BE treated red "Songea" sapphire stud earrings

What they are:  Real sapphires, mined from the earth, gorgeous, and affordable.

What they aren’t: Naturally the color you see.

Songea is a place of origin for some pretty, natural sapphires, but has been commandeered by the trade as the name for diffusion-treated sapphires, usually in shades of yellow, orange, and red.  Diffusion treating involves bringing the gems to high heat (which in itself improves the clarity of the stone) in the presence of beryllium.

If you follow gems and jewelry news, you may remember the “official gem of the Beijing Olympics,” which was marketed as a new find of rare red andesine.  These beautiful stones were flooded into the market and sold on television at high prices as natural gems, until an enterprising gemologist dug deeper and found evidence of color diffusion.

You see, diffusion is a treatment that can be very difficult to detect on ordinary gemological equipment, so the scam was perpetuated unknowingly by many honest vendors who simply couldn’t detect it.   There are few gem labs in the world with the equipment to make a determination of whether a stone is diffused or not; a SIMS (Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometer) costs as much as two million dollars and was originally developed to analyze moon rocks.

The same thing happened on a micro level within the gem trade when Songea sapphires first hit the market, but fortunately this time gem dealers caught it before the stones were mass marketed to consumers.  One dealer had to buy back a million dollar’s worth of goods that he had sold as natural before discovering the treatment, and many other dealers either overpaid or had to issue refunds to their buyers.  Unfortunately many overseas vendors are not always the best at disclosing treatments and sell these gems as “heated” or “new heat treatment.”  While accurate in that the stones are treated, that’s not the whole truth.

Buying a sapphire?

Is there anything wrong with buying a Songea sapphire?  None whatsoever!  They are gorgeous, affordable, and the treatment is permanent.  The only things I’d like to see my customers avoid is paying too much for them, or being mislead into thinking the color is 100% natural.  I think of this treatment as similar to the irradiation process that brings us beautiful blue topazes.

Darkfield loupe and polariscope

It’s been a busy couple of months here at Distinction Jewelry, and one of the most interesting (and sometimes frustrating) activities I’ve been engaged in is setting up my own little gemology lab.  I buy my gems very carefully from trusted, reputable sources.  I’ve got a sharp eye with a loupe and I can spot many fakes a mile away with my own trusty little eyeballs.  I send gems out to my gemologist (A GIA graduate gemologist) for testing and verification.

In other words, I was getting along just fine, until the gemology bug bit me and I decided I wanted to learn the nuts and bolts of gem innards myself.  That’s fabulous in many ways, because I love to learn and I love to buy new toys.  The downside to this latest obsession of mine is that the toys are expensive, and there is a LOT to learn.  There’s a reason people go to long, expensive, and often remotely located schools to learn gemology (I have a hankering to attend one in Thailand), but my low budget and addiction to doing things the hard way demand I do this on my own for the time being.

My initial setup includes the following:

• Refractometer
• Polariscope
• Dichroscope
• Specific gravity scale
• Darkfield loupe
• Jadeite filter and Hanneman PMCF filter
• Mini microscope, cheap and tiny but surprisingly useful
• Assorted other loupes, lights, and magnifiers
• Jury-rigged UV light box

Precision faceted peridot posing with my dichroscope

Just choosing the equipment was an adventure unto itself.  I try to keep my expenses as low as possible, because eventually they all have to be built into what I charge customers for finished jewelry.  Nothing in this industry comes cheap if you buy quality, and cheap can often be sadistically worthless in incalculable ways.  One place I decided to economize was the purchase of the refractometer, for which I opted to pay about $400.00 less than I perhaps should have.

It arrived, and I eagerly delved in with a packet of gems whose identity I was certain of.  I looked into the depths of its glowing orange light, read the scale, and compared to to my reference list.

Uh-oh.  Unless all of the gems had suddenly decided to undergo a radical change of their internal structure overnight, my new toy was pulling numbers out of its optical prism and watching my confusion with snickers of delight.  I sent it back home to live with its mother and obtained a new refractometer, which arrived yesterday.  After sternly warning it about the horrific fate of its misbehaving predecessor, I put it to the test.

It worked.

Polariscope, darkfield loupe, and refractometer

I heaved a sigh of relief, identified a few gems, and ran eagerly over to the computer to blog about it, because that’s what any self-respecting dork like myself does when experiencing elation few normal people are likely to share.

Many thanks to GemologyOnline.com and its many helpful experts, The Gemology Project, PrettyRock.com, and Andrea Robinson for their inspiration, education, and assistance.

The waters get muddied when one looks at ruby colors, because rubies are commonly seen as a stone with a wide range of hues from true red to wine to pink.  The most hard-line interpretation tells us to call only true red corundum ruby, and all of the others pink sapphires.  This is a little problematic however because most people outside of the jewelry field think of many shades of dark pink corundum as ruby, and would never think to ask for a “dark pink sapphire.”

Jewelry stores have been marketing light, sparkly pinks as pink sapphire, dark pink to red shades as ruby, and when you see a true red ruby for less than a small fortune, it is likely to be corundum grown in a lab, as the true red is a rare and expensive shade of corundum.

At the bottom of all of this confusion lies one reassuring fact: it’s all basically the same stone.  Your main job is to pick the shade that makes you happy, and at the end of the day it really doesn’t matter if your jeweler called it a ruby or a pink sapphire.

Oh, and the ring in my post?  I listed it for sale as a ruby…..but pink sapphire would be just as accurate, if not more so.

Ever look around at the prices of loose gemstones online and been completely baffled?  Ever wondered why one site has a sapphire for $50.00 and another for $50,000?  It all has to do with rarity.

Should I not have said quality, you ask?

Not really.  Quality tends to be an abstract when it comes to colored stones.  Pricing factors include availability, demand, color, size, cut, clarity, origins, and treatment.  I plan to go into some of these factors in more detail in a later article; my point for this one is simple: beautiful gemstones need not cost a fortune.

If there is a certain color you love, you may be happy to find that there is a lesser known or less traditional stone that will provide just what you are looking for.  Aquamarine is a costly stone, but many shades of aquamarine are well emulated by blue topaz.  Emeralds cost a fortune, but chrome diopside provides beautiful, rich green and great clarity at a fraction of the cost.

If it’s a particular, precious stone that is important to you, for example a birthstone, you may find that even precious gems can be affordable in smaller sizes, for instance in the 3-5mm range.  That will, given the right setting in a ring, give you the beauty and the stone you want without bankrupting you.

I love colored gems and would be happy to guide you to a choice that works within your taste and your budget; I welcome custom orders and have both a large inventory of beautiful, reasonably priced gems and some excellent sources for anything you might want me to order.

By the way….the beautiful chrome diopside ring shown in the photo above is available through my etsy shop for only $100.00!  Take a peek!