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If you have ever stood in a booth, down a long isle in major gem
show and looked up and down that isle, it is humbling to think that
there are so many people chasing what appears to be an ever
diminishing customer base with far too few dollars in their pockets.
Consequently many dealers who are what I refer to as =93bag men=94 as
opposed to miner/producers are always looking for some marketing
angle to differentiate themselves from the herd. Over the years this
quest for market differentiation has led to a bloated lexicon of gem
industry jargon that ultimately does the industry and hence the
public it serves a disservice. Consider that the average counter
sale is executed by a salesperson with limited technical background,
marginal gemological skills, who in all likelihood has no idea what
is involved in producing the gems that go into the jewelry that she
or he is trying to sell. How is this person going to explain to their
customer what Tasmarine is? My experience has been that confused
customers don=92t buy and as a result this ever increasing tendency to
"jargonize" is a recipe for mass confusion, which explains why
diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds and a couple of other common
gem materials dominate the cash flow. Consumers understand what they
are or at least are comfortable with the names associated with the
materials.
Over the years I have been involved in bringing a number of
materials to the specialty colored stone market including, Ponderosa
Mine Sunstone, Arizona pyrope, Namibian spessartines, Neu Schawben
tourmaline, and Namibian Demantoid. While I have used what I thought
were some clever advertising campaigns with some of these materials,
"Screaming Red" for the pyrope and "Fresh Squeezed" for the
spessartines I never thought it prudent to use terminology that
obscured the identity of the material or its origin. I have always
thought it more important to provide a well-cut, calibrated (where
appropriate) competitively priced product then to attempt to build
market differentiation via clever fabricated nomenclature.
Diopside is a pyroxene, a calcium, magnesium silicate from a class of
silicate minerals known as inosilicates. It is a fairly common rock
forming mineral and rarely of sufficient size, purity and pleasingly
colored to fashion into gems. It forms a complete solid solution
series with hedenbergite, which is a calcium iron silicate. In basic
terms a solid solution series is a line, diopside is on one end and
hedenbergite is on the other. There are essentially a limitless
number of intermediate members of this series with variable magnesium
to iron ratios between pure diopside on one end and pure hedenbergite
on the other. So is Tasmarine something new in the mineralogical
sense of the word new? Probably not, analysis would likely show it to
be yet another intermediate member in the diopside-hedenbergite solid
solution series. In the mineralogical sense of the word new it would
have to exhibit either distinctive chemistry or a distinctive atomic
structure to qualify as something =93"new" and if that were the case i=
t
would not be diopside nor would it likely be a intermediate member in
the diopside-hedenbergite solid solution series. It would be
something "new". (I note that the Tasmarine marketeers admit it is
diopside)
Were Tasmarine something new a researcher would have described the
mineral, chemistry, atomic structure, crystal morphology, genesis,
its host rock environment and submitted the description to the IMA
(International Mineralogical Association) for consideration for
classification as a new mineral species. Had it been accepted as a
new species it then would have had its name submitted to the
Nomenclature Committee of the IMA for approval. At that point if
approved the new species would have joined the other more then 4000
described, approved mineral species. Once that happened it would get
to have its name capitalized at the beginning of a sentence and
everywhere else would be all lower case letters. (Look at Demantoid
and Sunstone above I capitalized these names because they are proper
names and not accepted mineral species where pyrope, tourmaline and
spessartines are accepted mineral species)
I strongly believe as an industry it is our obligation to disclose
treatments and to provide our customers (wholesale or retail) with
accurate descriptions of materials. (most of my tourmalines are
burned and my demantoid is 100% natural) This in turn builds trust
and serves to keep our industry out of the tabloids and off 60
minutes. In no way to I intend to demean the effort of the Tasmarine
marketeers to bring something different to the market. I applaud
their determination in attempting to market a material with hardness
of 5-6 with 2 directions of imperfect cleavage and a third direction
of parting. My own experience with Ponderosa Mine Sunstone showed
that the market was prepared to accept softer materials with
cleavage problems and pay serious money for it, as long as they
understood what it was and how to use it. If you can accept that
besides having some fun in the gem and jewelry "bidness" our common
goal is to succeed in getting our customers to overcome the hand to
wallet reflex, I would close with this question, are the market and
the public interests served by Tasmarine or would their interests be
better served by calling it "______" diopside where the blank is
filled in by the Tajik name for the deposits origin?
Christopher L. Johnston
Omaruru ~ Namibia
chris AT johnston.com.na
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