How to set stones faster?

You must reach "gem-level hardness" to be called a gem.

Gems and jade are mineral raw materials for making various decorations and works of art, and occupy a special position in minerals. The use of gems and jade began in the ancient times when material civilization was formed: as early as the Paleolithic, primitive people decorated themselves or their idols with colored stones. Colored stone products are the records of ancient civilization. Gems, together with gold, have the function of money. Sometimes they are small and valuable. Gems and jade articles still have great economic and cultural significance.

Gem and jade are special minerals. Gem and jade industry use them to make various decorations, souvenirs and handicrafts. Precious (jade) stones include a large number of minerals and mineral aggregates, which all have gorgeous colors, beautiful patterns, crystal clear, dazzling, dichroic and other optical effects, and have high ornamental value. High-quality gems should be solid, that is, quite hard (Mohs hardness rating is above 6) and resistant to ordinary acid and alkali corrosion.

So far, there is no universal name for gem minerals. Some people call the transparent original stone a gem with its own color, while the opaque original stone is called a colored stone. Because most precious stones are natural, these two names are obviously synonyms. Some use "precious original stone". Using the name colored stone is the simplest and most common, although it may not be suitable for some transparent and colorless stones.

Colored stone is a mineral with many characteristics. First, colored stones contain a wide variety of minerals, and their composition and origin are quite inconsistent. At present, there are about 200 kinds of minerals and rocks used in gem and jade industry. With the discovery of stones with high ornamental value (such as hedenbergite, xonotlite-hedenbergite skarn, etc.). ), the number will continue to increase. The value of colored stones depends largely on whether they are widely distributed. No matter how beautiful the colored stones are, if they are widely distributed, they will also depreciate. For example, this happened in Rainbow Labrador. Long ago, it was regarded as a gem, but after some large mineral deposits were discovered in Canada and Ukraine, it became a very common stone. This happened to agate. The reputation of colored stones is also of great significance: some new or unfamiliar colored stones (plagioclase, chrome diopside, kyanite), even if rare, will not be valuable. Recognized gems include diamonds, emeralds, opals, rubies and sapphires, which are called the "five great gems". Except for precious stones, all the others are ordinary stones. Among more than 2,000 natural minerals that have been identified, less than 100 can be used as gems, of which only 16 is important.

Commercial names are widely used instead of mineral names in colored stone transactions. Generally, it is named after colored gems with similar, familiar and high value, such as tanzanite (Tanzanian blue zoisite), Bohemian ruby and Cape ruby (magnesium aluminum garnet produced in Czechoslovakia and South Africa respectively), Pakistani emerald (Pakistani green calcium aluminum garnet) and so on. Some colored stones also have certain ethnic and religious traditions. For example, in the Near East and Central Asia, people like turquoise and lapis lazuli, in China and Southeast Asia, people like nephrite and jadeite (jadeite), in India, people like ruby and agate, and Orthodox Christians like amethyst.

Due to the complexity and particularity of gemstone production and the uneven distribution of colored stone raw material bases, mining centers and processing centers are often separated in history. Colored gems's mining centers are Zaire, South Africa, Botswana, Madagascar, Brazil, Colombia, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Australia. The machining centers are Holland, Israel (mainly grinding diamonds), America, West Germany and Italy.