7 Ways To Tell If An Emerald Is Real (Jewelers Hope You Never Learn #1)

Two women sat down at the same counter on the same afternoon and took off their emerald rings. The first stone was everything you want a gem to be: bright, clean, a deep even green with nothing inside it. It had cost $300. The second looked worse — a little sleepy, and under the loupe a whole landscape of fine fractures and tiny crystals, like moss under ice. It had cost $6,000. The first woman pointed at her flawless stone and said what almost everyone would say: "Well, mine is obviously the real one." Hers had grown in a steel vessel in a factory, in a matter of weeks. The cloudy one had grown inside a mountain in Colombia over millions of years. Every instinct you have about gemstones — clean is good, flaws are bad — is exactly backwards for this one stone. 💎 ONE PIECE OF EVIDENCE FIRST: the Gemological Institute of America puts it plainly — emeralds "typically contain inclusions that are visible to the unaided eye," and "eye-clean emeralds are especially valuable because they're so rare." The one exception that proves the rule: in 2017 an 18-carat emerald from the Rockefeller family, "exceptionally free of the fissures found in most emeralds," sold at Christie's for $5.5 million — $305,000 a carat, the highest price per carat ever paid for an emerald. Clean and natural is a once-in-a-generation event. Clean and $300 is a furnace. Seven tests, in the order you should use them — from the one you can do from across the room to the one that turns everything you believe inside out. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- This video is based on over 20 years of firsthand experience in the jewelry industry combined with extensive research into publicly available financial reports, SEC filings, brand earnings calls, material spot prices, and secondary market resale data from platforms including Chrono24, The RealReal, and major auction houses. Every production cost estimate and markup figure cited in this video is based on indus