3 new stones from Tan. Aggregate cost for the 3 was around $70. The spinel and sphene are around 1.30, the Chrysoberyl is ~0.75.
They are all beautiful. My cellphone is insensitive to greens, so it's making the sphene and (particularly) chrysoberyl look much browner and less saturated than they actually are. This was taken under mixed cloudy daylight (we're socked in here today) and incandescent.
The chrysoberyl is, perhaps, a tad light in tone, but its about as saturated as such a light-toned stone could be, a perfect shade of "optic" yellow. It's also exceptionally well-cut-- showing a big tilt window here, but there's no window face up and no fat-bellied pavilion so it faces up very large for its size.
The spinel was one of those lighter greyish-blue Tanzania spinels that's been listed recently. It is -much- bluer than I expected. It does color shift a little in incandescent, but much less than my other blue spinels. And, while I don't have a UV handy, it seems to fluoresce a little---it has a cool blue sheen/glow in sunlight. The downside is that it's very poorly cut- it doesn't face up that much bigger than the chrysoberyl (despite being 80% heavier) and the belly is so fat that it has a big window despite being plenty deep-- the last facets are only a few degrees away from parallel to the table. If it wasn't a $20 stone, I might get it recut so it'd pop....but it was a $20 stone.
The sphene is jaw-dropping, a 10 out of 10. An oh-shit stone. It's going to make a hell of a pendant for my girlfriend. The dispersion is wild, it's a legit eye-clean (despite sugary inclusions in the magnified pic on the listing- the statement in the listing that the stone was eye-clean was 100% true), and the body color is excellent in daylight, browning only a little under incandescent. What makes the stone so wild is that you have this very complex greenish-slightly brownish-yellow color, a very warm, soft color...and then BAM the thing lights up like a disco ball if there's any sort of point-source light nearby. As always, a preposterous bargain.
They are all beautiful. My cellphone is insensitive to greens, so it's making the sphene and (particularly) chrysoberyl look much browner and less saturated than they actually are. This was taken under mixed cloudy daylight (we're socked in here today) and incandescent.
The chrysoberyl is, perhaps, a tad light in tone, but its about as saturated as such a light-toned stone could be, a perfect shade of "optic" yellow. It's also exceptionally well-cut-- showing a big tilt window here, but there's no window face up and no fat-bellied pavilion so it faces up very large for its size.
The spinel was one of those lighter greyish-blue Tanzania spinels that's been listed recently. It is -much- bluer than I expected. It does color shift a little in incandescent, but much less than my other blue spinels. And, while I don't have a UV handy, it seems to fluoresce a little---it has a cool blue sheen/glow in sunlight. The downside is that it's very poorly cut- it doesn't face up that much bigger than the chrysoberyl (despite being 80% heavier) and the belly is so fat that it has a big window despite being plenty deep-- the last facets are only a few degrees away from parallel to the table. If it wasn't a $20 stone, I might get it recut so it'd pop....but it was a $20 stone.
The sphene is jaw-dropping, a 10 out of 10. An oh-shit stone. It's going to make a hell of a pendant for my girlfriend. The dispersion is wild, it's a legit eye-clean (despite sugary inclusions in the magnified pic on the listing- the statement in the listing that the stone was eye-clean was 100% true), and the body color is excellent in daylight, browning only a little under incandescent. What makes the stone so wild is that you have this very complex greenish-slightly brownish-yellow color, a very warm, soft color...and then BAM the thing lights up like a disco ball if there's any sort of point-source light nearby. As always, a preposterous bargain.
(actually I do, but well...you now 
) They're also notoriously hard to capture in photo 
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