity and value when the people who're mining them announced that once they mined them form a small area, that'd be it forever. The announcement that they've run out will probably never come until they absolutely stop selling.
Alexandrite - The color changing stone. This cost more than anything, including diamond, by a longshot. It starts at about $16,000 a carat for smaller stones, so don't worry because you'll never see one.
Black Diamond - Same mineral as Diamond, with a slightly different composition so that instead of being clear, it's such a dark green that it looks black. These can range in all sort of prices since there's no real set market prices, usually stores just make it up as they go along.
Semi-Precious;
Opal - Creamy white with flecks of blue, green and red. The more color and flare in it, the more valuable it is.
Peridot - Light green
Garnet - Dark red
Topaz - Yellow, purple, rainbow, brown, but most commonly it's a clear light blue.
Citrine - A light orangish yellow. Like a pumpkin or a schoolbus.
Amethyst - Purple
All of these are very common in jewelry, usually without much flaw inside the stone, and market price on any size or quality is usually between $1 and $6 a carat. Cheap stuff until you have alot of it.
Very Semi-precious;
Onyx - A flat black slab
Jade - Green glassy stuff from china. Come in 3 forms, Nephrite, Jadeite and Jade glass. Nephrite is expensive and not very common, Jadeite is what 90% of jade jewelry is made of, and Jade glass is when they grind up jade, mix it with glass and make cheap bracelets with it. It's inexpensive enough that they can make entire walls out of it for banks in Hong Kong.
Amber - Dried tree resin, like in Jurassic Park. It's worth more if there's a bug floating in it, also like in Jurassic park.
Now, forget all that stuff about diamond quality. Once you find out the size and shape of a colored stone you like, 90% of the value in relation to those is strictly in the color. If you want a nice blue, 1ct round sapphire, don't bother looking into it with a loupe. Eyeball it, and ask yourself if you like the color. That's all there is too it. Don't be talked into paying more for Ceylon or Burmese or Sri Lankan sapphires if you don't genuinely like the look any more.
Buying
I can't tell you everything you need to know about buying jewelry. There are so many scenarios and variants that we'd be here till the end of time. What I can do right now is give you some tips. My first, last and most important tip when buying jewelry is this; Never, ever buy jewelry in the mall. This is the golden rule of the jewelry industry, the universal understanding that everyone in the world hates mall jewelry stores. They mass produce jewelry pieces by the tens of thousands, utilize terrible, 1pt diamonds in 10k gold, and sell it a a 3-500% premium over what a typical jewelry store would charge. If you walk into a Kays or Zales and see a diamond ring for $1,000, you can probably walk into any honest store and have that ring made to the same exact specifications for arounf $300. Selling gold for 4 times the market rate, tricking people with credit lines and flat out lying about materials has never been past them with the horror stories I've heard.
Then there's things like Tiffany & Co, David Yurman and Cartier. They typically sell jewelry made from Silver, gold, or silver with a tiny dab of gold on it for 20 times the cost of materials. Here you're mostly paying for the name. a $200 Tiffany ring in sterling has $5 worth of silver in it, and in any other store would retail for $10, but you're paying $190 for the privilege of a ring that has their name on it. Buy it if you like it, just do some research and know what you want before you get it, because you won't get much when you go to sell it. If you can buy things like these used, you can save a bundle, but there are so many fake tiffany and cartier pieces out there I wouldn't recommend it.
After that, there are the department store specials. Coach bracelets, D&G rings, gucci watches, etc. I deal with gold and silver in my regular day, and I don't know who or what Dolce and Gabana are. Not many people do. This doesn't keep people from trying to scrap out their designer watch for it's metal, not understanding that they paid for a name, and a $6 japanese movement in a brass and plated watch won't resell, even if they did pay $800 for it in Macy's.
The last pitfall is buying jewelry online. There are some good deals out there, and things like eBay are getting so competitive that there are some awesome deals to be had, but for christ sake stay safe. Don't buy from sites you've never heard of, don't bid on it if it ships from china from someone with 8 feedback, and for the hell of it, let's just say stay off of craigslist. Besides the abundance of inventory, the main reason there's such a supply of jewelry for sale online is that it's so criminally easy to sell people brass and glass disguised as diamond rings that people usually know better than to try buying that way. I usually recommend that if you don't see what you want from a reputable site for a decent price, get a real good idea of what you like, and take it to a local jeweler to have them make it for you. If it's not cheaper, it won't be much more, and you'll have a way, way smaller chance of getting ripped off.
Selling
Like the commercial with MC Hammer says, selling gold is an awesome way to get quick money. Unlike what it says, if you send it away in the mail, you're an idiot. But say you've got a bracelet, watch, chain, ring, etc that you want to sell. Here are some basic tips.
You can always, always get more money selling it privately. Be it diamond studs or a plated watch, if you clean it up and ask around people you know, friends or friends of friends or family, you'll get far beyond what you'd get in any jewelry store, pawn shop, gold party, trade show or mail in special.
As an example, say you have a gold mens bracelet, no stones in it. Market value on the gold in it is $100. TV Mailer will give you $20, a pawn shop will give you 50 (On a load, which you can buy back later), a non-pawning jewelry store will give you 60-70, a trade show or gold party might give you 70 or anywhere less. But being that much in gold, it's probably safe to say it retails for 200-250, so if you can sell it to someone you know for $150, everyone would win. Ebay and craigslist can work for selling gold, but Craigslist can be robbery central if you're in a bad area, and eBay is so competitive people will try to buy it for $101, hoping gold goes up $10 and they make a dollar scrapping it.
Before you sell gold, you should know what it's worth. Here I can try to explain how you figure that out. All stores that buy gold buy it by weight. Factor their refiners percentage, the market price, the purity of the gold, and their profit margin and you'll find what they pay any chump on the street. It breaks down like this.
Take the spot price on gold, it's about $1150 an ounce right now, but you can get a current accurate quote at kitco.com, multiply that by...
The purity of the gold. Separate the pieces you have by karat, then multiply the percentage of pure gold (14K is .56, 10k is .39, 18K is .72), scrap gold is always tallied a half karat under it's scientific purity because of dirt or low karat solder in the piece, or casters use 13.5 karat gold to save money.
Times their refiners fee. Use 95% (.95), since no serious store sells their gold for less than 95% of the market price. They might tell you they have their own refiner, or there are assaying charges, or currency trade fees, or gold conversion factors, but that's all bullshit. If they say they sell it for 80% so they'll but it at 50, they're lying.
Then multiply by the weight in either grams or pennyweights, however they prefer to weigh it...
Then divide by how many (Either grams or pennyweights) are in an ounce, 31.1 or 20, respectively.
So, working in grams, here's an example.
(Spot price on gold) X (Purity of gold) X (Refiners percentage) X (Gram Weight) / (31.1 grams to an ounce)
So say you have a 20 gram 14K chain. The formula would be"
$1150 X .56 X .95 X 20 / 31.1 = $393
That's every penny the jewelry store or pawn shop would get for it. They want to but it from you for $200, as it sounds like a nice round number, and make a decent profit. However, if you knew this going in, you could say "Hi, this is my chain, 14K, 20 grams. It scraps for about 390, is there any way you can do 350 for it?" They'll probably try to talk you down a bit, but if you can hold tight and collect more than 300, you'd be getting over 75%. More than any other chump on the street is going to get walking in without a clue about what they have.
When there are stones involved, it's way more complicated. Here are some rules that seem to stick around my area, but your results may vary.
Small diamonds, under 10 points each, are rarely paid for. Some people weigh up the gold and just pay that, some throw in a dollar a point or a few dollars a stone.
Bigger diamonds, 10-50 points, you can get an idea of by multiplying their point weight by a tenth of it. 20X2, 45X4.5, that sort of thing will give you a general idea of what to ask for. Factor a bit lower if they're junky stones or higher if they're really nice.
Larger than that is serious diamond territory, like $500 and up. Any diamonds that big should come with a written appraisal, of which you can usually shoot for 25% of what's written. Appraisals are inflated for insurance, and usually run double what the stone really costs, which is double what any jewelry would want to pay for it.
Colored stones are also tricky, but not too much so. Anything semiprecious rarely fetches any money unless it's a real art piece in a good quality gold. A blue topaz in 10k gold won't bring another dollar. Ruby, Emerald and Sapphire are on a case by case basis since there are good ones and truly awful ones, the same size of either could bring you a hundred dollars or nothing at all.
No matter what you have, be it gold or platinum or stones or copper, the golden rule of selling is to shop around. If selling a ring you paid $400, get a price from every store within 10 miles and you'll probably hear prices ranging from $35 to 200.
Watches are a bit of a dead item, especially womens watches. Sometimes guys will buy and wear a used watch, women are typically a bit more fussy and want a brand new one. Most stores don't even buy watches unless they're a better name. Movado, rado, tag heuer, rolex, breitling, that sort of thing. And consider from the stores perspective, before they buy a citizen or fossil from you for $50, can they sell it for $100, or would that customer rather spend a bit more and get a brand new one in the box with a warranty?
When buying a watch, I generally recommend Bulova, Seiko or Citizen watches. Anything less is sure to have a typical cheap japanese movement, good for a few years but probably won't last, and anything more expensive you're probably paying alot for a name on a watch that does no more than tell time. When buying a better watch, buying one used can save a ton of money though. For instance, mens Movado watches typically are all stainless, have a good swiss movement, and retail anywhere for $1,000 to $1,250. When I buy one, I recondition it till it looks as good as it did they day it was new, and put it out for sale with a box and some movado paperwork for $200-$300. Sometimes 20% of retail, and even then they sit there for years. Depending on whether you're buying or selling, or what taste you have in watches there are hundreds of scenarios, buy typically all you can do is buy a watch you like the look of, or if selling it, do it privately to maximize what you'll get for it.
Links
http://www.pricescope.com/ - I don't use it much, but it was sent to me a while ago and seems like it's full of some pretty good information about buying diamonds. Probably the best part is you can put in specs for a stone and instantly get a ballpark wholesale price.
http://www.kitco.com/market - The current metal market prices in US denomination by ounce.
Wow I've got 2 whole links?
Oh goodness my brain trailed off and I typed so much I forgot where I was. I suppose at this point you can fire away and I'll see if I can shed light on your questions.
what a fuckin' nerd
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Jun 8, 2016 15:42
