Crystal sellers love to throw around the term “hand-picked.” It sounds exclusive, thoughtful, and high-quality. But in most cases? It’s nothing more than a marketing gimmick.

LET’S BREAK IT DOWN:

Stefan Austermühle, CEO Gemrock Peru,                                                                  Last updated: 03.05.2025

The “Hand-picked” Crystal Scam

What they don´t want you to know

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Why “Hand-Picked” is Mostly a Lie

When wholesalers and retailers alike use the term “hand-picked,” they want you to believe they personally select the best crystals from mines and lapidaries worldwide. The truth? That’s not how the industry works.

• Miners don’t let buyers pick and choose. Wholesale means buying in bulk—good, bad, and everything in between. No miner is setting aside the best pieces and letting you take only the top quality while they’re stuck with the leftovers.

• Mass production cutting shops don’t sort by quality. They prioritize speed, not perfection. The result? A mix of well-cut, average, and poor-quality stones. Wholesalers take the full batch, not just the best pieces.

• Crystal shops “hand-picking” at gem shows? That just means selecting the most acceptable pieces from a pile of mass-produced stones—often leftovers that serious buyers have already passed on.

How Our Business Model is Different:

At Gemrock Peru, we don’t work with low-grade material. Instead, we focus on producing only high-quality pieces from the start.

Our cutters take their time because precision, perfect shapes, top-quality polish, and scratch-free products are valued over mass production.

Crystal shop clients that buy from us have no need to hand-pick – Because every piece meets our strict standards and is either good or excellent. That means buyers can trust that every order meets our high standards.

In crystal specimens, we are grouping crystals by quality and size in flats from 1 to 10 kilos and we allow our crystal shop clients to hand-pick their flat – but not to hand-pick a single crystal.

In exemptional cases, we would allow for hand-picking of single crystal specimens but charge a premium of 30% on top of the regular price because if a client handpicks, he leaves us with the not-so-good material that we then have to sell at much lower prices.

The Truth About Buying at Gem Shows:

If you’re a small crystal shop owner you most likely don’t have the opportunity to travel to the country of origin of your crystals. You will have to buy either from a wholesaler in a permanent warehouse or from a gem show like the one in Tucson, Denver, Saint Marie, or Munich. True, there you can hand-pick.

However, here’s something you should know:

• By the time the show opens to the public, the best pieces are already gone. Wholesalers give priority to their top clients and invite them to choose the best material days before the show even starts, while the booth is still under construction.

• If you’re “hand-picking” at the end of the show? You’re picking through leftovers trying to find the most acceptable part of the bad material.

Top-quality crystal producers like Gemrock Peru, sometimes don’t even visit gem shows anymore. Gemrock for example has not been on any gem show since before the pandemic.

We work with an exclusive group of ethically conscious and quality-sensitive crystal shop customers who have become our loyal clients over many years. And we experience a constant growth of our customer base who finds us on the internet.

Back to our crystal scammers: some of them will go even further and spice the hand-picked term up like in the following example:

“We are intentional with every crystal that comes into our shop. Most of them are hand-picked from all over the world“

The idea that a shop can “travel the world hand-picking crystals” is laughable. In reality, they’re just shopping at gem shows like everyone else.

Ethical Crystal Shops Should be Honest:

If a shop truly hand-picks top-quality pieces in rare cases, yes they should say that.

For example. Here at Gemrock we do hand-pick the jewelry-grade rough rock from tons of material bought from the mine and we do promote this hand-picked quality. However, we do so based on a published gemstone standard for each and every jewelry-grade material we have in our possession.

Every client can compare the hand-picked material with the pictures and descriptions of our gemstone standard and fact-check our claims.

But claiming that all the crystals of a shop are “hand-picked” is misleading.

The bottom line?

Be wary of “hand-picked” claims.

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Let’s bring more honesty into the crystal industry.

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