The Akra Gemstone Journal

Most gemstones can get wet. Here is what each stone I set can take, how I clean raw and polished stones, and when to take a piece off.

How I help people choose jewelry as a gift in my Tbilisi shop: three questions to ask, why the ring size is never a guess, and what to do when you don't know her taste.

The word "sterling" fixes how much silver a piece holds and says nothing about the rest. What allergy doctors say about nickel, why earrings need more care than rings, and what goes into the silver I work with.

The cloud that makes rose quartz milky is the same thing that gives it its pink, so the two cannot be separated. Three checks that work at home, two that can damage the stone, and why rose quartz is not pink quartz.

Uneven color is the first sign of real amethyst, and the tips are usually the darkest part. Four checks you can make at home, and why a crystal shows its color more openly than a cut stone.

Obsidian is volcanic glass, most black onyx is dyed quartz, and black tourmaline is a crystal. Three checks you can make by eye, and why only one of the three shows color.

Real jade is never one flat green. Seven checks for a stone that is already set in silver, from a studio that cuts and sets nephrite by hand.

Six tests you can do at home to tell real obsidian from glass, resin and dyed stone, and three popular tests that prove nothing at all.

Some moonstone glows and some does not, and both are moonstone. Here is what the glow actually is, what a raw unpolished stone gives you instead, and how to tell a real one from glass.

A stone that looks like gold, with flat square faces that gold never grows. Five checks that tell the two apart by eye, and why those faces stay as they grew.

What aquamarine means, where its blue really comes from, and the one thing about that color most sellers will not tell you.

The word toxic follows malachite everywhere. Here is what the sources actually say, where the real risk sits, how to tell a fake from a real stone, and why we stop before the polish.