4 LAPIDARY JOURNAL JEWELRY ARTIST
My Turn
From the Editor“IN INDUSTRY FACEBOOK POSTS, jewel-
ers say they fear consumers will get confused
between manmade gems and real,” reports Betsy
Lehndorff in a short piece about her interest in
some manmade emerald rough. Seems to me if
they’d stop suggesting that real is the opposite
of manmade, we’d have much less confusion all
around.
If you see it, hold it, plop it in a setting... it’s
real, all right, it’s not a figment of anyone’s imagi-
nation or a hologram, now is it? It’s not a fake, either, unless someone
is trying to pass it off as something, anything, that it isn’t — which
would also apply for anything else on earth. It’s not a rip-off unless
someone is charging a predatorily exorbitant price for it — ditto.
More than that, a manmade emerald, for example, meets the criteria
of emerald the substance. These include its basic chemical composi-
tion, structure, and the physical and optical properties that result,
such as hardness, color, dispersion, durability... the things that make
a gem a gem. A manmade emerald is just that: an emerald that is
manmade. (Another term often used is synthetic, accurate here in its
stricter sense of manmade but not in the more commonly used and
pejorative sense of ersatz, concocted and of lesser quality.)
A manmade gem does differ from a natural one — in how it came to
be. Rather than an accident of Nature, a manmade gem is a deliber-
ate product of human beings, usually some very smart and patient
ones who’ve figured out how to synthesize it. Its laboratory origins
generally make a manmade gem less rare than a natural one, and
as rarity or scarcity pushes costs up, manmade gems should be less
expensive than their natural counterparts (if such exist). But the con-
trolled environment of a lab can also turn out gem rough that is more
pure, less flawed, or otherwise generally considered more valuable.
Buyers of any gem in any situation should be concerned about pay-
ing a fair price and getting what they pay for. But as with color, size,
clarity, and the like, so, too, with origin. Beauty is in the mind as well
as the eye of the beholder, and what appeals to one person may not
be so important to another, or even to the same person in another
instance. Manmade or natural is one choice among many, and choice
is a wonderful thing — as long as you understand what the choices
really are.P.S. More about those manmade emeralds in Betsy’s feature
“Roughing It in the Lab,” page 86. And definitely check out what she
did with the emerald she bought in her “Manmade / Handmade” Art
Deco–inspired necklace project, page 88.EDITORIAL
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Scott T. Hill, [email protected]Lapidary Journal Jewelry Artist (ISSN 1936-5942) is published
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