Roa Yaghmour, a Saudi jewelry designer and expert in precious stones, said that there are many difficulties facing women who work in this field. “It is easy to fall prey to fraudulent schemes and the high price of raw materials and labor may cause huge losses. Besides, nobody is monitoring the workers in this field,” Yaghmour said. “The majority of people, especially women who are easily deceived when purchasing precious stones, cannot determine the value of different types of gold and diamonds without the help of experts and special laboratories,” she said. “For example, moissanite crystals are sold for the price of diamonds and women buy them assuming they are diamonds. For businesswomen, it is easy to sell sapphires for diamonds because they look like diamonds,” she added. Yaghmour, who studied design in the United States, Canada and Italy and has been designing and marketing jewelry for the private sector for a number of years, emphasized the importance of customers being able to have confidence in the genuineness of the precious stones they purchase. Just as in Dubai, Europe and America, special laboratories for analyzing precious stones should be set up in the Kingdom to protect the public from the sale of fake gemstones, she said. “To analyze a precious stone, you need special lighting, thermal analysis, and the Mohs scale of mineral hardness and weakness, which is an ordinal scale that assigns numbers to the hardness of gemstones. For example, moissanite is (9.5) while diamond is (10),” Yaghmour explained. The prices of raw materials and the costs of highly-skilled workers are higher in the Kingdom than in other Gulf countries, she said. Moreover, many of the workers in the Kingdom do not have the skills and professional ethics which are very important in this industry. Lack of professional workers may result in great losses for investors. “I overcame this difficulty by recruiting highly-skilled workers from the Philippines and East Asia,” Yaghmour said, adding that the most difficult problem is recruiting Saudi youth who do not have the required qualifications and sales skills necessary for dealing with customers and convincing them to buy jewelry. “Saudi youth do not want to work as salesmen in gold stores; they want to be managers. My advice for Saudi youth is that instead of complaining about unemployment, they should learn to sell jewelry in gold stores,” she said. __
