SALE OF CUT GEMS
Cut gems may be obtained from domestic professional lapidaries or imported from abroad already cut. The choice depends on cost and the cutting quality desired. If small gems are required as “side” stones or for pave work, it probably pays to import them already cut because labor charges abroad -are enough less to compensate for the higher duty which has to be paid on cut gems as compared to rough. This scheme is followed for such gems as small diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and zircons. Excellent cutting work is done in Idar-Oberstein, Germany, in Thailand, Hong Kong, and a few other places, but unsatisfactory work is common in India and Ceylon, and it is from the latter places that faceted gems receive the dealer label “native cut,” which is to say, “poorly” cut.

After gems are received, the dealer examines all of them carefully, checks weights and qualities, and then places them in specially folded paper packets called “diamond papers.” Important gems are packaged individually with carat weight, dimensions in millimeters, quality, and price per carat or per piece marked on the flap of the packet. Mediocre quality gems are often lumped together in large numbers in the same packet.

The largest quantity of cut gems in the United States is sold by special¬ists in this aspect of the trade to other members of the trade. They are prepared to send out “approval” selections or single gems, depending upon the requirements of jewelers, or other cut-gem dealers who happen to have a call for a certain gem not in their own stocks. The prices are wholesale or “keystone,” the latter term, when affixed to a price, meaning that it is 50 per cent off to the retailer. The latter may then mark up the gems to assure himself a profit and dispose of them to individual buyers not in the trade, or send them to a manufacturing jeweler to be made up into jewelry.