Hi Everyone and hope you're all keeping well. It's another Saturday night ! The shop has just closed but I'm not ready to leave the party yet :-)
Tonight Tanzanite is on my mind. Here's a pic of the largest crystal ever found ~ 3.37 Kgs ! It's called the Mawenzie, and apologies to whoever owns it for not asking permission.
Tanzanite has become one of my favourite stones. I'm sure it's no coincidence that this stone arrived in my life as I was wanting to perfect my business and website. See my write up here, heading the Tanzanite Collection.
Loving this stone and unable to find any ready made Jewellery with the quality I wanted I realised I needed to source the stones and get them set myself. At a Gemshow overseas I followed my intuition to one particular stall with good energy. I liked the Tanzanites there & the price was not too scary, so I bought a few. Feeling quite excited but with logical mind giving me a hard time over the cost I walked away thinking " Wish Paul was here so I could ask him if these are a good deal or not " Turned into another aisle and there he was ! Don't you love serendipity ? Unbelievable just to bump into someone you're thinking of at an overseas gem show !
Anyway, with Paul's very positive feedback on quality and price I went back to spend a small fortune on more lovely Tanzanites. Most of these were set & uploaded last September ( all the G codes ) But there were 4 higher grade larger stones which could have been cut from the pic above. These I gave to Paul to set because I wanted something special. Finally they've arrived and were uploaded earlier this week, see Latest Jewellery Uploads
However, despite cutting margins, these turned out to be the our most expensive rings ever. That's cool, I took a risk and raised us to another level ~ Tanzanite is clearly evolving my Shop to it's highest potential :-) But I was concerned about the cost ( to you ! ) so I did some google exploration. I couldn't find any direct comparisons with great colour clarity and inclusions. Yes there are lovely large perfect AAA stones but they were even more expensive. Personally I love the inclusions. They bring the same or better energy at a more reasonable cost. They bring the stones to life with their sparkle. Jess's first comment was "Wow it's like they have a Galaxy inside"
Thus far I was happy that I'd apparently filled a gap in the market. Until i checked out a certain popular site that sells everything and there I was shocked. OMG. Apparently flawless Tanzanites, described as authentic, yet for a handful of dollars ! How can this be ? Well they do say "If it seems to be too good to be true, it probably is !" but that wasn't enough for me as authenticity is so important and at least I wanted to be really sure that my stones were real.
I do have ways to check my gems when needed. Nothing fancy, I'm not a lab, but just Refractive Index and Thermal Conductivity are generally enough so I have bought a few instruments to check these, and in this case I've taken the extra step of actually uploading pics of the results. If you look at the latest Tanzanites ( p1 to 4 ) you can see that Refractive Index and Thermal Conductivity are both correct for real Tanzanite.
Ha ! I love these instruments. One of them paid for itself in an aborted deal in Delhi on faceted Tourmalines. Interestingly, the one with inclusions tested real but the rest of the packet were flawless and proved to be glass !
Love from the Heart, as always.