The 20 Buck investment every gem lover NEEDS

[drruby]

If you plan on buying any gemstone including diamond and especially colored you need to have besides a 5 buck loupe and learn about inclusions that are natural a minor 20 buck investment device you can use in any store.

That is the so-called diamond tester and for around 20 bucks today you can get one and if you spend a little time testing stones you get used to where on the MOHS scale for most gems should be.

I use my sapphire crystal watch as a good calibration test in shops, it is a 9 MOHS and should just set off your tester to be right below diamond or 10 MOHS.

If you are looking at corundum red or blue being ruby or sapphire, you will see a 9 MOHS.

Lots of red stones today are 9 MOHS so then you need that 5 buck loupe to look for big bubbles, that means yeah real ruby but it's got easy to find LGFF (Lead Glass Fracture Filler) in it. Now some LGFF is high end, but most consider all lgff worthless. Plus some lgff just has no bubbles so then you need to move into flash effects you need a wifi microscope for (around 150 bucks) to look on say your iphone, it's easier than lugging around a black light lab scope to look for 'flash' but 99% of lgff rubies the bubbles show it is lgff so you rarely have to move into microscopic flash effect analysis and yes wifi microscopes are now 150 bucks or so and work with both iphone and android smart phones. Also, most high heating is easily visible in a loupe, you don't need a lab report to detect high heat in rubies IF you learn what HH does to inclusions such as silk and needles. HH leaves effects you can see in a loupe IF you learn how to look for them.

Now if you like red stones you will be able for 20 bucks to find all the garnet in exchange display cases with ruby labels on them.

Garnet and even red tanzanite have low 6.5MOHS ratings, easily detectable with a 20 buck diamond tester and exchanges are usually where you find garnet and red tanzanite with 'real ruby' tags on them.

Oh if you see some nice carbon, zap it, if hard to detect mossanite it will be a low 10 with real diamond going way pass the usual 10 MOHS on diamond testers, so you can actually get used to detecting mossanite with these field level testers now.

Emeralds are pretty soft so you can get used to the MOHS range for that and sapphires are corundum so they MOHS at 9 like rubies.

So start to carry a 5 buck loupe and a 20 buck diamond tester and you may find a decent gem once you learn how to be your own cert lab in the field.

Not all treatments can be detected this way, but you will quickly learn how to detect garnet from spinel from ruby and sapphire from tanzanite etc.

Also some dealers do swap stones with certs, so if a swap was made having a 20 buck mohs test can keep you from buying a stone with a cert that was swapped out.

Yes certs are nice, but IMO most good colored certs are now 500 to 1500 buck range, I'm not a big GIA fan and I'm not a fan of AGL either, but for lower priced stones (under 2000 bucks) having a simple 20 buck diamond tester and learning the MOHS scale could save you big time.

So if you are like most people not sinking over $2500 bucks into stones usually, a minor 20 buck investment could help you. Plus not all dealers are able to do these simple tests, the better dealers do them all the time, but, you do have some nice gems in the cases of dealers that just can't look at a gem and tell if it's garnet, tanzanite, spinel or ruby. You can tell with a 20 buck investment today without a lab cert.

I hope my 2 cents helps some.

 

[ChrisA222]

Red Tanzanite??????

 

[Michael_E]

So start to carry a 5 buck loupe and a 20 buck diamond tester and you may find a decent gem once you learn how to be your own cert lab in the field.

Not all treatments can be detected this way, but you will quickly learn how to detect garnet from spinel from ruby and sapphire from tanzanite etc.

I hope my 2 cents helps some.

I'm afraid that your 2 cents is not even worth that. The testers that you are so fond of are thermal conductivity measuring tools and they can be influenced by all sorts of things like coatings, inclusions and being too close to the metal of a mounting. There is no way to determine hardness from a thermal conductivity measurement, so what are you talking about with that? These testers also have no way to tell the difference between a well made synthetic and a natural gem, making them useless for that.

Moissanite from diamond? Why bother? Moissanite shows facet doubling in every piece that I've seen as well as having a much higher dispersion than diamond, so easy to check using "visual optics" ( Hanneman-Hodgkinson).

This thread is really misleading and should be taken with a large grain of salt.

 

[drruby]

Yep red tanzanite, very rare but it's out there.

I use my handy tester all day and it says what is diamond all day and the only fakes that pass it are lab grown and today lab grown is 80% of the value of natural diamond.

Synthetic ruby is easy to spot, and I don't even have to get to a thermal tester to spot it.

But for the average person, garnet and glass will turn up in most tests of 'ruby' if it's clean.

If it tests 9, then you need to know how to loupe real ruby and if you know how to use a size chart syn rubies are heavy almost as heavy as the LGFF rubies you can spot easily with a loupe.

Just like today some guy was testing me, says here test this diamond, I look at it and didn't even loop and I say glass, then I hit with thermal tester GLASS.

Are they perfect? No, but it is a valuable tool and IMO a simple thermal test can separate rubies from garnet faster than a person learning how they look in loupes.

Synthetic emeralds test way harder than natural.

Most gem experts still don't know how to use a simple thermal tester and they are a great device to quickly disqualify a ton of fakes.

Just like a guy today insisting a spinel was ruby, so we hit with thermal, bang, the ruby is 9 and the spinel a step down 8.

So IF you know how to work a thermal tester IT IS GREAT.

Now when the guy realized the spinel was a high end spinel he quickly faded from the conversation, his own words that's 4K a carat now wholesale, I can't afford.

Yet he wanted to argue it was ruby until a thermal tester showed him under ruby and sapphire and way above garnet.

You know how long that would have taken with an RI test? Way longer.