What on Earth?
The Earth Bazaar
I was introduced to The Earth Bazaar by friends on a jewelry forum earlier this year. Fabulous prices! Beautiful stones! Exciting cuts and styles! Was I sucked in? You bet...right to the tune of almost $400 (that was before I went back and trimmed a little) in glorious high grade gemstones!
Short tour around The Earth Bazaar — the Deal of the Week and Daily Deal offer fantastic prices on gemstones, pearls and silver in hundreds of cuts, sizes and grade*. Sale prices are reasonable, if not dirt cheap...regular prices are pretty steep, so wait for a sale. Based on what I've seen, nearly every cut and stone goes on sale at some point.
Moving around the site can be a bit cumbersome — my advice is to fill up your cart and then take some out when you are ready to check out. Gemstones are categorized by stone type, and the sale sections are not organized well. Browsing the sale sections requires actually browsing through all pages — sometimes dozens — to find something that tickles your fancy.
Checkout is fairly easy — you'll be challenged if you are removing items from your shopping cart (you have to remove them one item at a time), but The Earth Bazaar accepts Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express. Shipping is a flat rate depending on the ship to address (at time of review: US $5, Canada $15, International $30).
There are no ancillary sections of The Earth Bazaar — no design help or gallery or project listings — which is fine with me. I was there to buy stones!
So you may be curious about the title of this review, and why I don't necessarily give The Earth Bazaar an AAA rating. I patiently waited for my order to arrive, which it did fairly quickly. Stones were packaged very nicely — plastic bags for each item that were individually marked with size, stone and other descriptive terms. Everything was cushioned well and arrived without damage.
But.
The Earth Bazaar must use a measuring system from an alternate universe...beads that were advertised and labeled as 3mm were the size of a pin head. Everything "tiny" that I'd ordered was miniscule.
To make matters worse, when I started using the stones, many of them were drilled so poorly that they either wouldn't take a wire, or the drill was crooked. A pair of large pink amethyst briolettes that looked absolutely astonishing had to be reamed to even fit 24g wire through the drilled holes!
The stones themselves (I ordered nothing less than A grade) were beautiful. Color, clarity, cut...all very nice. But many of the stones I ordered will be difficult to use because of the actual size and/or drilling.
So while I was disappointed with The Earth Bazaar, I will probably get sucked in again by one of their fabulous sales. Next time, however, I will be more aware of the size of the stones I'm ordering, as well as knowing that I will more than likely be reaming the beads.
*For those new to gemstone purchasing, "grade" is the quality of the stone. "A" grade is the highest, with multiple "A" grades indicating even better quality (for example, a stone with AAA grade is better than A grade, and way better than a D grade stone.)
