ven though it comes to Houston four times a year, I always look forward to spending an afternoon walking round the International Gem and Jewelry show now held in a hall at the Reliant Park complex—the same area where the Astrodome is now dwarfed by the Reliant Stadium Football field on one side and the sprawling Reliant Halls complex and some parking on the other.

The January 2005 show was much like many others with a wide array of dealers selling most anything from T-shirts to diamonds. Most of the material was of marginal or no interest to us. My primary goals were to keep up and find what’s new in lapidary materials, particularly beads, and to find any interesting stone carvings (especially frogs) to add to my collection and to find other carvings in the wholesale area for resale. There is always a hope of finding some mineral specimens of interest, and that was particularly true for this show because I did not think I would get to Tucson in February. My wife and I pulled into the Fannin Street entrance, hoping to cut the walking distance from the parking lot to the show. We were somewhat successful in this, but the show was not in the hall advertised, but we probably would not have been much closer coming in the Kirby entrance.

Inside, the usual array of gemstones, jewelry, and miscellaneous material was present. I usually head straight for the wholesale area first to check it out. It is my best chance to buy anything except minerals, and Wilson Lin (Oriental Crest) is usually there. I get a good idea from him what is new in bead materials. The last two years or so have brought beads back into fashion.

Wholesale bead selling has boomed, and the number of bead dealers has increased many times. However many (if not most) of the dealers have no idea what the material actually is that they are selling. The name used for each type of material may or may not be meaningful to me, and in some cases the name is very deceitful to both me and potential customers. The general rule is, if a known mineral or gemstone name is preceded by another name, you can be pretty sure it is not the last-named material.

To keep up with demand and have new materials for their customers, the Chinese bead industry has introduced many types of glass, which is fine if it is sold as glass, but much is sold as quartz. When I questioned this, I was given a pocket knife and told to try and scratch it. Glass has a hardness of 5 that a knife which generally is harder should scratch while quartz has a hardness of 8 and cannot be scratched. The bead was so highly polished that I could not get the knife to “bite” into it. However, adjacent to the hole in the bead it was a rough area, and I easily scratched it. When this was shown to the dealer, he shrugged and said, “Well, it sells well!”

This year there was quite a bit of Russian bead material, particularly jade. Since I could not confirm any of its identity visually, I will not mention the names, but I have doubts about some. Of particular interest to me were some pale yellow-green beads of prehnite. I did not get a source for the material except Africa. Mineral specimens of prehnite have been coming from Mali, and they have a similar color so it is a probable source, but similar prehnite is also reported to come from Australia.

The surprise in the wholesale area was that I found a frog carved out of boulder opal and matrix from Queensland, Australia. Actually I already had one in my frog collection of lapidary materials but it is small, just a little larger than a large pea and does not show much opal. Although this frog is also more ironstone (goethite) matrix than opal, it has a good size patch of opal on one side. This is typical of some of the less expensive carvings from China. They do not orient the best character of the material on a conspicuous part of the carving. Some of the boulder opal carvings that were offered were all goethite matrix and no opal that you could see.

So having done the wholesale section, I quickly went through the retail section mostly to locate Five Lions Gems. I was in luck; Wali Beekzad had recently returned from a buying trip to Peshwar, Pakistan where he purchased Afghanistan and Pakistan minerals and gem rough. Wali does not venture into Afghanistan but buys all his material in Pakistan which is safer. Since I would not be going to Tucson this year, I might be able to afford some pegmatite minerals from him.

What caught my eye first was a pink morganite (beryl) crystal with a quartz crystal and minor albite. I have several small morganite crystals in my collection and this would far outshine any of them, but it was quite expensive. The main crystal is about 2.5 by 2 by 1 inch and a pleasing peach-pink color. It is not perfectly clear but has some clear spots in it. It is from Pech, Nuristan, Afghanistan.

Wali also had bicolored terminated elbaite (tourmaline) specimens from three different Afghanistan localities. The Afghan tourmalines keep going up in price, which is not surprising. I usually try to pick one that is at least partly gemmy because I think they will ultimately have the highest value. Now it seems that color alone makes it more valuable which is surprising to me, because Wali is primarily a gem rough dealer, but he seems to keep the specimen value separate from the gem value. It seems when I first started buying from Wali about 10 years ago, the reverse was true. Now he seems to buy for two customers, gemstone cutters and specimen collectors, and for the latter his price is determined by the over all aesthetics of the specimen and not its gemstone value alone.

The lapis lazuli deposits at Sar-E-Sang, Badakhshan also produce other minerals for the collector. Wali had a one-inch crystal of blue afghanite and calcite with a price so high I did not even look closely at it. He also had two specimens of sodalite that are sold under the variety name of hackmanite. One consisted of pale, dull gray, blocky 1 to 1 1/2 inch crystals but the other that had much smaller crystals was a pleasing lustrous purple color. Nothing about their appearance would indicate that they are basically the same mineral.

The prize from Pakistan was probably about 10 inches long and 4 or 5 inches across, a deep blue, and very gemmy, but it was only a partial crystal of aquamarine. It was the bluest

Pakistani aquamarine crystal that I have ever seen. However, since it was only a partial crystal, its value, in the thousands, was as only as gem rough. There were other complete and terminated crystals of paler aquamarine also from Pakistan.

I was interested in two specimens he had from the new find of brookite from the Northern area of Pakistan. One was a single, very thin, yellowish, 0.75-inch crystal without matrix. The other was a small group of clear quartz crystals with similar but much smaller and less fragile looking brookite crystals scattered between the quartz crystals. I bought it and when I looked at it under the microscope saw that some of the crystals were partly coated with something. So I gave it a bath and cleaning in the ultrasonic and got a lesson on what I already knew but did not consider. The ultrasonic cleaner wiped out about half the crystals on the specimen. I use the term “wiped-out” because it not only removed them from the quartz specimen, it shattered them so much that I could not even find any partial crystals in the residue in the cleaner. I know better, but fortunately I still have enough microcrystals left to use—but now there is no room for error when it is trimmed.

With pockets full of wrapped carvings and crystals, we quickly finished our tour of the retail area. We decided then that enough had been spent for my pseudo-Tucson trip, so we headed back out to the parking lot and drove home to wait until the next show in April. Can I really afford these shows four times a year? Most of the time I find very little to buy, but looking is always interesting.