Passport to Obscurity

By John I. Koivula and Richard W. Hughes

Obscurity is a lonely place, right next door to oblivion.

While a passport typically conjures up images of freedom, the open road and travel to exotic locales, not every destination is five-star. This point was driven home during the examination of a group of yellow sapphires recently sent to the laboratory for identification.
     The lot consisted of several yellow sapphires of graduated weight, each with similar shape, facet arrangement and face-up color. It appeared likely that all were intended for a single piece of jewelry.
     In gems of this type, inclusions are often sufficient to immediately identify the host as a natural sapphire, as well as prove or disprove heat treatment. When present, a 3160 infrared peak is also important evidence of natural, untreated origin in yellow sapphires. With but one exception, all the sapphires in the group contained obvious visual micro-evidence of natural origin, along with moderate to strong 3160 peaks in the infrared, both tickets to paradise.
     One sapphire, however, showed no obvious inclusions and no telltale 3160 peak, immediately raising an alarm. This meant it would require additional examination consisting of a detailed microscopic inspection using a combination of fiber-optic and darkfield illumination, with polarized light, if needed. Careful scrutiny would be necessary if a decision was to be reached as to the full identity.
     Microscopic search parties were sent out throughout the stone on a facet-to-facet search. All reported back empty-handed. Except one. As the stone was rocked to-and-fro, a weak flash of light winked from the abyss. Zooming in revealed a miniscule, inconspicuous heat-damaged inclusion with an associated mirror-reflective discoid decrepitation halo (Figure 1). While at just 0.01 mm in diameter (as measured with an eyepiece micrometer), this inclusion was certainly tiny, it was all that was needed to both eliminate the possibility of synthetic origin and prove heat treatment.

     Separate identification reports were requested for every stone and all except one received natural, unheated reports. While we do not know the fate of this individual gem, we suspect that when the client studied the reports, the guilty stone was pulled and a natural replacement found. The treated stone is probably now destined for a lesser piece of jewelry, or perhaps it will simply be placed somewhere in a drawer, cast aside and forgotten.
     Inclusions are passports, identification papers. From the transparent calcite rhombs in Burma rubies to the rutile arrows in Sri Lankan sapphires, these tiny disturbances so often provide entreé to a better place. But as this tale tells, inclusions may also be tickets to a less-than distinguished future.
     When inclusions provide proof of natural origin, they allow entry to paradise. But when the reverse is true, when they prove a gem to be treated or synthetic, they can be passports to obscurity. And obscurity is but a short walk from the abyss of oblivion.

About the authors

John I. Koivula is one of the world's most famous gemologists and photomicrographers. Author of several books and more than a thousand articles, he was also the scientific advisor to the famous MacGyver television series.

Richard Hughes (left) is the author of the classic Ruby & Sapphire and over 100 articles on various aspects of gemology. Many of his writings can be found at www.ruby-sapphire.com.

Notes

First published in November 2005, while John and I were at the AGTA GTC. Working with John was one of the greatest pleasures of my life, sadly far too brief. Looking back, I can only wonder what might have been… Thanks to Donald Allen for suggesting the above article.

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Posted 14 October, 2011; last updated 7 March, 2013