Experience with jewelry television

Hello, I saw this tv show called Jewelry Television, (JTV.com) and
they were selling colored gem stones. Has anyone ever bought anything
from them? If so how was the quality and price. Dan

I have gotten some items from them. You have to examine carefully. I
have returned a few with no hassel. You just have avoid the verbal
hype from the hosts.

John

I’ve been buying gemstones from JTV for years. I also appear on the
show regularly on “Jewel School.” The gems are of moderate to
excellent quality, and they disclose any treatments, heatings, etc.
They are the largest retail seller of loose gemstones in the country.
Their prices are very good for the quality of the stones. They have
the best and largest offering of chrome diopside I’ve ever seen.

Jackie Truty

Avoid!

Gemstone sold on TV are more or less the quality of gravel for
aquarium decoration. These companies source and offer
closout/rejected lots from manufacturers in India and Thailand.

As a jeweler, find yourself a reputable gem dealer, and aspire for
the best quality gems you can afford and your customer wish, and
leave the sofa, popcorn and tv gem shopping to the public…

The gems are of moderate to excellent quality, and they disclose
any treatments, heatings, etc. 

For the most part, well, sometimes. The samples I’ve seen have
generally been of decent quality in terms of the original gem
material, treatments properly disclosed for anyone who knows what
those descriptions mean. But the cutting quality I’ve seen has been
unexceptional, to be kind. As a jeweler, I’ve yet to see one of their
gems I’d be interested in buying and using myself. It’s not junk,
it’s just ho-hum compared to what I can find at actual gem dealers.

Perhaps my biggest argument against these and other TV sellers is
the marketing. They’ll find some unknown material that the gem world
pretty much discards because there’s no demand, or it just isn’t all
that pretty, and by the time they’re done hyping it up, they make it
sound like the rarest and most desireable gem on the planet. And
since there wasn’t much market, they now can sell it cheap. And they
will seem pretty exclusive too, since your local jewelry store won’t
carry it…

The quality issue depends on what you’re looking for. I recall some
tanzanites purchased by one of my customers that had been described
in all sorts of wonderful terms. They were reasonally good for
clarity, the cutting was passable but not great, but the color was so
pale as to hardly qualify look like tanzanite. While that can still
be fine and attractive, presenting these as wonderful examples of the
gem, in a beautiful light pastel color, might not be fraud, but it
misrepresented the actual market opinion and desireability of that
quality of stone.

Weren’t these the guys who took white sapphire, an otherwise pretty
dull and unlively looking material (no color, so it’s not nice for
the color, and the refractive index and dispersion are low enough
that it just doesn’t do much. Add that many are slightly cloudy, and
you see why prior to the TV sellers, most of this junk was never even
cut. Now, of course, people pay noticable prices for it. Most of
them, people lured by the hype, rather than people who actually have
some knowledge and understanding of gems…

Of course, this is hardly the first time a gem’s market has been
built by advertising. Just look at what N.W. Ayers and DeBeers have
managed to do with diamonds over the last hundred years or so… but
I digress…

They are the largest retail seller of loose gemstones in the
country. 

The key here is to notice both those terms. “retail”, and “loose”.
For readers of this list, who’d want to buy gems on the retail
market. Most of us have access to the wholesale market, where better
prices and better quality and more accurate marketing prevails. And
the retail buyers are not otherwise usually shopping for loose
stones, but rather for finished jewelry. So while JTV or the other TV
channels may sell more loose stones at retail, one might suggest
that this is a market they themselves created, so it’s not surprising
they’re filling it well.

With all that said, I’d also say that even if there are debatable
issues regarding what they do, it’s also true that they have had a
distinct role in increasing the public awareness of gemstones in
general. It used to be the public knew diamonds sapphires, rubies,
emeralds, pearls, and maybe a few other standards. Now, in part due
to the TV sellers, there’s much more awareness of the wide range of
gems that one can find out there. That is a good thing. I just wish
the salesmanship used were more knowlegeable, less high pressure,
less likely to get people to think the gems are something more
valuable than they actually are. They’re pretty enough to sell with
complete honesty. The hype only makes the whole TV market seem
suspect… If they toned it down just a little, and explained just
where in the real quality and rarity spectrum their wares fit, so
customers could accurately evaluate what they were getting, I
suspect that in the long run, they might do even better than they do.
As is now, I know more than a few people who’ve bought from them only
once, and then found they hadn’t got quite what they thought they’d
bought. The stones could have been pleasing, and the customers might
have returned, had they felt more honestly informed…

Just my two cents, and much of that comes from observations that are
quite a few years old now. Perhaps the channels have gotten better.
But from the few times I’ve accidentally happened on those late night
sales, I doubt it.

Peter Rowe G.G.

I have not bought from them but did acquire a bunch of stones from
someone that had a buying habit with them. The stones where found in
a dumpster with all the paper work…long story short they ended up
in my hands All I can say is you get what you pay for. Some of the
cuts where beautiful the stone type and quality varied widely. Some
stones I had no idea what they were by the paper work they have names
that only gem tv uses. Buy carefully and have fun, make good work

Lauren

The are the largest retail seller of loose gemstones in the
country." Why pay retail for mediocre stones when you could pay
wholesale for mediocre stones. 

Why buy a stone that you can’t loupe until you buy it? Develop a
good relationship with a local wholesale broker. We use several
depending on what we want.

Have fun and make lots of jewelry.
Jo Haemer
www.timothywgreen.com

We have a few customers who buy gemstones from Jewelry Television.
From what we have seen them bring in for us to set, the prices are
cheapl and so is the quality. You certainly get what you pay for, and
nothing more.

Dan,

At first I bought into all their hype, pretty stuff and the way they
talk about it. I spent over a year buying from them, but that was in
the beginning, I’ve since learned my lessons.

I would not buy Gemstones, Cabochons, or anything else they sell. I
was one of those Dumb asses that bought their “Hype” about their
"Natural" Andesine Labradorite Gemstones. Turns out they were not
Natural and they were sued with a Class Action lawsuit, which I was
a part of. But that was even a joke with the amount they returned.
They only gave a partial cash refunds, plus store credit, which had
to be split into 4 quarters (25% in each) and could only be used for
50% of whatever you were purchasing.

I purchased many items with diamonds, which I returned each and ever
one of them. They were all crap. You get what you pay for with JTV.

I’ve also bought many of their Gemstone parcels and never found
anything worth much.

They have had a couple Cabochons that were nice, but most were
worthless too.

I gave them a huge chance and bought lots of things hoping I’d get
something nice, but all in all I’d have to give them a 3 on a scale
from 1 to 10. If you are just playing around maybe, but if you are
serious about your gems and jewelry, DO NOT buy from them.

And by the way, I NEVER did spend my store credit with them, I
couldn’t justify having to give them my money to get my money back.

I’m sorry Jackie, but everything you said is exactly what they tell
you on their TV show, you do work for them occasionally, so I don’t
think you are completely biased.

I would be very cautious about buying anything from JTV. I made the
mistake of getting a parcel of opal triplets which turned out to be
junk. The bulk of the packet are so tiny, around 1 to 2 mm, that they
are almost almost useless for my purposes. The rest are around 5 or 6
mm, either totally colorless, dull gray, no fire, or dark black. I
was completely misled by those they showed on TV which were full of
fire, and were of a size around 8mm and larger. Furthermore, what
they showed did not include any tiny ones. The host had picked up one
of the stones with the tweezers, and held them against the hand of
the woman who gushed over it. From that I judged it to be about 9 mm
or even larger which seemed to be the average size of those in the
parcel.

The quality of the packet I received was horrible. The stones were
glued onto a piece of plastic which formed the bottom of the
triplet, and for the most part were off center.

There is not a single one in the packet that I could use.

True, I could have returned them, but had already paid $6.00 for
shipping and would have had to pay another $6.00 to return them,
plus a trip to the post office. I have put them in a little glass
container on my workbench as a reminder to me to get my stones from
reputable sources.

Alma