Aurora Borealis
July 15th, 2007, 04:47 AM
So, a bunch of us are these Lord of the Rings fans. We love the movies, and so I'm doing my LOTR Christmas shopping now (don't laugh-while everyone else is trudging through overpopulated malls in 5 months searching through picked-over merchandise, I'll be sitting by the fire sipping hot chocolate and reading Charles Dickens). I'm thinking of getting Aragorn's ring for a friend of mine. He'll flip-I know he wants one. Now, the "gemstone" is a Swarovski crystal. As crystals go, that's a good one, but I'm wondering: if I were to replace the crystal with an actual emerald, would that increase the value because of the better stone, or would it decrease the collector's value because I altered the ring from its original condition?