You are more likely to see it on quartz and tips because they are large enough to cut this way. It’s hard to make that happen on the real estate of a 5mm sapphire
@dassauerkraut@Soy_Magnus Miners don’t like to break up rough because their main client is factories. It’s hard to get a full parcel of anything unless you have the money to throw $10,000 to $500,000 at one bag.
You can’t not make money on the material and the price.
The problem is your own customers. Can you make a business of cutting and selling nothing but whatever material comes in that bag? How long till you recoup your money? Do you want to be doing it?
@dassauerkraut@Soy_Magnus The big factories will send the best material to gemstone suppliers used by jewelers.
The mid-line material goes to factories mass producing cheap “silver” jewelry.
The low end stuff gets dumped on crystal shops and worse.
If you are a cutter specializing in really unusual shit or repairs or cutting matches to lost stones, you need a really diverse inventory of material so you can’t get into that wholesale game.
That’s where every bottom feeder tries to screw you.
@dassauerkraut@Soy_Magnus If I had to cut an emerald I’d buy material from a friend who lives in Southeast Asia and makes a business buying misfit stones to recut them.
It would cost a lot and that’s why I’d have to change the customer more, but it is the only way to guarantee quality of the material.
Large parcels are either bought by Indian cut houses or bought by a foreign dealer hiring the Indian cut hose to process it.
Either rejects get sold off in small parcels mixed with a few good stones to small scale cutters, or people steal rough from the factory.
That changes hands a few times till it ends up in a pile. That pile then sits in India or Pakistan (occasionally Thailand) while brokers online try to flip it to small independent cutters.
@Soy_Magnus I don’t buy them unless they are very green.
Emerald is one I rarely get to cut because I can’t afford good rough, and most of the ones needing repair also need oil treatment, which I don’t do.
Traditional oil treatment of emerald involves submerging them in cedar oil in a dish and putting g them under vacuum pressure to force the oil into the stone to fill voids。
Looks very pretty but breaks down over the years when exposed to detergents.
There was a big scandal last year where EVERYONE’S FAVORITE SUBCONTINENT was dumping “natural” rough on the market that wasn’t even oiled but fucking filled with colored resin.
In 1998 there were companies letting you print coupons for whatever the fuck you wanted to pay, stores took them, investors paid for them, and ?????? profit?
Oh no, wait, they lost everything and now their name is used for a travel booking site.