The beads are a good quality. There were no chips or scratches and they were strung and packaged nicely. While this is probably a fault of mine that I didn’t read descriptions carefully enough, I was slightly disappointed that the garnets were more opaque, more brown than how they looked in the photo. They are pretty and I will use them, but probably not for the project I had planned for. I would order from the Bead Chest again—the service was fast.