Hi Glenn,
As a guy who grew up digging Aquamarines, Tourmalines, Graphic
Granites and asteriated Rose Quartzes out of pegmatite dike tailings
piles on his way home from elementary school and has been involved
with minerals and gems ever since, I read your posting with a mixture
of surprise and utter disbelief. Despite having tried marketing to
retailers who buy bricks for five dollars in order to sell them for
ten or fifteen (without caring what or how fine they were), I wasn’t
aware that there were any people who feel as you do on the creative
side of the counter; I just always assumed that views like this were
the purview of shopping mall comparers. Nonetheless, you’ve asked a
couple of what I consider to be very important questions, and since I
get the impression you’re both genuinely interested in their answers
and fairly young, I’ll do what I can to explain and try to introduce
you to a new way of seeing things. It may not be the easiest thing to
accomplish, however…
Your first question,
where does "natural" end and "unnatural" begin?
is a fair one, but it misses the most important point of all – the
point that is at the crux of who most of us are, as creative
craftsmen and women, and why we’re so passionate about what it is
that we do. The choices you’ve highlighted are not so much between
“natural” and “unnatural”, as they are between “naturally occurring,
usually butt-ugly and utterly undesirable by almost everyone but, on
rare occasions, potentially very beautiful and, thus, both rare and
prohibitively expensive” and “naturally occurring, usually butt-ugly
and utterly undesirable by almost everyone but, under the right
conditions, and with just the right combinations of chemicals, heat
and/or other physical treatments, physically transformable into
something the masses can appreciate and afford”. You see, Glenn, you
are not alone in your fascination with “gems and gemstones”. For
thousands of years, mankind has striven to find, possess and exhibit
items of surpassing beauty, primarily as statements of achievement.
(FWIW, in my opinion, it’s we men who’ve usually gone after gems
and other “objets d’art” for their achievement value, while, more
often than not, women cherish them as souvenirs of fond past
experiences, which enable them to take soothing, 3-second
reminiscence “vacations” in the midst of their more difficult days.)
Anyhow, for centuries, the characteristics which defined gemstones
as gemstones have been beauty, rarity, and durability, and it was
just naturally assumed that only royalty, and the wealthiest of the
wealthy could afford them, because they, and they alone, possessed
the resources necessary to pay for the gems’ removal from the tonnage
of overburden and/or bedrock which contained them, and fashioning
into wearable “statements” of personal adornment.
Between 160 and 120 years ago, way back before the Great Depression
came along and put a damper on things, Western Europe and this
experiment called The United States underwent an economic overhaul
called Industrialization, through which more people had more chances
to accumulate more things, and more and different technologies
became available for unearthing these previously unavailable baubles
we all love so much, and fashioning them into goodies for personal
adornment. If I’m not mistaken, this period saw the birth of fashion
jewelry, as most of us know it today, in which tin, zinc, whalebone,
copper or brass could be set with brightly colored and/or
foil-backed “Rhine-stones” – that is, glass imitation “stones” which
were manufactured in the Rhine region – which were created in order
to enable the relatively impoverished masses to have something
beautiful with which to adorn themselves, so they could feel “just
like Royalty”. And so began a quest, as the middle class came into
existence, for any- and everything that would give the impression
that one person of limited means was, somehow, more valuable that
all others of his or her caste. This delusion, and the very
successful attempts to market it to those susceptible to it, have
buried more millions of people in debt, and created more feelings of
helplessness and comparative inadequacy than probably any other
social movement in recorded history. (Oh, and it’s also helped create
and further the very industry that sustains all of us, here on the
Orchid List!)
Unfortunately, that double-edged sword has only grown sharper since
the advent of the cable TV-based round-the-clock shopping networks,
twenty years ago, which dangle the lure of what might best be called
“implied opulence” before the unsuspecting eyes of those who don’t
know any better, and insinuate to all of those within viewing
distance and reach of a credit card that they, too, can have whatever
they want and look like the kings and queens of fairy tale fame, “for
just pennies on the dollar”. You say that the treatments necessary to
maintain that myth “boggle your mind”, but I can’t understand how.
…Unless, of course, you have trouble with that because you’ve
managed to overlook the fact that you’re a consumer, too, just like
everyone else, and that your customers are only there because of the
trends in gemological consumerism (i.e.treatments and other
cost-reducing manufacturing angles) that make it possible for them
to buy from you. Just as various aspects of the media have been
successively “dumbed down” to make them more accessible to the
lowest common denominators of society, so too, have the lowest grades
of the most prized gem materials been enhanced, to place them within
easy reach of those hellbent on not only keeping up with the Joneses,
but slipping into the social lead in front of them (however
temporarily). After all, sooner or later, there comes a point at
which the fantasy cruise of unlimited resources and irrevocably
discountable prices runs aground on the jagged rocks of better
qualities, empty ore veins and exhausted contact zones. If the earth
only holds, say, a hundred thousand tons of Amethyst, for example,
and those who view the gem world as it appears you do are convinced
that the supply is bottomless and the prices can never increase
beyond a certain point, the only rational solutions remaining are to
either treat the living hell out of something that approximates the
previously-available commodity, or tap a chemical company to
synthesize enough of something that looks and acts like it to meet
market demands.
Let’s look at this quandary from another perspective, for a
moment… If you were presented the choice between knowing that
neither you, nor anyone you loved (or would even be likely to meet)
could ever reasonably aspire to owning a piece of jewelry that
contained one of these (truly mind-boggling) little miracles we call
“gemstones”, because they each cost the equivalent of a full years’
salary to procure, or knowing that, for a considerably more
attainable price, you could have something that was still beautiful,
fairly durable, and relatively rare (although less rare than one of
those hugely expensive rarities known as natural gems), which would
you choose? Okay, now, how about if these latter choices’ treatments
were so carefully researched and so well executed that not only could
you not tell the difference between them and their natural
counterparts, but neither could most others, and the difference in
price was extraordinary, how might you choose?
I’ve actually just had a great example of this in my studio! On the
one hand, I had a 100% natural, lush, velvety blue 6.40 ct. Sapphire
oval (reminiscent of a fine, but ever-so-slightly sleepy Tanzanite)
with a ‘discounted’ wholesale price of $2000/ct.; next, a 5.20 ct.
heavily heated African Sapphire oval with evidence of bulk
diffusion, wholesaled for $250/ct. and finally, a beautifully cut,
hydrothermally-grown, 4.42 ct. Ruby oval that went for $150/ct. All
three were within shouting distance of 10x8mm, and all were
chemically constructed, at the molecular level, of Aluminum, Oxygen,
and trace (doping) elements like Iron, Chromium and Titanium. But
their origins and respective retail prices – and thus, the degrees
of relative access to them which the public, at large, could hope
for – were markedly different. At a keystoned retail price, the most
affordable of these could be had for just over a thousand dollars; a
number that’s very easily attainable by practically anyone with a
high school education. And the next one up could be had for just
scarcely more than twice the price of the first, even though it
possessed the allure of having once been formed in nature. But to
get to the one after that, you’d have to multiply the first stone’s
price by at least twenty – more than that, actually, because of the
premium normally paid for such an exquisite and completely natural
stone. Chances are good that it will eventually retail for a figure
closer to the $50-60,000 mark, once set in a piece of fine Diamond
and Platinum jewelry of the calibre it deserves, and that it will be
eagerly snapped up by some lucky “someone” before the New Year
arrives.
To address your second question fully would probably take far longer
than the first one did, because any attempt to do so would require
first finding a way to instill an entirely different set of values
and a sense of awe where your current commodities-type value system
now lies. The core issue is not whether a stone came from this
grouping of chemicals or that, but whether its origins bring it
closer to being yet another insignificant smudge in an incessant
torrent of low value, high-tech, man-made “flashy things” which hold
all the gravitas of toilet paper and hold our feeble attention spans
about as long as it does, or to a true miracle of nature, utterly
individual and as minutely different from the next stone as you are
from the person next to you, which ties us to that natural spring
from whence we, our senses of awe, and our spiritual beliefs all
eminate. Next up, you say that you
have a hard time understanding why heating, drilling, filling,
waxing, oiling etc. of "natural" stones to create something rarely
(if ever) found in nature is acceptable while creating the same
thing from basic raw materials is not.
The reason you’re have such a hard time with this, Glenn, is that
you’ve bought into the whole consumerism thing so completely and
utterly, and so matter-of-factly, that you can’t comprehend the
existence of any values beyond those of the covalent bonds which
hold chemical compounds together. I’m sorry to be so blunt about it,
but your challenge seems obvious to me: if you can’t sense any
intrinsic value in anything beyond how flashy something is, or at
what price, or how fast you can crank out behemoth chunks of it to
the marketplace, or whether or not you can save a sale by
representing a piece of cheap junk to customers as being “real”, or
not, then some serious congratulations are due to all of those
Madison Avenue advertising agencies who programmed your values into
you. In short, if your values are really as you’re describing them,
you may very well be the perfect match for a Stepford Wife! Perhaps
the greatest obstacle you’re facing is this last one, which you’d
essentially reiterated as a separate “last point”, towards the end of
your letter:
The last point on created vs. natural is that the created stones
do not create the hostile environment that natural stones do. The
murders and oppression of people does not occur like it does in the
mining process (especially in areas like Burma etc.).
The reason that these negative things do not happen with created
stones is similar to the reason why, during gasoline shortages,
people do not wait in long lines to fill their cars’ fuel tanks up
with either milk or river water: because, despite being plentiful
and reasonably similar in structure (i.e. liquids), these other
“commodities” are intrinsically worthless. The reason that created
stones don’t engender such passionate (albeit occasionally
unfortunate) responses is that they are, for most intents and
purposes, not worth the effort. If they had any intrinsic value, at
all, people would go out of their way to do whatever it took to
attain them. As it is, they realize that the vast majority of these
“fakes” are just that: imitators to the throne. No matter how
closely they resemble or imitate those incredibly beautiful, durable,
rare and precious miracles of nature, the best that they will ever be
able to aspire to is their durability and a small fraction of their
beauty. After all, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, and what
beautiful woman doesn’t suddenly become infinitely more beautiful,
the moment your emotions enter the equation and you fall in love with
her? The difference between passionately yearning for a natural gem
and plunking down a few bucks for a created attempt to equal it is
like the difference spending an hour either falling in love or
balancing your checkbook. Enough said.
Douglas Turet, G.J.,
Turet Design
P.O. Box 242
Avon, MA 02322-0242
Tel: (508) 586-5690 Fax: (508) 586-5677
doug. at .turetdesign.com
