Worlds Most Counterfeited Item Sneakers !!

That is really interesting, @Pulsegleaner . I used to hoard beads and make jewelry back when I had time to mess with it. It seems to be a natural jump into collecting beans. All the colors and patterns give me the same sort of satisfaction when I hold a scoopful in my hand. :)
 
Another example I just though of last night.

Hematite is a semiprecious stone with a deep grayish silver appearance, widely used in jewelry and carvings. As with a lot of other classic semiprecious stones, like bloodstone in recent years the supply of top quality material has largely dried up causing the price to go steadily up, and risk breaking the "semiprecious barrier" (the price where people will no longer buy a stone that is "merely" semiprecious.)

To ameliorate the situation the Chinese developed a synthetic substitute stone called "Hemalike" which was designed to fill in the lower cheaper end of the market, leaving the pool of people demanding the real thing small enough for current supplies to meet needs.

I think we can all guess what happened next, The Chinese have gotten into the business of selling hemalike articles AS hematite, and charging hematite prices for it. And since China is now pretty much the primary to nearly only source from which calibrated cabochons and beads come (which are what drives the semiprecious jewelry business) and has more or less bought up the whole supplies of nearly ALL gem rough, there really isn't an option of "going somewhere else" for the market.

Luckily, there is actually a simple test to tell if what you are being offered is the "real deal"; touch it with a magnet. Hematite is not strongly attracted to a magnet, hemalike is (they're both made of iron, but the internal arrangement is a little different**

* In the case of bloodstone, the issue is that the mines in India (which have been supplying the top quality stuff for literally millenia) have been largely tapped out by now, and no source of comparable quality and quantity has been found. The gem market has turned to supplies from Africa, and is now trying to get the African colors (greeny grey with rust colored spots) re-defined as the "correct color". You can still find chunks of Indian (bright green with bright red spots) around on the market (usually fist size or smaller) but they are becoming scarcer even at "B" grade ("A" grade is of course scarcer still)

** In fact with the proper treatment, hemalike becomes a magnet , and a pretty strong one. On occasion I have seen necklaces of it in which one bead was magnetized and then split in half, to serve as the necklace's clasp.
 
Well, the line between "natural" and "artificial" is a pretty fuzzy one with regards to the stone trade. Nearly all blue topaz got that way through heat, as does nearly all aquamarine (when it comes out of the ground, aqua is usually greenish blue (as one would expect from the name, "sea water") and carnelian. Lots of Amethyst gets purpled from irradiation (it's actually a sort of circle, heat amethyst, you get citrine; irradiate citrine, you get amethyst). Put white sapphires in a crucible with some aluminum dust, and they'll come out as blue as the "real" ones. A lot of these enhancement traditions are centuries, even millennia old and pretty firmly entrenched.

So long as there is no trickery involved, synthetic gems are no big deal. The're the reason the stone in your high school ring can be real ruby or sapphire, your fancy watch can have "17 jewels" in it's workings, and there are sapphires and rubies big enough to be used for some common purposes (you know that big red plate on the scanner at the checkout of your supermarket? That's ruby (because corundum is hardness 9 on the Mohs scale it's a lot tougher than glass would be))
 
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