Cheap materials of amazing shades are everywhere, so the need for a piece of agate or jasper as a kaleidoscope of wondrous colors has disappeared. Fashion has become faster. The structure of people's spending has altered either. Nothing has happened for the precious stones, like diamonds and sapphires, but the rest has faded from glory.
Of course, there are still many gemstone lovers, collectors, and geologists, some shops on Etsy thrive, etc, etc, but these are only crumbles of the passed popularity.
Look at modern jewelry for the general public: mostly cheap artificial materials. Not counting those boring factory-made beads which can hardly be called jewelry. Most stores, which offer more, are rarely visited and seem to be dinosaurs not less than those which sell post stamps.
The trend might seem the final verdict to the craft and industry, if not for one thing: growing demand for authenticity. That's very simple: you can produce a piece of plastic and paint it metallic red but it will never become a 1-billion-year-old piece of copper ore. No matter how well you will optimize production, how cheap (or expensive) material you will use, how well you will market your product, your plastic piece of shit will stay a piece of shit and never be a specimen of 1 billion-year-old copper ore.
It's not coincidence that I mentioned copper ore. That's what I surprisingly found at Iconsiam, Thailand's largest shopping mall, in the form of interior decoration.
The store is called Agata London. They have two spots there: an exposition next to the entrance on the ground floor and a shop on the floor above.
The exposition is centrally located and attracts much attention
while the store looks like a little geology museum:
They mostly market products as interior objects ("jewellery for your home"). Often, these are large gemstones installed on the top of a stand like if they were sculptures. For example, these agates with a price sticker 290.000 baht (∼8000$):
These giant cubes of pyrite from Peru, indeed, resembles a sculpture:
And this stone is more reminiscent of abstract painting:
Azurite (blue) and malachite (green spots) on kaolinite from Australia, as the description sticker says.
I personally was charmed by this giant fluorite cubes:
The stone is like from a sci-fi movie about extraterrestrial forms of life.
If you have a room with neon lights and references to space and the supernatural, this stone can fit well into such an interior. 😀 (I would love to have such a room! 🙂)
As for the next specimen, it looks rather an artifact from a fantasy reality:
Calcite crystals on a scattering of amethysts. Can be a wonderful decoration for a dwarf's cave. 😄
Hard to believe but the next object is made of natural material too:
The sticker says it's a hand-crafted "tea bowl" made of Tiger Iron, which is a fossil stromatolite composed of red jasper, hematite, and tiger's eye. 2.7 billion years old. From Western Australia. The price is 295.000 baht (∼8300$).
Have you ever heard of bumblebee jasper? This one:
From West Java, 380.000 baht (∼11.000).
I was happy to see gemstones at Iconsiam. Firstly, gemstones are amazing, mysterious part of nature, once again reminding us how diverse our world is.
Scolecite
Secondly, I have a personal connection: when I was a child, gemstones were my hobby which I had learned from my father. We used to stroll along pebble beaches of the Black Sea in Georgia collecting agates and jasper born by the Caucasian Mountains. I also made cabochons in childhood and teenager-hood - cut, processed, and polished stones.
Natural agate framed with crystals at Agata London store, Iconsiam
Pyrite
My childhood is long gone, and collecting gemstones is no longer my hobby. But they inspire me as before. And wherever I find myself, I always examine stones under my feet, and sometimes find something interesting like it was in Georgia a year ago when I found agates, jaspers, and a carnelian.
More images and stories from Southeast Asia are ahead! Stay tuned!
I took the images with a Nikkor 50mm f/1.8G on Nikon D750 on December 10, 2023 in Bangkok, Thailand.