She’s Come Unstrung

It’s time to start blogging about all the fakery out there in the gemstone world, since it occupies a good part of my mind. Fake Friday will be a recurring feature on my blog, and will probably not be posted on Fridays (get it?).

Anyway, recently I got a new color/stone combo in mind to play with, and bought two strands of what were identified as “Peruvian blue opal” from my favorite vendor. Here is one of the strands:

They look like nice Peruvian blue opal. They aren't.

Gorgeous, right? I thought so too. (My daughter just walked by the computer and said, “pretty!”) I also bought a strand of faceted rondelles. Unfortunately, I was A) in a hurry that day, B) buying a stone I didn’t know anything about, and C) ignoring the little voice in my head that said something was off.

At home the next day, eager to get to work, I pulled out the rondelles. They were a little sticky feeling (clue #1), so I washed them. Still sticky. I pulled a few off the strand and noticed a couple were whiter around the drill hole (clue #2). This isn’t always an indicator of a problem, but it did make me look more closely. I pulled out my loupe for a close up and noticed a difference in the finish of the stone right around the hole (clue #3). The stones were very glossy except for right around the hole.

I was pretty sure what the next test was going to reveal. I grabbed my pliers (not the good ones!) and scraped at the area around the hole. Uh-oh. Flakes of aqua blue gathered on the plier edge, and the light area around the hole grew larger with each scrape. This is the point where I said some words that I would not say in front of the kids. (Well, unless I didn’t know they were within earshot. They’ve certainly been accidentally exposed to mom’s occasional potty mouth.)

Anyway, after getting the coating to start coming off, I found I could scrape it with my fingernail. Here’s a close up of the rondelle and another that I cracked open (which showed the underlying stone was an insipid grayish-white color, not a vibrant aqua):

Fake Peruvian blue opal with coating scratched away

I grabbed the briolettes. I didn’t even have to look too hard to find where the coating had already scratched off an edge:

Coating already scraped off a briolette

I felt like crying, not the least because the project I was ready to embark on was shot! And clearly, I had managed to buy inferior Peruvian opal that had been coated with a colored resin or plastic to pass them off as higher quality. I felt pretty dumb.

I spent some time looking at supply shops and various Internet vendors and found several examples of similar “Peruvian blue opal.” Without having the stones in hand I couldn’t say for sure, but zooming in on some of the photos I found showed some possible scraping and flaking of a coating and a super glossy look like the stones I bought had. And not one source had information about any treatment at all, much less a dyed coating. So this isn’t an isolated problem. Some sources I found stated that almost all the “Peruvian blue opal” coming out of India and China is not genuine natural opal from Peru.

It’s not that I spent a huge amount on the stones — I didn’t, which actually should have been clue #1. If I had known anything about Peruvian blue opal before I bought these strands, I would have known that the real thing should have cost ten times what I paid for these fake blue opals. I’m usually pretty skeptical of buying stones I know nothing about but got carried away this time. It happens. Even professional gemologists get fooled sometimes, so I’m not beating myself up too badly. The important thing to me is that I not pass anything off to my customers without doing my best to know what I am using and to disclose what I know about my supplies. I could not in good conscience have turned a blind eye to the clues I was noticing.

And of course my supplier took them back, no problem at all. (If he had not, I would have stopped buying from him.) He apologized that the staff member who sold them to me didn’t disclose the coating. FTC rules require sellers of gemstones in the United States (from the mine to the finished piece of jewelry) to disclose all treatments, and I have never had this particular vendor fail to do so in the past. I am not categorically opposed to treatments (else I would not be able to use many gemstones which are routinely treated, some of which can’t be used in jewelry without treatment) but I do draw the line at coatings that are not permanent and/or are obviously meant to mislead one into buying a crap gemstone passing itself off as something rare. And truly, if someone knowingly uses these treated stones to create inexpensive jewelry and discloses the treatment to her customers, I see no problem with that. That’s not my product nor my market, so back to the supplier they went!

It’s a sad fact that anyone buying gemstones has to embrace “caveat emptor” — gemstones are a highly lucrative market, and dishonest people are at work all the time trying to find new ways to make money by creating sophisticated treatments to fool even the smartest buyers. Hopefully, sharing my experience with coated Peruvian blue opal will help buyers be a little more informed about this particular treatment.