The stone is real. The invoice is the problem.
GemsVerified was built because the coloured stone trade has no register, and the places most people now buy from check nothing at all before taking the money.
Glass is being sold as emerald, and the price says so
You do not need a laboratory to catch most of it. You need arithmetic. A listing offering a 120-carat natural Colombian emerald for eighteen dollars is not a bargain and not a borderline call: a genuine Colombian stone at that size, if one surfaced, would be a seven-figure lot and there would be articles about it. At eighteen dollars the thing in the photograph is glass, and green glass has been cut into convincing ovals since the nineteenth century. The same arithmetic runs the length of the market. Ten carats of natural Colombian emerald for thirty-four pounds. A flawless twenty-carat ruby for the price of a takeaway. Lead glass poured into the fractures of a poor corundum until it looks like a gem, sold as ruby because in a loose sense it started as one. Marketplaces list all of it beside real stones with the word natural in the title, because the word natural in a title is typed by the seller and read by nobody. No test is run. No question is asked. The buyer finds out at a laboratory, months later, usually while trying to insure the thing.
The laboratory report is not the safeguard people think it is
A report is only worth the institution behind it. GIA, SSEF, Gubelin, AGL and GRS are held to their names and will tell you what a stone is whether or not that suits whoever sent it in. Alongside them now sit outfits that will issue a handsome certificate, in a wallet, with a hologram, to anyone who pays. They grade generously, describe treatment vaguely or skip it, and borrow enough of the layout to read like the real thing to somebody seeing their first one. The tell is simple, and most buyers never think to try it: take the reference number off the document and type it into the issuing laboratory's own website. A report you cannot pull up at source is a printout.
What a register can actually do about it
Not police the trade. Record it. Every house here has a page naming what it publishes about itself, the source that came from and the date it was read, so you can check the claim rather than trust us about it. Standing sits in its own column. Today every entry carries the sourced mark, which means catalogued and nothing checked — and saying so is the point.
A listing, redrawn
A reconstruction. No real listing, photograph or seller is shown here — the figures are what matters and they are typical of the category.
Photograph omitted
- Seller withheld
- 96.3% positive
- Last one · 393 sold
What the figures say
- 01The weight against the priceA hundred and twenty carats is roughly the size of a plum. A Colombian emerald of that weight, if a real one came to market, would be a seven-figure lot with provenance and a queue of buyers. This one is eighteen dollars and three cents.
- 02The word naturalTyped into the title box by whoever wrote the listing. No marketplace tests a stone before it goes live, and none of them require the word to be earned.
- 03Three hundred and ninety-three soldThat figure is the part worth sitting with. It is not a warning about one listing. It is a count of people who already believe they own a Colombian emerald.
We stand behind what we publish about a dealer, and we show you plainly what has been checked and what has not. We do not vouch for a house we have only catalogued, and we never certify an individual stone. Nobody can pay to change either of those.