While there is always a chance that the gems I bought are worthless, I have working with me an amateur gemologist who enjoys cutting stones and giving them to his wife as baubles. He had heard that there were jewels to be gotten here and subsequently brought his spectrometer, loupe, tweezers, and electrical-heat sensing thingamajigger that runs a charge throgh the stone and detects its' electrical resistance and heating properties of which each particular type of rock has a unique signature.
He isn't 100% certain about the blue sapphire, but is positive the orange is a varient of the padparadscha or lotus flower sapphire, one of the more rare types, much like a good quality ruby.
As for reselling them back home, no, I won't be doing that. Rather, I have had a number of the stars placed in settings for rings and pendents to be given as Christmas gifts to all my friends and relatives. They'll make for a surprisingly high quality gift for very little cost, somehwere on the order of $40 a piece.
Without a doubt, however, some are synthetic like the green star sapphire I bought for $10. It's a very pretty stone and it "pops" but for anybody who knows gems, they'd recognise it for the manufactured stone that it is because of the unnatural color.
This seems to be a Middle Eastern/SE Asian thing though. When I was in Saudi there were many gemstone merchants who had scads of loose stones for sale. If any of you are interested in having me pick one up for you send me a PM and I'll see what I can do.
Totem
