My largest ones are synthetic lab created stones cut by a local guy. The cutter has dementia now so I stopped dealing with him. Kind of sad to see how quickly it progressed. The first one of this new collection I had cut I happened on by chance doing some horse trading with a luthier. The guy wanted an outrageous price for some uncut scrap sapphire from a military project. Just two stones. I basically did a hard pass and a month later he's still trying to get me to bite so I offered him $50.00 and being desperate he took the money. Later I came back and showed him the large cut sapphire that was the clear one. He was pissed, visibly disturbed. It's worth about $500.00 now or more. The best thing to get stuff you can be sure of is to go to gem shows or mineral shows here in US first and only deal with people you feel a real kinship with. Otherwise, you get ripped off or at least get hooked into paying too much. Learn how to look at raw stones. Start by just browsing around and looking at stuff you find interesting. Asking prices and learning how to see. Fluorite looks like Amethyst but is quite different once you know what you are looking at. Different crystal structure. For instance, I won't ever by emerald because it's so often faked. I also won't buy a ruby because it's usually heat treated with glass to fill the cracks. You just can't buy a decent natural ruby of any size worth looking at. You can buy a very nice lab created ruby grown with the flux method which is most like natural but there's only one guy doing it and he's in California. He can sell you a huge one for a few thousand. Now that, I would buy. Lessor known gems are my passion. Mexican fire opal I think will soon hit the market explosively and I have a great desire to travel down there and bring back some of my own for processing. Example, the guy doing my cutting for me had a raw opal stone from Mexico that looked highly fractured and was set in silver. The owner backed out and didn't pick it up so he wanted his labor out of it so I took it for $75.00. A bit much considering the quality but while owning it I began to peer deep into it using backlighting and a magnifying glass. I could see there was a large bit of unfractured stone that formed a pit deep inside. I looked at it for minutes at a time every evening till I was sure. Then I sent it back with instructions to grind it down, find the stone in the middle and polish to a nice cabochon. It's worth about $1400.00 now. My investment is around $125.00. I have three small cabochons of garnet which also are very red hued and I plan to make a medieval style crucifix with gold. Sort of a box style hollow inside with a small door on the back for inserting what ever is tiny and precious. I also have some unique quartz cabochons of various types I plan to use with silver. Those I will sell for their "healing" qualities to people who believe in such silliness. Hahaha. A few years back I had a supervisor who wanted to impress his wife of 28 years with a ring. I got him an old heirloom gold ring with a large beat up citron stone. I had the stone removed and replaced with a fiery Russian made synthetic sapphire identical in cut. The central stone was surrounded with 28 accent diamonds. It looked way more impressive with the "Russian Sapphire" and who's gonna tell my boss it's lab created by some Russian scientists experimenting for military laser optics? I don't feel so bad as he paid me by padding my hours. So basically, he made our employers pay me off. At the end of the day, you could consider that sale to be financed by the oil industry. My all time best buy was from someone in Asia who sold me a clear topaz with very fine silky inclusion of some other mineral. It's a large cabochon they tried to sell me for an even $1000.00. Since they contacted me several times on my interest I smelled desperation. I offered $300.00. The message they sent me had a hint of sadness but they said due to the market being temporarily depressed they'd agree but begged me to insure it for the maximum. It can't be replaced as it's very much one of a kind and I've never seen anything like it on the market. I can buy all sorts of topaz of various designs but never saw another like this one. Large and very well proportioned cabochon. When the sunlight hits it just right the metal crystal inclusions will sparkle like silk deep inside. Otherwise, it appears like clear glass but more reflective. It also makes a decent magnifier which is cool. Obviously it deserves a gold setting with maybe a couple accent stones of similar quality. I'm thinking something organic looking. Regrets? The one I didn't buy at a cheap swap meet on the side of the road. I kick myself for that. A scruffy drugged out doper trying to make a buck with a large hunk of tigereye. Over a pound for $80 bucks. A week later I was looking at tiger eye stones and realized he was vastly underselling his stone. It could have been cut to make about five huge cabochons or ten medium sized cabochons. And then there's the honey agate I chanced across in a gravel parking lot. I had that one cut nicely.