Etched into the side of this unusual grossular green garnet crystal from Southern Ethiopia, is the somewhat minuscule hallucinogenic atomical etchings looking like a futuristic cityscape. Too much absinthe sir ?
A 50CT+ Barcode Emerald, or, to be more precise, white beryl with chromium-rich emerald zoning. From Skardu, Pakistan. A highly unusual and collectible piece.
Passing thru the office the other day was a small parcel of cobalt-glass filled sapphire. Technically not really a sapphire, they a manufactured mish-mash composite of dyed-blue-lead-glass and low quality colorless corundum. We thought we could snap a few photomicrographs under the microscope and provide a few slides with annotation of what is going inside and outside of these "Franken-Sapphires".
Green Tourmaline From Rubaya, Democratic Republic of the Congo Known somewhat casually and unofficially as Congo #2 by Chanthaburi’s hundreds of African rough gemstone dealers, these electric grass-green tourmaline crystals burst out of a new deposit in the Eastern Congo’s Rubaya area in July / August 2019. The crystal sizes and clarity from this mine have been absolutely exceptional with…
Holy Cow Batman! Is That A Weird Near Ultra-Violet Sapphire ? No. Its a deeply colored vanadium and chrome rich sapphire from Tunduru in Tanzania. Granted this sapphire does have a powerful fibre-optic parked up its rear-end which explains the intensity of the colors. But, what the fiber-optic does not explain, is, the combination of colors, the directions and also…
A strange parcel of crystals from deep in the Oromia state, Southern Ethiopia, came to the office last week. The crystals richly green, had a blue-green color and olive’s color another way. We noticed that several crystals looked reddish with a light when viewed in particular directions. The phenomena appears to be an unusual and not-entirely-explicable interplay between pleochroism, flourescence…
Winza, pronounced Win-Za in its mother language Kiswahili, produced in my opinion the best ruby colors to be found in all of Africa.
The Chameleon Zircon That Gets A Fading Suntan One week ago a huge and quite spectacular color zircon was bought to my office in Chanthaburi, Thailand, which was an intense and almost neon pure-yellow color — like mandarin color zircon. Showing a vivid yellow color, we photographed and videoed it, and amongst other places, posted it to Gemology Worldwide.