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.

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.

It’s listed on my etsy site at just $65.00 – snag it while you can!  http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=21866384