Fakes are the rust eating away high jewelry style, www.superstyle.ru writes. The reasoning behind jewelry fakes stems from two things – high jewelry prices and impossibility to identify declared grades of precious alloys and declared characteristics of precious gems by sight and touch.
How to avoid a jewelry fake? Certainly, you should follow standard requirements and study the accompanying certificates, check the hallmark and the manufacturer’s stamp (these identifications are obligatory by law for all jewelry pieces made in the Russian Federation). But the main means to identify imitations is one’s own awareness.
First of all, one should differentiate between a fake and a counterfeit. A fake is a piece, in which precious metal or gems are secretly replaced by cheap substitutes - for instance, glass is used instead of polished diamonds. A counterfeit is illegal copying of a famous design made by a popular firm. In this case, a piece might be made of proper jewelry alloy and proper quality gems might be used. The purpose of such business is to deceive buyers not by way of materials used but by way of exploiting somebody else’s good reputation.
Second, one should know that some part of jewelry on the Russian market is manufactured illegally. These are made in ‘underground’ factories or illegal workshops. In this case, as a rule, jewelry pieces are made of full-weight gold and standard gems are used. The only thing which is forged is the hallmarks of the State Assay Chamber. The purpose of such business is to evade taxes and attention of law-enforcement agencies (if gold used is off the books and polished diamonds are stolen).
Third, please mind that high technologies have come into jewelry business on a mass scale. These facilitate the processing of low grade stones making them ostensibly precious. Many techniques are even called ‘stone enhancement’. For example, HTHP technique is used for ‘healing’ cracks in emeralds, rubies and sapphires. Thermobaric processing is used to turn cheap brown diamonds into colorless gems. Ion-plasma methods (primarily developed for electronic industry) are used to blacken diamonds to make them look fashionable. Laser units are used to drill out dark inclusions in diamonds bringing them to perfection if seen by eye. Broken gems are glued together using special compounds.
According to the international ethical norms, jewelers are obliged to inform their buyers about the changes done. However, it is not always the case: sellers are reluctant to disclose their secrets of preliminary processing applied to precious gems.
Forth, in jewelry business sellers often resort to such a form of cheating as overrated characteristics of gems. These characteristics being important elements of a jewelry piece include not just the weight of a stone but also some other quality parameters like colour and clarity in addition to carats. Moreover, the price of diamonds having the highest colour and highest clarity grades (designated as 1/1 in Russia) differs many times from that of ‘grey mice,’ diamonds featuring unattractive yellow hue and dull inclusions graded as 5/6, 6/7. For example, a 1 carat round diamond of a 1/1 grade is actually priced in retail at RUB 2 million, and the one rated as 5/4 at RUB 1 million. The difference of RUB 1 million is an unceasing and often irresistible motive for cheating. By the way, it is the initially overrated characteristics of diamonds that explain the unrealistic discounts going up to 60% in some jewelry stores.
All fakes are subdivided into two types: imitation of jewelry alloys and imitation of precious stones.
Usually, alloys of cheap metals – copper, zinc, tin – are used to imitate gold, silver and platinum. As for precious gemstones, synthetic analogues, colour plastics and tinted glass are used for imitations. For example, the USSR used to produce tens of tons of synthetic rubies. The diamond occupies a special place: apart from such famous imitations as rhinestones (lead glass) and fianites (zirconium dioxide), in recent time there appeared moissanite (silicon carbide), which cannot be identified even with a diamond tester.
Experts recommend the following ‘road map’ to a buyer who is not sure about the quality of a jewelry piece: he or she has to submit the jewelry piece bought to the Assay Chamber (the only state agency in Russia performing expert appraisal of metals and gemstones) for appraisal; write a complaint to Rospotrebnadzor (Federal Service for Supervision of Consumer Rights Protection and Human Welfare), and then go court.
Finally, it is worth remembering that imitations are a double-edged weapon. There are ‘folk avengers’, who make business on imitations: with the help of experts they search for high priced imitations in the stores and purchase them via figureheads. After the required expert appraisals are completed, the ‘avengers’ blackmail the sellers threatening them with taking the matter to the court and making it public, and then they receive substantial compensations within the framework of amicable agreements.
