Diamonds are costly because they are numerous and ugly; blue agate jewelry are inexpensive because they are unusual and wonderful. Apart from creating my hopeless technology (economics) co-workers flinch, there is a feed of reality in this unlikely paradox, which has to do with the record of value and the finishes to which “precious gems” have been put. The value of rocks has modified eventually, and there is little that is natural in the characteristics of diamonds to exalt it over supposedly lowly blue agate jewelry and other “semiprecious” rocks. “Little,” as we shall see, but not “nothing.”

That statement results in my first thesis: that there is a fringe movement of types that items up the value of gemstones and other “precious stones”—a combined accept, one could say, between produce ... Read more »