that’s how most people do it… I haven’t found a way that professionals rate and price thier stones. Chysocolla isn’t as expensive as turquoise but stones that are well colored and hard enough to cab and take a high polish are hard to find. Online prices are all over the place. Lots of online stuff is junk. Some of the cheap good looking material is stabilized.
Turquoise is hard to value also. Turquoise is rarer as it’s an aluminophosphate.versus chrysocolla being an aluminosilicate, although both are found along with malachite and azurite in the supergene oxidized zone of porphyry copper deposits. I suspect that since this is high grade copper ore, much of it is strip mined and crushed indiscriminately at the big commerical copper mines. Turquoise only forms when phosphate is present and not all porphyry copper has phosphate, making it rarer. .
The stuff online is often stablized turquoise, but I also suspect that many of the sellers do not disclose that. I suspect that the same is true for chrysocolla. How to stablize soft crumbly stones at home is using diluted epoxy resin is online. I have a quart bottle full of tumble polished stabilized turquoise that is no good for jewerly making… any exposure to heat will cause the epoxy to burn…it can be drilled to string as a necklace and it’s about all that it can be made into. Needless to say I bought it for dirt cheap… Etsy is one of the worst places for buying and selling… sellers either don’t disclose or don’t know what they are really selling.