Antiques Fair...

[GliderPoss]

Hello all,

Just thought I''d share an interesting thing that I saw on the weekend. Went to a local antiques fair and was happily drooling over all the antique jewellery until I noticed rather a lot of things stating "18K gold blah blah blah with real RUBY" but when I looked at them they were clearly garnet (very obvious brown/orange undertones, very clear and large) and they were selling it for a rather high price to rip people off!

I felt really angry that they would do this, because if they truely were genuine ruby I''m sure the price would have been thousands of dollar higher! So poor little old ladies there were forking out hundreds of dollars for something that wasn''t even real ruby! Grrrr....

 

[chrono]

Is it possible the vendor is inexperienced with gemstones? Well, they really should appraise/check it first anyway.

 

[Lisa Loves Shiny]

There is a sucker born every minute.

 

[ma re]

If they were large (whatever you mean by that in terms of diameter) my first bet would be synthetic ruby and not a garnet - dark red/brown garnets (pyropes) are rarely larger than 2-3 cts.

P. S. The first rule of gem buying is; if it''s too good to be true, then it''s not true