New synthetic spinel hits the market

[Dioptase]

It's a pretty important news:

http://www.gemresearch.ch/news/2015-09-09_SyntheticSpinel/Spinel_New_Synthetic.pdf

New synthetics spinels... pinkish red, lavender, violetish, color-change. A bit scary.

Edit : "A new type of spinel enters the market with RI and crystallinity corresponding to natural spinels."

 

[SparkliesLuver]

Thanks for the link, Dioptase.

 

[chrono]

I thought the flux melt synthetic spinel was "found" several years ago?
http://www.ssef.ch/fileadmin/Documents/PDF/650_Presentations/HK2010March_Spinel.pdf

I am sorry I don't know how to link this PDF file.
http://www.gia.edu/cs/Satellite?blobcol=gfile&blobheader=application%2Fpdf&blobheadername1=Content-Disposition&blobheadername2=MDT-Type&blobheadername3=Content-Type&blobheadervalue1=attachment%3B+filename%3DFlux-Grown-Synthetic-Red-and-Blue-Spinels-from-Russia&blobheadervalue2=abinary%3B+charset%3DUTF-8&blobheadervalue3=application%2Funknown&blobkey=id&blobtable=GIA_DocumentFile&blobwhere=1355958370866&ssbinary=true

 

[Dioptase]

The flux melt ones were red and cobalt blue. Now we are going to see other colors as well.

 

[chrono]

The flux melt ones were red and cobalt blue. Now we are going to see other colors as well.

Of course this is only to be expected. Just as heat treatment and diffusion will one day mar the spinel name.

 

[drruby]

I'm losing some respect for GRS with this article.

MAJOR MISTAKE

Natural Spinel has a wider range of RI

In fact Natural dark red spinel is usually 1.73 RI not the low range mentioned

Other colored spinel is that low of RI but the red has always been higher

It's why good red spinel has fooled jewelers forever

I think the SG is a little off on syn spinel still so a SG test finds most of it

Unless they finally got the SG right

 

[Lisa Loves Shiny]

Terrible. This last year even though I bought my larger spinels from trusted vendors I obtained lab results on them. Do we know which gem lab was fooled into classifying these synthetics as natural? Thanks Dioptase for this information.