Gem experts tricks to spotting
fakes
Many people who purchase a diamond
simulant don't necessarily want others
to know that
what they are wearing is not a diamond. Thus, part
of the goal
of Asha� was to learn how and why
various simulants could be spotted as
fakes. Thus,
we continuously showed various simulants to
customers,
scientists and of course jewelers and gem
experts with our long-standing
"Asha�
challenge". Based on that feedback we went
through 3 different
iterations of Asha�, now
culminating in version3.
If you examine a fine, well-cut
diamond closely, you will see that the look it
has
might best be summarized as "sparkling
liquid-mercury". If you then
compare most common
simulants, you can see how and where they fall short
pretty easily.
Moissanite has exceptional sparkle,
but its heavy green tinting (especially
the larger
the gem is) and blurry look when looking directly
into the stone will
fail to convince most experts thats its a diamond. It may pass as a poor
grade
diamond if not inspected closely however. Moissanite also does not
have the internal
whitish-silver shimmer that is meant by the
"sparkling liquid-
mercury" analogy above. However,
when used in smaller size rounds, it's a
good simulant. The smaller the stone, the harder it is
to see the details, and
thus the blurry look and
tinting tend to not be as visible.
Within the CZ world, most jewelers
told us that typical CZ is spotted easily
because it
is either "too white" or "too glassy" to be a
diamond. Again, it's
very dependent on the quality
of cz, but lower grade cz can vary in color from
a
dull gray to a plasticy white. The other easy test
is to take a low quality
cz into the sunlight and
observe it - it will not sparkle as much as diamond,
especially on the underside (if the underside is
visible). Like moissanite,
though, even low grade cz is a good simulant for small sizes (2mm, 3mm),
again simply because the eye cannot make out as many
details in the smaller
sizes.
Thus, part of the evolution of Asha�
was to ensure that the cz crystal
grown had the
right 'mercury-like' shimmer that fine diamond has,
as it was
the color that tended to give away common cz. After achieving that with
version 1, we then
found out other tricks that diamond experts used to
spot
whether a given gem was diamond or simulant.
There were several, but
most were related to the
manner of cut employed. Basically, diamond is a
very expensive substance, and thus when cut,
especially for larger stones,
diamond cutters tended
to ensure that the extra details in cutting were
taken care of. In most cz's, they were not.
Most jewelers would evaluate color
first, then if it passed that, the next
step would
be to examine the cut to determine if it was a simulant or real.
Version2 of Asha� addressed some
of the cutting issues, and with version3,
we went
all the way with the round cut to cutting it in the
same fashion as
the very best diamonds, namely a
Hearts and Arrows cut. Fewer than 1 in
1000
diamonds will have this level of cutting employed,
and its rarely seen
on a simulant, so with version3
Asha�, experts no longer had any visual
clues to
look for in order to ascertain if the Asha� simulant
was diamond or
Asha�. For version3, our cutters had
to spend approximately 8 times as
long cutting the
Asha� as before, in order to meet the necessary
parameters of a hearts and arrows cut. In
confirmation of that, version3
Asha� was finally
able to fool the gem expert (who had never been
fooled
before by any simulant) our professor of
mineralogy had relied on for
feedback
as we
developed the Asha� gem.
One other obvious trick used by most
people of course is simply the type of
jewelry
employed! If you had a $10,000 diamond, would you
put it in a
cheap 10k, hastily assembled ring? Of
course you wouldn't, yet if you view
most low grade cz's, they end up in very cheap jewelry mountings.
External
clues like that also impact on the
believability of any simulant. Thus, all the
jewelry we utilize at BetterThanDiamond are the
highest quality mountings,
exactly the same as would
be used for any natural diamond.
Article still in progress...
References:
"Crystal chemistry and refractivity", Howard Jaffe
