PURPOSE

The purpose of this guide is to help you find a good quality stone,after all this is a buyers guide. i am not here to slander other sellers.

Lets keep this simple and informative, i have been making ammonite ,or ammolite gemstones since 1990 and selling it to a few select retailers on a full time basis "so i have been a victim of the customer is allways right." so this will be the basis of my guide.

DOUBLET OR NATURAL

Doublets.  have a new matrix [backing]. The sheet material gem typically has an unstable backing making the doublet the best route to go to make a strong stone, and avoid failures during cutting. Before the doublet came to be this type of gem was mostly used to make very nice hand samples and paper weights. And the flat pieces we used to skip accross the river, and called them fancy skippers... just a little piece of trivia for ya.

Naturals. the fossils chunk sheet gem has typically a light brown matrix that is hard and brittle, while the flat pieces have a light gray matrix that can be crumbly or has lots of fracture lines in the matrix. with lots of stabalizing these stones can be very nice but if you drop them chances are they explode. The lizard skin type gem has the most stable type matrix. And make the most stable naturals..I personally use this type of matrix to reback all my sheet gem stones.

GEM SURFACE

Now when you are buying stones here you must look at the pictures closely to try and see any of the flaws because this does affect the value of the stone, suface chips ,scratchs, tool marks, multi layer cutting , facets on the surface etc and of course shine are all important, as for naturally occuring fracture lines remember the shell was put under lots of pressure when it was fossilized so a crack line in the stone should not hurt value this is natural for ammonite ,some cutters will cut the stone on these lines to minimize the naturally occuring flaws but this will make for very small stones in most cases ,,but i dont think this should affect the value we all have our flaws that make us who we are and so do the ammonites .

COATED GEM SURFACE

These will be the more affordable stones, but the life span will be considerably shorter, coatings dont pollish for one thing, and most will crack or yellow with time..UV light and the acid from your skin are just a few things that make most coatings a problem..A little more time and skill will make an uncoated stone.But this is a buyers preferance issue 

CUT

You want a nice smooth cut all the way around the edge,,not all choppy looking and not a bunch of different angles on all the different edges , it needs to be uniform looking ,backing or [matrix] should not be protrudeing past the gem and the surface should be all gemstone, no burn throughs into the matrix. there should be a nice little 45 degree angle at the edge of the gem all the way around, this is to prevent chipping, you dont want a straight 90 degree cut,,the matrix or backing can be 90 degrees  or just a slight undercut,,i undercut all my stones and the goldsmiths tell me ,this is what they like. the only exception to these rules are with the edge peices ,this is a stone that was made from  the outer edge of the ammonite so they have 3 sides. these stones will sometimes be all bent up and strange looking with color on both sides and make some of the most beautiful jewllery pieces and or collector stones selling at a very high price. a good one will look allmost like a fire agate..

GRADE AND PRICE OF THE STONE

The general rule is more colors plus shine and cut means higher price. [A grade] would be single color and in the 100 dollars USD wholesale per square inch.

AA grade is 3 colors and in the 300 to 500 USD range would not be outrageous.

[AAA grade] or collector grade what ever you want to call it simply means more than 3 colors and these would be the best of the best stones, some people dont consider this a grade at all..BUT what would you call the best of the best stones that nobody ever sees in the store, Many retailers have a AAA grade category for their stuff and Every retailer has their collectors that buy this stuff up before anybody else gets to see it and thats a fact... Many collector grade stones are not allways set either, they can be kept just the way they are,and 500 to a 1000 USD per inch. would most definatley not be unreasonable.Remember this is a non renuable resource..

All prices are based on what we feel is reasonable,,search the net and you will see much higher prices for very small stones.

SHAPE

Shape of the stone is up to your taste, And this i will stress..it seems other sellers would have you think that the stones should have standardized shapes or callibrated shapes, this is fine and dandy when you are looking to set them in mass produced settings and sell them  for high dollars, or even cheap cash with cheap gold or platted gold, just because it is a finished product,Lets face it the cool shapes and different styles of cutting make ammonite a very unique gemstone, dont let anybody sway you about what you like concerning shape

WORKMANSHIP

There must be no compromise..these are after all gemstones not river rocks that were pollished in a rock tumbler, it takes years of experiance to make a good stone. It is all hand work with diamond lapping wheels. Diamond pastes, sanding papers, and stabalizing,, I have seen single colored stones finished to perfection fetch a higher  price then a multicolor one of poor manufacturing. These are the main things to look for when buying a natural ammonite or [ammolite] gemstone. I put this picture here because it is a good example of that nice cut all the way around the stone . I hope this will be helpful,and if i have left something out you can ask, i would prefer that to a non helpfulness vote..all emails welcome.

SUMMARY

Ammonite is a non renewable resource and the price and rarity of the stones and fossils has and will  go up.

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