RedSpinel
Shiny_Rock
- Joined
- Apr 28, 2012
- Messages
- 211
My first purchase of a colored gem(aside from road side dealers in the mountains of NC as a kid) was a blue star sapphire. I bought the stone with the plan of getting it mounted into a gents ring. I bought it from a large, well known Philadelphia jeweler who has a store here in De, Robbins 8th and Walnut(now just called Robbins). I went in looking for a star sapphire, because I'd seen a client wearing one and I liked it. Ironically, when I later asked more detail about that client's sapphire, he admitted that his was simulated....
So I buy the sapphire and check out a suitable semi mount, only to be informed they had a backlog of work for their jeweler, so I'd have to wait as much as 6 weeks to have it mounted, so I decided not to wait, and went to another jeweler. This jeweler had the time to do it within a week, so I picked out a mount and waited. In the mean time, I bought my 2nd-ever loose gem, a radiant cut metallic raspberry colored tourmaline of approx 3cts from GSN(in 2003). I happened to have that gem with me when I dropped by the jeweler to check on the progress of my ring. I showed him the tourmaline and asked whether it was genuine. He apparently didnt have a refractometer there, because instead he used a fairly large gemstone microscope to look at it really closely.
I dont know the magnification he used, but I will describe it like this. The tourmaline is like 99% eye clean. if you look at it with your naked eye closely, you probably wont find anything inside it. But I did manage to find a tiny little wisp of an inclusion later on, but its tough to do. Anyway, I describe its eye visible condition, because when we looked at it under a gem microscope, it was kinda amazing. What we saw were these tiny internal crystals here and there. Imagine a fully formed natural uncut gem crystal that hasnt been weathered, like maybe an amethyst or a tourmaline crystal. Thats what we were seeing inside this stone in a few places. There werent a lot of them, and they absolutley are not visible to the naked eye or with my loupe, but with this microscope they are right there inside the stone. I guess they are separate crystals that grew within the main crystal that was cut into my gemstone. There were also some little inclusions here and there, but very small and not eye visible.
Its strange how a gem that looks really clean can instead have oddities inside it that you dont even know are there.
So I buy the sapphire and check out a suitable semi mount, only to be informed they had a backlog of work for their jeweler, so I'd have to wait as much as 6 weeks to have it mounted, so I decided not to wait, and went to another jeweler. This jeweler had the time to do it within a week, so I picked out a mount and waited. In the mean time, I bought my 2nd-ever loose gem, a radiant cut metallic raspberry colored tourmaline of approx 3cts from GSN(in 2003). I happened to have that gem with me when I dropped by the jeweler to check on the progress of my ring. I showed him the tourmaline and asked whether it was genuine. He apparently didnt have a refractometer there, because instead he used a fairly large gemstone microscope to look at it really closely.
I dont know the magnification he used, but I will describe it like this. The tourmaline is like 99% eye clean. if you look at it with your naked eye closely, you probably wont find anything inside it. But I did manage to find a tiny little wisp of an inclusion later on, but its tough to do. Anyway, I describe its eye visible condition, because when we looked at it under a gem microscope, it was kinda amazing. What we saw were these tiny internal crystals here and there. Imagine a fully formed natural uncut gem crystal that hasnt been weathered, like maybe an amethyst or a tourmaline crystal. Thats what we were seeing inside this stone in a few places. There werent a lot of them, and they absolutley are not visible to the naked eye or with my loupe, but with this microscope they are right there inside the stone. I guess they are separate crystals that grew within the main crystal that was cut into my gemstone. There were also some little inclusions here and there, but very small and not eye visible.
Its strange how a gem that looks really clean can instead have oddities inside it that you dont even know are there.
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