Gold is usually mined underground or panned in rivers.

But for ukay-ukay vendor Vilma Maravilla of Sta. Rosa City, Laguna, precious stones can be found in the secondhand bags and wallets that she sells online.

It is routine for Maravilla to clean the used bags and wallets before reselling them. The practice is also how the working housewife with a cancer-stricken husband finds cash and gems left inside their previous owners' secret pockets of bags and wallets.

Once, she found a diamond-shaped ring she sold to a friend for P7,000, the TV show KMJS reported. The money helped pay for her husband's medicines.

Maravilla also found $200 in one wallet and 70 Chinese yuan in another. In August, she found a gold necklace with a round pendant. Appraisal by a pawnshop determined it to be 21-carat Saudi gold worth P28,000.

A Chinese woman, however, found a gem in the most unusual place.

The woman from Shaanxi Province, China, had been suffering from inner ear pain for a month, so she consulted a doctor, GMA Integrated Newsfeed reported.

Upon cleaning her ear, the doctor discovered what was causing her pain. In a video on Newsflare.com, a micro camera showed an earwax spoon scooping up a tiny diamond from the inner ear of the woman.

It was the missing diamond from her earring that had somehow ended up inside her ear.

Fortunately, the tiny diamond did not cause infection or injury to her.