Mistakes, omissions and outright lies
I read a lot of jewelry making forums, participate in a few and find myself often times on the wrong side of popular opinion. Admittedly, I lean toward black and white, I can see the shades of grey on most issues, but for the most part it’s right or it’s wrong.
I was reading a forum post today stating that since lab-grown stones have the same mineral composition of naturally occurring stones, the post’er felt is was perfectly fine to omit the ‘lab-grown’ part in the description that related to the stone. Several people replied agreeing with the OP that since the mineral composition was same in a lab-grown stone and natural stone his/her opinion on the subject was correct, I was the lone dissenting opinion.
At a jewelry trade show I found some really pretty tanzanite bead strands for a very reasonable price – I was waffling and the seller pounced – he told me the stones were genuine and color was natural – continuing on to tell me that the stones come out of the ground that color…{seriously, really}…I couldn’t decide if he actually believed that or thought I didn’t know enough and could tell me anything that popped into his head to sway me to buy.
I love Etsy, but that site is littered with misrepresented stones – naturally occurring hot pink chalcedony anyone? Natural purple turquoise? How about goldstone tagged as stone? And, what is candy jade!
Mistakes? Omissions? Lies? Hardly, most if not all of the violators are big sellers, I’m not talking about the person who bought too many strands of beads at a gem show and now is trying to resell them. These are resellers with thousands, probably hundreds of thousands dollar of merchandise to sell, surely they know what they are selling. While I believe we are all responsible and should know what we’re buying, since when is outright lying to customers ok?
khmetalwork 
Its not Karen. You know it, I know it. Chances are they know it too, but won’t admit it especially if they have a bunch of people backing them. I, unfortunately, don’t ‘know’ my stones or all the gem facts, need to study up, and it scares me that I might misrepresent something simply because I don’t know better and went by what a seller told me. Think I need to get on top of this and study!!! HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Janice
Diminish the requirements, lower the threshold, call anyone insisting upon quality an elitist, and you can accumulate a fairly large following, in a short amount of time. Next, rally that crowd, condemn critical thinking, and establish mediocrity as the norm–via overwhelming consensus– and you’ve got a castle with a moat!
It’s a dishonest means of acquiring power, but it’s been quite popular the last eight years ;P
Ditto to what Vika said.
Karen,
I don’t always see eye-to-eye with everyone, but I fully agree with Vika. I also am heartened that you are asking these questions-I ask them myself, quite often. I have yet to find a way to reconcile these answers with what passes for acceptable in most venues in a way that can be heard. If you figure it out, tell me, PLEASE!