All that glitters may stain your fingers green
There are times when you need to gaze upon something of real beauty. Times when this dirty, depressing world gets too much for even an eternal optimist such as the Smoking Monkey, and I need my faith restored that there are items of pure physical perfection that exist and replenish the soul.
So where should you go to experience such an item? Try Gems TV
Gems TV is one of several channels on Sky TV that claims to sell incredibly valuable jewellery, for low low prices. Now I make it very clear that while I am the world’s foremost expert in many things, jewellery and precious stones are not my specialisms. On the one occasion that TechnoScouse tasked me with selecting a pair of earings (which she had pointed out to me less than 7 days previously), I still managed to pick out the wrong bloody ones.
However, notwithstanding my lack of expertise, I still have eyes and can identify overpriced crap when I see it.
The key word to look for is “Gems”, not “Jewels”. Jewels are precious stones like diamonds, rubies, sapphires… the kind of things you expect to find in a pirate’s treasure chest. Gems are the bits of gaudy coloured blobs of crap you see in an 8 year old girl’s dressing up box.
For example, Have any of you dear readers heard of the following “gems”? And for a truly impartial test, it doesn’t count if you heard of these on a dedicated TV shopping channel. Understand the rules? Good:
Alexandrite, Amblygonite, Andalusite, Aragonite (I’m sure he was in Lord of the Rings), Flourite (isn’t this in toothpaste?), Howlite (got to be a made up name), Iolite, Kunzite, Malachite, Marcasite, Morganite, Sodalite (isn’t that what Americans call diet soft drinks?), Tanzanite, and Tsavorite.
Now by and large, I’m suspicious of anything that rhymes with the word “shite.” Coincidence, or something more significant?
If you want something that contains a gem you’ve actually heard of, why not shell out £58 for a pearl… mounted on a chunk of silver shaped like an Octopus. That’s right, you could have a 2 inch metal invertibrate hanging from your neck. And why wouldn’t you want that? It only looks marginally worse than the Beastie Boys with VW car badges in the ’80s.
How about a Fire Opal and diamond ring? Sounds promising until you see that the diamonds make up less than 0.05% of the gem weight (0.066 Carats diamond compared to a 12.28 Carat Opal). So what does a huge Fire Opal look like? Best description I’d make is a golf ball sized gobbet of frozen urine stuck to your finger. Sophisticated, no?
The next cause for concern comes from the pricing structure. When these items are offered, they start out with astronomical valuations, usually in excess of £1000. However, these prices (for materials never heard of outside a Tolkein story), seem to plummet like a stone to around £100-£150.
I’ve just seen a bracelet containing 66 sapphires (real jewel, but only 2mm in diameter each) set in 9 karat white gold (so not exactly pure gold there then?) go from £1976 to £200.
Now call me old fashioned, but if something can reduce in price by 90% in the space of 2 seconds, I suspect it could have been a tad overpriced. Now I am not accusing Gems TV of such a ploy, so don’t misinterpret me. But if, hypothetically, a company were to boost its prices by 10 times the real RRP, then how can you trust the “discount” price to reflect the value of the item?
Put it this way. I have a box, and you don’t know what’s in it. I say it contains something worth 50 quid, but I will sell it you for £5. You still don’t know what’s in the box, though you can smell something that reminds you of squirrel crap. You see that I’m dressed in very expensive clothes, and you know that my only source of income is my sales work. How sure are you that the thing in the box is worth anything at all?
Well fortunately the good people at Gems TV know what a scaptical bastard you are. I would therefore direct you to their Appraisals page. This raises some very interesting notions that I would like to expand upon:
“An appraisal valuation is what someone is prepared to pay for something. For example, what is the value of the Mona Lisa? Is the value the same as the cost of the canvas and the paint or is it determined by the amount that someone will pay for it? We believe that jewellery appraisals should reflect the average cost you would have to pay to replace the item if lost or stolen.”
So yes, a good question is “what does value actually mean”, and their example of the Mona Lisa shows that while something is physically worth diddly squat, it can be priceless. Alternatively it can mean that if you’re stupid enough to pay a certain price, you have defined it as being worth that amount. The really nice touch is saying that appraisal value should reflect the replacement cost. Of course, the minerals referred to above are only available on these TV channels, and so again the “value” is defined by the seller who could be making a massive profit (after the overheads of running 3 TV channels, which are surely not that much!!!)
And as for the next bit, it’s probably easier to add my comments to the actual text:
On these pages are just some of the thousands of comments (I can’t find any) we have received from delighted customers whose appraisals have exceeded their expectations (What if they have ridiculously low expectations?). Unfortunately, we have also heard that some customers have had a negative experience when obtaining appraisals from local jewellers (again, these aren’t posted on the site). As GemsTV is an integrated manufacturer and television home shopping retailer of coloured gemstone jewellery, we cut out numerous middlemen. This keeps our prices extremely competitive (Competetive with who? you’re the only ones selling this toss). Whilst most jewellers thank us for increasing the awareness of coloured gems (possibly because the profit margins on colourful horse-shit are massive), a few may feel threatened and try to discredit our jewellery (or perhaps they are the honest ones, and think that your shiny baubles are worth bugger all).
Like I say, I’m no expert on jewels, gems, or valuations thereof. I just have a few doubts about anything sold only on tv, that gets sold at a mere fraction of it’s starting price, and that has a website spinning what can only be described as bullshit!
