FMF - Friends of Minerals Forum, discussion and message board

[bob kerr]

OK - this may be a dangerous topic but for me, I cannot see why the Ajoite in Quartz specimens (all from The Messina Mine) are so highly valued.

Don't get me wrong - the very best of these are amazing and interesting - not to mention rare - but how can a palest-of-pale-blue 5cm single quartz points demand multiple thousand $ price tags?? Just enter Ajoite into the minfind dot com site. Please tell me what it is about these that make them so attractive. I just don't understand it.

Is there some ultra-metaphysical action going on here?

Anyone else agree/disagree - or maybe point out other candidates?

thanks,
bob

[Marvin Hanner]

I agree Bob. They appear to be vastly over-rated. Even the thumbnails are high priced. Marv

[Bergur_E_Sigurdarson]

I think I've seen some of those ajoite included quartzes for sale on instagram, and not that terribly priced.
Could part of the issue be that mostly high-end dealers are on minfind?

On overrated and overpriced though, I find that the Colombian "mango" quartzes are mostly ridiculously priced and that only happened because of an initial tush to buy "all" of them, in the belief it was a small and unique find.
Sure they're quite nice, but I actually prefer properly cleaned pieces where the top appears white from what to me look like tubular whisps.

Another price hiking factor seems to be when a specimen has "provenance".
Labels of certain previous owners could possibly add to value, but often it seems like a "reason" to multiply price for little proper reasons.
But that may be a thing for some I guess.

[alfredo]

Humans are so easily influenced by "fashion", and stones go through fashions just like clothes and art do. Tourmaline and moldavites are examples of things which some "influencers" decided were desirable, and then their hordes of followers blindly drove up the prices to insane heights. Now the prices of those things are slowly coming back down again. Moral of the story: Buy things you like BEFORE they become fashionable ;))

[Roger Warin]

Hello,
When I was a little younger, in the early 1990s, the prices of minerals from RSA and Tsumeb were affordable. In 1992, ajoite was rather despised compared to papagoite, which had a more attractive color. There was a big difference in price (half the price).
I paid the same price for the buttgenbachite specimen (15 mm, which I will tell you about soon) as for these beautiful papagoite quartz specimens (15 cm). The same quartz (showcase specimens) with ajoite was worth half that price.
Collecting minerals is a passion. It is an activity that brings together consumer goods, like old Bordeaux wines. The older these wines get, the more they deteriorate.
The more our carefully chosen minerals appreciate over the years. Theoretically, at least, because you resell them at 1/10th of the current price...
When I say that they are consumer goods, you have to look at them often to understand them. In French, we say, “You have to feast your eyes on them!” (Il faut se rincer l’oeil).
I bought my specimen of buttgenbachite from the Panda mine in Likasi in 1997. It was only a few days ago that I realized (by chance) that it was not a nitrate, but a copper hydroxide containing heterogeneous lithophile inclusions of nitrogen oxides.
Studies of buttgenbachite have been conducted for a long time, but Mindat is not up to date.
Buttgenbachite containing sulfates instead of nitrogen oxides has even been found.
But I don't know any more about this, except that these ions occupy the same sites as nitrogen oxydes.

[bob kerr]

[minsur]

The term "influencer" in this context made me smile. Although or probably just because it originates from social media, it fits perfectly, reflecting the swift from ever declining mineral shows (with a few exceptions) towards virtual market places.j

Excessive paper money overhang, particularly in the US, has indeed fostered a group of "elite-dealer/collector opinion leaders", as I would call them - with a bit of experience quite easy to spot.

Working hard to make us humble collectors believe, that a clay/dirt contaminated cluster of Colombian quartz crystals (YES, they look nice, but it is just plain dirt and not even halloysite), a chunk of questionable East German wire silver or a glued-together tourmaline specimen, frequently not even cabochon-grade, should and must be worth at least the equivalent of a brand new fancy car or a new home...
Personally, for belief, I prefer the church around the corner;)

The same with the recent "push" of thumbnails: Now asking three and even four figure prices for stuff that for decades was worth next to nothing.



Ajoite quartzes... in my eyes, with very few exceptions, so ugly that I would not want to have one - at any price;)

[Bob Carnein]

When I hear the word "influencer", the first thing that comes to mind is "manipulator" and the second is "shallow". In short, a pest.