Jewelry and wearable stone

The obvious commercial extension from lapidary, and it crosses into a trade with actual advertising rules.

A step into a regulated trade

Rough specimens sit almost entirely outside product regulation. Finished jewelry does not.

The FTC's Guides for the Jewelry, Precious Metals, and Pewter Industries govern how gemstones, simulants and metals may be described, and they are specific.

So the looseness of specimen description does not carry over. This is the point at which what you write is measured against a published standard.

What the FTC guides require

That a stone be described accurately: a simulant or a laboratory-created stone must be identified as such, clearly and conspicuously, rather than left to be assumed natural.

That metal content be described accurately.

That vague or unqualified claims not imply more than can be substantiated.

The unifying principle is that silence implies natural and unmodified, which is the same principle the specimen trade holds by custom and the jewelry trade holds by rule.

Treatment disclosure

The item that catches makers. Heating, irradiation, dyeing, fracture filling, coating and impregnation are all treatments, and the guides require them to be disclosed.

A very large share of commercially available gem rough has been treated, frequently before it reached the person who sold it to you.

Which means you need to ask your supplier and keep the answer, because you are the one making the representation to the customer.

Whether to

It is a real market, it uses the undocumented material a collection accumulates, and it sells to people who will never buy a specimen.

It is also a different business with a different customer, a different channel and a compliance layer the specimen side does not have.

Worth entering deliberately rather than because somebody asked whether you could make a pendant.

References