BE. Stone Buying Checklist

1.1Ask for the mineral or material name.

Trade names are marketing. Nobody regulates them. Cherry quartz is ordinarily glass. Gold sheen obsidian is real material named after an optical effect. Neither one tells you what you are holding. A seller who can name the mineral (quartz, obsidian, beryl, corundum, feldspar) knows what they bought.

1.2Sight into the drill hole for dye.

The drill hole is the one place a bead has been cut open, so it is where applied colour shows first. Sight into the opening under a torch. On a dyed bead you see a darker collar right at the mouth of the hole where pigment soaked into the freshly abraded surface, then a paler, sometimes almost colourless core deeper in. Natural body colour does the opposite: it is even from the surface inward, and the hole wall looks the same shade as the outside of the bead.

The same logic reads across the whole bead. Dye needs a path, so it collects in fractures and along the boundaries between grains, and pools where those paths meet. Colour that is strong in the cracks and weak across solid ground was added.

Crackle quartz is this made deliberate. Clear quartz is heated and then quenched in cold liquid; the sudden contraction opens a network of internal fractures throughout the bead, and dye is drawn into that network. It is the fractures that hold the colour, which is why, held to a light, a crackle bead reads as a coloured web suspended in clear material.

1.3Screen for glass and plastic.

Four signals, none of which need magnification:

• Bubbles. Round, three-dimensional voids suspended in the body. Natural inclusions are rarely perfect spheres.
• Swirl lines. Flow marks, like slowly stirred liquid.
• Repetition. The same pattern appearing bead to bead. Natural material does not repeat.
• Temperature. Held against the inside of the wrist, crystalline quartz stays cool distinctly longer than glass. The reason is structural: quartz atoms sit in an ordered lattice that carries heat away from skin at roughly 6–10 W/m·K, where glass is amorphous and manages about 1. That is a six- to tenfold difference, and it is the one bare-hand test that reliably separates the two.
• Sound, for plastic only. Tapped together, both quartz and glass ring. Plastic gives a dull knock.

Weight is not on this list for a reason. Quartz is 2.65 g/cm³ and ordinary glass 2.4–2.5, so a 7.5-inch strand of 10 mm beads comes to about 26 g in quartz against 24 g in glass. Two grams across a whole bracelet is not something a hand can feel, and leaded glass is denser than quartz, so heft can point the wrong way entirely.

1.4Screen for reconstituted material.

Pressed and bonded stone is common in turquoise, amber, malachite and lapis. It reads as very even colour over a fine granular texture, sometimes with a visible binder seam. There is nothing wrong with it, as long as the seller says so.

1.5Look for the treatment stated in writing, and ask if it is not.

Several treatments are routine in the trade, stable, and entirely legitimate once declared:

• Heat. Most citrine on the market is heated amethyst. Heat also deepens some agate and carnelian.
• Irradiation. Some smoky quartz reaches its colour this way, whether in the ground or in a facility.
• Dyeing. Standard for agate, howlite and some quartz, and the reason for most bright, uniform colours.
• Impregnation and stabilisation. Wax, resin or polymer used to harden porous material. Ordinary in turquoise.

None of these is a fault, and a treated stone is not a lesser stone. Disclosure is the whole of the check, and it has two halves.

• Stated in the open. Is it written on the product page or the ticket, where you can read it without asking?
• Answered when asked. Put the question directly and see whether it can be answered: what was done to this piece, or that nothing was. Someone who selected the material knows which.

2.1Read the host and the inclusions separately.

An included stone is two things at once, and both carry quality. There is the host crystal, which is the container, and there is the inclusion, which is what it contains. Rutilated quartz, tourmalinated quartz, phantom quartz and hematoid all have to be read on both.

The host. How clear is the quartz between the inclusions? Is it bright, or is it cloudy, chipped, fogged with fractures? A strand with few needles is showing you more host, so the host has to hold up to being seen.

The inclusion. Are the needles or plates intact, cleanly coloured, and fully enclosed by the host? Broken, dulled, or surface-breaking needles are what lowers a stone. Their number is not. How many a stone contains is a matter of taste: a sparse strand is judged more on the clarity of its quartz, a dense one more on the colour and continuity of its needles.

2.2Look for chips and pits on the bead itself.

Turn each bead against a light and then against a dark surface. Two kinds of damage show up, and they mean different things:

• Chips. Small conchoidal flakes, usually at the mouth of the drill hole or on the shoulder of the bead. Against a dark background they catch the light as bright angular flashes.
• Pits. Shallow craters in the surface. A pit with a smooth floor is a polishing fault. A pit with a rough, granular floor is a void where an inclusion sat until it was torn out during cutting.

Neither is cosmetic only. Both collect skin oil and dust, and both darken visibly over a few years of wear.

2.3Judge the cloud and clarity.

Fine white wispy inclusions (cotton, or veils) are natural in quartz and are not a defect in themselves. What matters is how much there is and how it sits.

A light, even scatter reads as depth and is part of what makes natural material look natural. Dense cotton reads as a dead, milky bead with no light moving inside it. The practical test is to hold the strand up to a single light: if a bead lets nothing through at all, the cotton has taken it over. Cotton concentrated in one half of a bead, leaving the other half clear, is worth noticing too, because it will always sit either against the wrist or facing out.

2.4Separate colour from brightness.

Saturation and brightness are not the same quality, and the difference is most of what separates a good strand from a dull one. A good stone reads as clear colour with light moving through it. A poor one reads as the same hue gone grey and flat, as though seen through dust.

Then compare beads along the strand. Natural stone can show zoning and shifts of tone. One bead noticeably duller or greyer than its neighbours is different: that strand was made up from weaker material to reach a length.

2.5Find the fractures that reach the surface.

Rotate each bead slowly under one light source. Internal feathers and veils are normal and are not a fault. What matters is whether a flat, reflective plane runs out to the surface of the bead: that is the plane along which it eventually splits. It takes about forty seconds for a whole strand. Nothing else here predicts breakage as well.

2.6Match hardness to the way it will be worn.

A crystal bracelet lives on the most exposed part of the body, against desks, doorframes and keyboards. Hardness matters more here than in any other form of jewellery.

• Mohs 7 and above: quartz and its varieties (amethyst, citrine, rose quartz, clear quartz, smoky quartz), plus garnet, spinel and corundum. Tolerates daily wear.
• Mohs 5 to 6.5: obsidian, moonstone, opal, apatite, lapis. Fine on a wrist that comes off before manual work.
• Below Mohs 5: malachite, fluorite, calcite, amber, pearl. Occasional wear, and kept away from grit.

2.7Read the stone in two lights before deciding.

Daylight and indoor light are two different tests. Deeply saturated stones like garnet, dark amethyst and smoky quartz read close to black under weak indoor light, then open into colour outside. You will see it both ways, most days.

3.1Diameter consistency.

Lay the strand flat and sight down its length. The beads should read as one size. Natural stone is usually cut to about 0.2 mm either way, which the eye does not catch. A step the eye does register was not cut to a tolerance.

3.2Drill-hole centring.

Sight into the hole end-on. It should pass through the centre of the sphere. Off-centre holes make the strand sit crooked, and put all the wear on one shoulder of every bead.

3.3Drill-hole edges.

Look for a ring of small chips at the mouth of the hole. That happens when a worn bit is pushed too fast, usually without enough water to cool it. The chips spread out from that edge over the years. It also tells you how fast the workshop was working.

3.4Polish.

Lustre should be uniform across the whole surface. Dull patches, fine parallel grinding marks, or an orange-peel texture all mean the polishing stage was cut short. Run a fingertip along the strand: it should feel continuous, with no gritty or matte spots.

3.5Sphericity.

Hold the strand up against a plain background and look at the silhouette. Out-of-round beads show up at once in profile. And once you have seen them, you keep seeing them.

4.1On magnetic clasps.

A magnetic clasp is judged on three things, and only the first is about the magnet.

• Holding force. Ask for a holding weight in grams. The BE. Crystal Jewellery clasp holds 835 g: more than two full 330 ml drink cans hanging from it.
• Mechanics. Cycle life depends on the metal components. A clasp whose two halves meet flat relies on magnetism alone and drifts out of alignment as it wears. One where the halves seat into each other on an interlocking shoulder (the same principle as a mortise-and-tenon joint) carries the load on the metal and uses the magnet only to close it. That is what keeps it true after thousands of openings.
• Finish. The colour you buy should be the colour you keep. BE. clasps are finished so they do not tarnish or oxidise with skin contact.

A clasp can be designed to release under a hard, direct tug: better the strand comes away from a snag than scatters across the floor. What it should not do is open under its own weight, or drift out of line when closed.

There is a second reason to care about the closure. A magnetic clasp makes a strand modular. Two or three bracelets (obsidian, clear quartz, prehnite) click end to end into a single necklace, and come apart again the same evening. One strand becomes a double wrap or a choker depending on how many are joined. A single feature bead can be carried on its own. All of that depends on a closure built to be opened and closed constantly, which is why the three questions above are worth asking before the aesthetic ones.

4.2Take the length from the size guide.

Wrist size is not bracelet size. A bracelet is a ring sitting outside the wrist, so bead diameter changes the length needed to reach the same fit. This is not worth working out by hand when a tool already exists, and getting it wrong causes more returns than every quality question in the three sections above.

The BE. Crystal Jewellery size guide does it in about a minute and shows the proportion on a wrist before you order.

The BE. Crystal Jewellery size guide →

5.1What is the mineral? What treatment? On what basis is it graded?

How they answer matters more than what they answer. The third question is the one that separates sellers: grading terms are only meaningful if the person using them can say what their own criteria are, level by level, and where those criteria are published. A seller who explains their standard, and says plainly that it is their own, has told you considerably more than one who quotes a letter.

5.2Read the return terms before buying.

Two things to establish: how many days the window runs, and what happens if the piece arrives not as described. Within that, the details that decide whether the policy is real are who pays return carriage, and whether the window opens at dispatch or at delivery.

6.1Letter grades have no standard behind them.

There is no body that defines AAA, AAAA or 5A, and no test a stone has to pass to earn one. Each seller sets their own, which is why the same strand can be AAA in one shop and A in the next. A letter on its own carries no information.

Ask for the seller’s published grading criteria, what each level means and how it is applied.

BE. Crystal Jewellery grades on four criteria (Transparency, Tone, Texture and Treasure) and the reasoning is set out in full.

AAA, AA, A crystal grading explained, and why BE. uses Crystal 4T™ →

6.2What rarity means here.

Rarity is real, and it is not one thing. It works on several levels at once, and a claim is only worth something if it says which one it means.

• The material itself. Some stones are genuinely scarce. Green phantom quartz needs a pause in crystal growth long enough for chlorite to settle on a face and then be sealed over by later growth. The conditions are uncommon and the material is limited.
• Rarity inside a grade. Rose quartz is everywhere. Rose quartz that is even in colour, free of surface-reaching fractures, lightly and evenly clouded, and matched across a whole strand is not. The species is common; that description of it is not.
• Rarity that compounds. High-grade material has to hold up on several axes at once: clarity, colour, inclusion character, freedom from damage. Each axis removes candidates, and what survives all of them is a small fraction of what was mined.
• Rarity in the work. Then the cutting: beads within tolerance of one another, cut round, drilled through the centre with clean hole edges, polished evenly, and matched into a strand. The workshop applies this second filter.