How to show us a stone.
Five minutes with a phone. Do these and you will get a straighter answer from us, and a better one from anybody else you show it to afterwards.
Two photographs on white paper — dry, then wet. One photograph held up against a bright overcast sky. One fifteen-second video, turning it slowly against that same sky. A coin in the frame. Daylight, never flash.
1. Wet it. This is the one that costs people money.
Rough is frosted on the outside, and that frosting scatters light before it ever reaches the stone. Dry, a fine blue sapphire looks like a grey pebble — and it will be priced like a grey pebble by anyone working from that photograph.
Water is enough. It fills the surface pits, light gets in, and the real colour appears. Send both the dry and the wet shot of the same stone in the same light. If you do nothing else on this page, do this.
2. Hold it up to the light — this shows the inside
A stone lying on paper only ever shows you its skin. Light bounces off the surface and comes back; almost nothing passes through. Hold the same stone up against a bright sky and the light travels through the body, and suddenly you can see what is actually in there: where the colour sits, which corners are clean, where the fractures run.
That is the difference between a photograph of a stone and a photograph of what the stone is worth. It is also how every dealer in Ratnapura has assessed rough for two hundred years, and there is nothing to buy to do it.
Point the stone at a bright overcast sky, or at clear sky well away from the sun — never at the sun's disc. Direct sun is so much brighter than everything else that a phone gives up and records a white blob with a black stone in front of it.
This one surprises people. A clear blue sky is a strongly blue light source, and it tints everything it shines through. It flatters a sapphire and it ruins a yellow, a padparadscha or a spinel — so the picture stops telling the truth in both directions. Bright white overcast is much closer to neutral and is the best free light there is.
3. The fifteen-second video
The single most useful thing you can send, and it takes fifteen seconds. Hold the stone up against that overcast sky and turn it slowly — right the way round, and then over.
Motion shows things no still photograph can hold:
- Where the colour sits. Colour in rough is almost never even — it sits in bands, corners and cores. Where it sits decides how a cutter orients the piece, and that decides what comes out of it. One angle hides all of it.
- What is inside. Feathers, silk, crystals and fractures appear and vanish as the stone turns. A still catches whichever ones happened to face the lens.
- Anything that only exists in movement. A cat's eye, a star, a colour change, the flash of fire in a zircon or a sphene — none of these exist in a still photograph at all. A cat's eye stone photographed flat is just a cloudy pebble.
Slowly is the whole trick. Most people turn far too fast. Count to fifteen while you do one rotation, and keep your hand as steady as you can.
Not one instead of the other. Video is compressed hard by every messaging app, and colour is the first thing that compression throws away — so a clip is the best possible record of shape, structure and behaviour, and a poor record of colour. The still photographs are what we read the colour from. Together they answer everything. Either one alone leaves half the question open.
4. Daylight, plain white, no flash
Outdoors in open shade is ideal — bright, but out of direct sun. Put the stones on plain white paper. A blue tarp makes everything on it look blue, a wooden table pushes everything warm, and it is the stone that gets blamed for it. Turn the flash off: it flattens the colour and blows out the surface.
If you can, keep a corner of plain white paper in the frame even for the backlit shots. It lets us correct the colour of your light, which means we are judging your stone instead of your afternoon.
5. Something for scale, every time
A coin, a ruler, a fingernail. Without it a 4mm stone and a 40mm stone are the same photograph, and we have to write back and ask — which costs you a day for no reason.
6. Stand back and crop
Phones cannot focus closer than about 10cm. Moving nearer than that makes the picture blurrier, not bigger. Stand back, take the shot, then crop it — that is sharper than anything you get by pushing the lens in.
7. The good ones on their own
One photograph of forty pieces tells us the parcel exists and almost nothing else. Anything you think is special deserves its own photographs and its own video. A single good stone in a mixed parcel is worth separating out — and that is worth more to you than it is to us.
Send whatever you like first
There is no minimum. No form, no list of required shots, nothing to read before you message us. Send one photograph if that is what you have — we look at everything, and we would rather see a bad picture of a good stone than never see it.
Everything above this line makes our answer better. None of it is a condition of getting one.
If we are interested, we send you a code
When we want to take a parcel further, we send you a short code — five characters, something like K7QM4. Write it on a piece of paper by hand, and take a few more photographs with that paper in the frame beside the stone.
Each stone gets its own code, and we ask for it back within about two days.
Photographs get passed between dealers constantly. The same picture reaches us from several different people in a month — usually with nobody meaning any harm — and we have no way of telling whose stones we are looking at. A code we made up after seeing your photographs is something only the person actually holding that stone can produce, and only within the time we ask. It is the cheapest honest answer to a problem that otherwise makes us cautious with everybody, including you.
If the weather is against you, or you are away from the stones, or the deadline simply passes — just say so and we will send a fresh code. It is not a test and there is nothing to fail. We would far rather send a new code than lose a parcel over a rainy afternoon.
What we can and cannot tell from a picture
What we can and cannot tell from a picture
Worth saying plainly, so nobody wastes effort. From photographs and video we can form a view on colour, clarity, shape, how a piece is likely to orient, and often what species it is. We cannot weigh it, measure it, tell you whether it has been heated, or tell you where it came from — no photograph can do any of those, and anyone who tells you otherwise from a picture is guessing.
So a range from photographs is a range. The firm number comes when the material is in hand, and it can go up as well as down.