Ask A Genius 1410: Fake Gems, Diamond Myths, and the Surreal World of eBay Jewelry
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/06/03
Rick Rosner is an accomplished television writer with credits on shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Crank Yankers, and The Man Show. Over his career, he has earned multiple Writers Guild Award nominations—winning one—and an Emmy nomination. Rosner holds a broad academic background, graduating with the equivalent of eight majors. Based in Los Angeles, he continues to write and develop ideas while spending time with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.
Rick Rosner shares his fascination with gemstones, exposing eBay’s flood of fake “natural” gems and explaining how heat and radiation can alter stones like tanzanite. He debunks the diamond industry, praises piezoelectric crystals, and throws in jokes and memories about his creative past designing jewelry and hunting for sparkle and scams.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: One more thing—any other topics?
Rick Rosner: A light day or two would help. I’m still working on the main material, but this was a useful part of the process. I haven’t posted on our blog in a while, but I’ve got a quick, light topic—kind of stupid, honestly. Just something I’ve been thinking about for a few minutes. Rod’ll be in shortly.
I like pretty things. I used to make jewelry for my wife. I genuinely enjoy creating jewelry that looks good. There’s a lot of jewelry out there that looks like garbage. You’ve probably never gone out of your way to search for jewelry design—maybe you’ve stumbled on it occasionally—but I doubt you’ve browsed through issues of Town & Country or Harper’s Bazaar, where you’ll find page after page of haute couture jewelry.
Anyway, I’ve looked at a lot of jewelry—seriously, a lot. I also really like gemstones because they’re fascinating. They’re cool, intricate, and aesthetically amazing.
Lately, though, what I find most interesting is the nonsense people try to sell as gemstones on eBay. And there’s no “eBay police” for this kind of fraud. Sure, eBay will crack down on certain listings. Up until maybe 10 or 12 years ago, you could even sell human body parts on eBay. They hadn’t yet figured out how repulsive—or possibly illegal—that is.
There was a guy at Kimmel named Gary who used to buy weird stuff. At one point, he considered buying a taxidermied clown. That’s right—a man who was a clown in life, died, and was then preserved in clown form. You can’t buy that sort of thing on eBay anymore; they’ve tightened the rules.
But fake gemstones? That marketplace is still the Wild West. Buyer beware.
Case in point: there’s a gemstone called tanzanite, which comes almost exclusively from a few mines in Tanzania. It’s a beautiful pleochroic gem—meaning it displays different colors (typically blue to violet) depending on the angle of light. High-quality tanzanite can go for anywhere from $80 to several hundred dollars per carat.
Now here’s the ridiculous part: I bought a supposed 77-carat tanzanite stone, 38 millimeters wide—about an inch and a half across—bigger than a ping pong ball. I paid $5.50 for it. Five dollars and fifty cents.
Obviously, it’s fake.
To my knowledge, synthetic tanzanite doesn’t even exist yet. If it isn’t tanzanite, it’s likely some cheap material like colored glass or zircon. And yet, hundreds of listings for “natural tanzanite” are live on eBay at any given time. If you’re not paying attention, you could end up buying a so-called “natural ruby” that’s 50 carats, the size of a walnut, for $20—when in reality, if it were genuine, it would cost a million dollars.
Same deal with my “tanzanite.” I paid roughly 3.5 cents per carat, when a real stone of that size would cost between $1,000 and $1,500 per carat.
It’s fascinating to me that this can continue unchecked.
So, what’s the weirdest type of gem or stone—something with bizarre properties?
One that comes to mind is piezoelectric materials. I own one. Certain crystals, like quartz, will actually produce an electric charge when compressed. That’s weird, right?
There’s a lot of strange stuff out there. What else? Let me think…
Ah, diamonds. Everyone says “diamonds are forever,” but that’s not entirely true.
Diamonds are made of carbon atoms arranged in an extremely tight crystal lattice. Under that kind of internal pressure, individual carbon atoms can eventually be ejected. Over unimaginable time scales—say, 20 billion years—a diamond would slowly disintegrate. So no, not truly forever.
In that sense, is everything in the universe evaporating at different rates? Yes. However, a ruby would last millions of times longer than a diamond.
Another thing—diamonds are kind of overrated. They’re everywhere. The only reason they’re considered valuable is because De Beers, the diamond cartel, artificially kept prices inflated for over 120 years. They’re the ones who popularized the idea that everyone needs a diamond engagement ring.
That market is now being heavily disrupted because technology has advanced to the point where we can manufacture diamonds of any size and quality in the lab. It’s absolutely wrecking the diamond industry.
For example, a flawless one-carat diamond with a D color rating—the best possible grade, meaning completely colorless—might cost $8,000 to $10,000 if it’s a natural diamond. But you can now buy a lab-grown diamond, chemically and structurally identical, from India for around $20.
Now, of course, there’s a catch. With all the fraud and nonsense on eBay, your $20 “diamond” might end up being cubic zirconia or some other fake. Buyer beware.
Jacobsen: Funniest joke you’ve ever heard?
Rosner: I don’t know. The first joke that always comes to mind when someone asks is one that’s really not that funny. It’s basic and kind of dumb. But it sticks:
A couple has been married for fifty, sixty years. They’re in their eighties. The woman turns to the man and says, “Do you want super sex?” And the man replies, “I’ll take the soup.”
It’s not great. Then there’s the classic:
A horse walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Why the long face?”
Back to gems for a second—
Here’s something interesting: you can alter the color of many gemstones using heat or radiation. Not every stone responds, but many do.
Tanzanite is a great example. A lot of it comes out of the ground brown. But if you heat it in a kiln—around 800 degrees Fahrenheit—for 12 hours, slowly increasing the temperature (because if you heat it too fast, it could crack), it transforms into that beautiful blue-violet color.
Sapphires and rubies are similar. They’re often sold as “heat-treated” or “untreated,” with the latter being more valuable.
And diamonds? You can irradiate them—blast them with specific wavelengths in an accelerator or linear accelerator—and change their color. You can achieve most of the colors of the rainbow this way.
But blue diamonds made this way often have a weird, metallic sheen. It’s like the surface of a shiny beetle—a kind of tinny, unnatural blue. It’s neat, but not exactly beautiful.
Still, the fact that you can color stones with radiation is fascinating. I once bought a cheap piece of tanzanite and tried it myself. I’d like to think I made the blue just a little more vivid.
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