These are vials containing various natural stones as well as mixes of lab/natural stones and pearls from scrapped jewelry. Kornerupine: This was a rare Tucson find! Kornerupine is an obscure gem, most commonly found in a dark bottle green, but a deposit in Tanzania produces vanadium- and chromium-bearing crystals. Vanadium gives a rich brilliant green which is pretty nice, and chromium turns them into a bizarre trichroic blue/green/purple gem. These latter stones visibly shift as you turn them around giving vivid paraiva-like colors. These vials have a mix of both color types in beautiful transparent crystal fragments. Tunduru mix: this is old mixed gem gravel from the Tunduru deposit! Rivers wore down a gem-rich host rock, releasing the crystals and rolling them into smooth pebbles. This has a mix of sapphires, spinel, garnet, chrysoberyl, zircon and more--Tunduru is famed for having incredible diversity in its gems. Pearls: These are pearls and imitation pearls from scrapped jewelry. I separated these out from the other breakout gems because there were so many, but while I know a lot about colored stones I don't know anything about pearls. They do look cool though! Garnets: Rough red to pink rhodolite garnets. These are all small uncut stones, averaging just over 1ct but with a few larger ones. I bought them about fifteen years ago because I just couldn't resist the color. These are beautiful little gems, many are facetable but would cut very small stones. BGO-20 Shards: Used as an acousto-optical modulator, Bismuth Germanate (Bi12GeO20) is strongly piezoelectric, as well as the densest gem material you can get. At 9.22 g/cm3, BGO-20 is 80% as dense as a chunk of lead. We had some stray scraps that were too small to facet, so we put them in vials. Popout Gems: Also known as "breakout", these are gems which I bought from a retired jeweler who had a sideline doing cash for gold. When they melt down jewelry they remove the stones first, and breakout is all the stones that are left. Typically jewelers will pull out obvious diamonds and any stones that look valuable to them, but frankly it's time-consuming to sort them and requires equipment and knowledge a lot of jewelers don't have. I actually do have the right equipment but just don't have the time for it anymore. Note a few of these had been semi-sorted by the jeweler but from what I can tell he got a lot of it wrong and I've mostly mixed it all back together. They all have a mix of lab and natural stones and beads. From doing small spot checks I've seen natural rubies and emeralds, blue zircons, even an oddball andalusite. A small vial contains about 25ct of stones, a large one is about 65. The large jars have larger stones because of the size of the neck. Note I have soaked these in isopropyl alcohol and rinsed them but they may need more cleaning before use in crafts or jewelry.
