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PostPosted: Tue Jan 31, 2006 2:45 pm 
hi,
It is interesting that I have begun a war of words here. Here I am suggesting that treatment(heating and others) is a way to make economically unviable stocks viable, and stones that do not require treatment naturally do not have to undergo any unnecessary treatment.

A look at History

Let us take for example Sri Lankan Geuda. In its natural state, I doubt anybody will consider setting them into rings. Heating brings out the latent potential of the gemstone by dissolving the thickly overgrown rutile needles. What the Sri Lankans used to prop their houses up as worthless, absolutely worthless mind you, after a process of heat treatment and an investment of time, you suddenly have with you rough that you can derive say 200 per carat returns after the stones are cut. This all happened many years ago, say back around 1960s to 1985. So much so that the bulk of exported sapphires from Sri Lanka is heated; for that matter, the bulk of sapphires of the world.

Now a modern parallel; we have these horrid looking Tanzanian Songea sapphires and sapphires from various other places in hundreds of kgs. These are stones that miners have already mined, and they either sell or throw back to the landfill. Slight experimentation revealed that magic happens when they are heated with crysoberyl crystals(a natural source of Beryllium). Suddenly landfill rocks become economically viable.

Taking into consideration the above, we must realise that treatment is a viable, and logical way of realising the economic potential of gem rough(fish pond fill). Let us not just blindly cast away treatment as blasphemy to Nature, and not perform it. Don't obsess yourself with the notion that heat treatment isn't treatment, because it is. It is time tested and it became tradition. 50 years down the road, Beryllium treatment may too one day become a 'traditional method'.

Disclosure

Treatments are treatments all the same. What we should actually be concerned with is proper disclosure. The difference in asking prices between a natural loupe clean cornflower blue stone of say 5 carats, and of a similar but heated stone can be up to 100 to 150% different in prices due to rarity and hence collectability. Non disclosure in this instance is equally bad. The price discrepancy between clean heated and unheated rubies of good clarity and colour is far greater; possibly in the range of 5 to 10 folds difference in prices. In any case, heat treatment, in really clean sapphires and rubies may be undetectable! Just check any lab certificate and they will never state that heat treatment is not done. If fact, they will state that it is not detected. Kick in Beryllium diffusion, the latest gift to terror and poverty torn places like Sri Lanka and Africa. Non disclosure similarly results in defrauding people. Disclosure on the other hand brings prices down quite a bit.

Aussie Sapphire quoted a just example where a customer paid 10 per carat. This is not underpaying for gemstones by any measure because what beryllium treatment does is to conceal the fact that they are paying for landfill. 10 per carat is nothing more than cutting charges add a little profit. This is a proper disclosure. What happens if there isn't any proper disclosure? We all know.

Treatment stimulates the economy for the poor and desperate. It is unfortunate that it drags the prices of naturals down; but who is to blame? Each makes their niche market - the less financially endowed goes for gravels; the higher echelon goes for untreated. There is no point grumbling that prices are hit badly; most consumers don't have the technical knowledge of say an experienced trader or a gemmologist. They see the price tag. The educated ones goes for the virgin stones and fair enough.

Conclusion: Blame not Chrysoberyl
If the demand for natural stones are insufficient for subsistence then perhaps we have to concede defeat to the ultimate law; the Law of supply and Demand. And it seems that currently the market demands treated stones because of their ridiculously low prices. If this is a heavy competition, kill the person that theorised the Law of Supply and Demand. Not treatment.

All in all, treatment is ,for a fact, a useful technique for bringing utterly useless gravels to the consumers. And traders don't have to cheat to sell; the price tag on the gemstones sell themselves.

Unethical business practices cannot and must not be condoned. It hurts the whole trade, and consumers lose faith in the whole gemstone species instead of reading up more. Once again, it is not the fault of brilliant experimentation and science, it is the fault of human nature.

As I have mentioned, it is admirable to stick to your business principle of just dealing with natural unheated and traditional treatments. I salute you. I myself love natural sapphires. I feel a sense of joy when I see fine rutile silk in my sapphires.
But let us concede that business runs on a Law, and it is the Law of Supply and Demand. And that treatment rakes in money. Let me end this on a right note, just in case you guys conclude wrongly; I am fine with the trade trading in treated stones provided that ALL treatments, easy to detect, or hard to detect, or impossible to detect, are FULLY disclosed. I am not arguing for "Selling treated stones is good"; such a thesis is absurd.

hehheh

By the way, Edward Bristol, you wrote an amazing article on buying gem and gem rough in your website; on the "initiation test" of gem buyers by synthetics and imitations brought along by traders and other adventures. The bargaining part was also very close to heart. Very well done.


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PostPosted: Tue Jan 31, 2006 3:51 pm 
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On the health effects of Beryllium:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beryllium#Health_effects


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PostPosted: Tue Jan 31, 2006 4:35 pm 
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Here's a more relevant one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette#Health_effects


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PostPosted: Tue Jan 31, 2006 5:52 pm 
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... OK, maybe I missed something, but what does cigarette smoking have to do with Beryllium powder used in gem "cooking"?


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PostPosted: Tue Jan 31, 2006 6:54 pm 
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I figured you were concerned with the health risk the burners are taking by working with Be . . . I'm just showing that there are many things people are willing to risk their health or lives for. (Sorry for the dangling preposition :) )


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PostPosted: Tue Jan 31, 2006 10:33 pm 
Chatham himself puts himself in far more danger with his experimentation with the creation of synthetic emeralds and all. His fluxes were far more poisonous, with metallic fumes able to kill lesser beings easily.

If you are so concerned about the how poisonous Beryllium is, don't wear chrysoberyl or alexandrite. I die to wear them; what about you.

If heating chrysoberyl is such a concern, you are missing out on a big part of chemistry. The bulk of chemistry involves hazardous chemicals. Face it.

Vincent Pardieu did a photojournal of heat treatment of Pailin sapphires and you will see that they wash the sapphires with concentrated hydrofluoric acid for preparation. That's a dangerous compound too.

Or what about barium meals that you have to undergo for an x-ray of your digestive tracts? Barium, mind you, is horrendously poisonous.

Don't be obsessed about how poisonous the chemicals can be because many rocks and minerals happen to be really poisonous compounds themselves(Cinnabar, orpiment, natural mercury, torbenite). People still collect them all the same.

If it's the dangers of the job, think about the dangers people voluntarily put themselves through by smoking. Its occupational hazard. Miners are faced with collapsing mine shafts too.

I like gemstones to be beautiful. Brownish sapphires, or blue sapphires with yellowish overtones disgust me. If Beryllium treatment is going to remove the yellowish colouring, I'll treat them because either way, customers are going to be disgusted with gems that are not beautiful and the stones cannot be sold anyway.


Last edited by hehheh on Wed Feb 01, 2006 1:52 am, edited 1 time in total.

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PostPosted: Wed Feb 01, 2006 1:10 am 
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The history of gem treatments dates back thousands of years.
See:
http://www.ruby-sapphire.com/brief-history-heat.htm

The majority of jewelry manufactured today is made for the masses. The days where only nobility, society's upper echelon and religious figureheads commissioned jewels, is, thankfully, long gone.
Even when pieces are commercially and inexpensively mass- produced, they will not sell unless the buyer finds them beautiful.
Heat treated gems and beryllium diffused gems are beautiful and affordable.
They fill a need.


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PostPosted: Wed Feb 01, 2006 1:18 pm 
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Something Vincent said during the chat opened my eyes concerning treatments. Although I didn't get his point at first (4am in the morning).

Good wine is made from top grapes. In regions where top grapes are hard to grow they adapt the process and make great Champagne, or they apply some more heat and foreign materials and we get a great Cognac or liquer.
Both Champagne and Cognac can be considered enhanced wines.
We don't regard Champagne and Cognac makers as unethical though.

Alsong as you market them right and with open harnas, the disclosure is in the name.


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PostPosted: Wed Feb 01, 2006 4:53 pm 
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hehheh wrote:
Chatham himself puts himself in far more danger with his experimentation with the creation of synthetic emeralds and all. His fluxes were far more poisonous, with metallic fumes able to kill lesser beings easily.


Probably. I'm also assuming he had a proper lab around with fume hoods, etc. I don't know for certain, however.

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If you are so concerned about the how poisonous Beryllium is, don't wear chrysoberyl or alexandrite. I die to wear them; what about you.


Repeat after me: Alexandrite in a pendant around your neck, SAFE. Plastic baggies of Beryllium powder for sale on the street, BAD.

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If heating chrysoberyl is such a concern, you are missing out on a big part of chemistry. The bulk of chemistry involves hazardous chemicals. Face it.


The bulk of chemistry also involves proper procedure for handling those hazardous chemicals. Face it.

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Vincent Pardieu did a photojournal of heat treatment of Pailin sapphires and you will see that they wash the sapphires with concentrated hydrofluoric acid for preparation. That's a dangerous compound too.


Again, proper handling procedures for hazardous compounds is the concern here. Many things are "safe" if you deal with them properly.

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Or what about barium meals that you have to undergo for an x-ray of your digestive tracts? Barium, mind you, is horrendously poisonous.


Show me someone who comes into contact with Barium because of Barium x-ray tests at the same rate as people dealing with Beryllium powder and I'll grant that you may have a point. Besides, it's not uncommon to use "dangerous" compounds in the diagnosis and treatment of disease. In these cases, there's a greater danger by NOT using the Barium. There is NO danger (health wise) in NOT using Be-treatment.

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Don't be obsessed about how poisonous the chemicals can be because many rocks and minerals happen to be really poisonous compounds themselves(Cinnabar, orpiment, natural mercury, torbenite). People still collect them all the same.


An inhalable powder and a "stable" rock are different things.

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If it's the dangers of the job, think about the dangers people voluntarily put themselves through by smoking. Its occupational hazard. Miners are faced with collapsing mine shafts too.


Sure it's an occupational hazard... and some people choose not to do it. Of course, those that DO do it like to have SAFETY procedures in place I'd imagine. Selling baggies of Beryllium powder on the street strikes me as about as wise as doing work 3000 ft. down a mine shaft in bermuda shorts and a t-shirt with a cigarette lighter for illumination. Also, when people die in a collapsed mine shaft, it's almost 100% certain to be miners who understood the risk. When you're dealing with dangerous carcinogens (even smoking cigarettes), especially powdered ones, the likelihood that people OTHER than those voluntarily taking informed risks will be at danger is higher.

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I like gemstones to be beautiful. Brownish sapphires, or blue sapphires with yellowish overtones disgust me. If Beryllium treatment is going to remove the yellowish colouring, I'll treat them because either way, customers are going to be disgusted with gems that are not beautiful and the stones cannot be sold anyway.


The treatment is fine as long as proper safety precautions are undertaken and the treatment is fully disclosed at all levels of the supply chain. Do you think that both those cases are true?


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PostPosted: Thu Feb 02, 2006 2:49 am 
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Thanks for your kind words, hehheh. (do you have a more personal name for us?).

One root problem with the disclosure of treatments is the way the trade is (not) organized:
Totally defragmented and filled with people who, for various reasons from lack of education to money laundering, hate accounting.

Thus we all face a constant mess of treated and untreated stones in any stock and in any parcel. Even if one could trust anybody in the jungle we would still have to test every stone and even then we know that not all treatments are detectable.

Try to buy non-irradiated pink tourmaline these days. You can not! Not unless you saw it coming out of the river. As you might have read on my site I have gone that hard way in order to control our supply chain, got myself gray hair over it, and still it sometimes happens that I get a stone that somebody, somewhere has held into a fire.

This market is too chaotic and uncontrolled for us to accept that totally unreliable people can radiate or add chemicals (of whatever sort) into a high value product without later being held responsible for it.

It is too risky!

People on this message board are already educated and can rationally discuss and then decide about treatments.

BUT: If something bad happens, say somebody claims to have gotten skin cancer from a radiated chrysoberyl cat’s eye and goes to court with it, then we will have panic (media loves it) and the whole industry will go on its knees.

p.s. lets not speak of a 'war' on this polite and useful discussion board. War is quite a bad thing even with words.

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Edward Bristol
http://www.WildFishGems.com & http://www.EdwardBristol.com
Exclusively Untreated Gemstones


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PostPosted: Thu Feb 02, 2006 12:05 pm 
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Hi All!

Thought I'd post the latest words of wisdom from Richard Hughes:


This Year's Model:
Beryllium-treated blue sapphires

"See her picture in a thousand places 'cause she's this year's girl…

Please excuse the banal nonchalance of my been-there, done-that deadpan, but it's Tucson time again and what would the world's greatest gem fiesta be without yet another treatment model roll-out. Bigger, faster, badder!

This year's girl is none other than beryllium, back again for yet another go, but this time dressed in blue. Beryllium treated blue sapphires. We've been predicting it for several years, now it's here.

Cynical? Yes, but there is hope. This go-round, some of the gem docs on the downside of the eight ball last time come up smelling like roses. Bravo. Boogie chillen!

Sadly, then there are others, those that have no qualms about pissing in the public well. What they forget is that their own children will inhabit the world they have made. By treating blue sapphires with beryllium, they will poison yet another segment of the gem market. But perhaps there is a silver lining. We can expect that this will further accelerate the demand for sapphires that have had no heat treatment whatsoever.

Never knowing it's a real attraction, all these promises of satisfaction…

You're gonna hear a helluva lot about this gal in the coming weeks. Plenty of panties in a whirl. All this, but no surprises for this year's girl…"

Bold, my emphesis. My views are 1) the gem market is rife with non-disclosure - there is no point is saying treatments are fine as long is disclosed - they are NOT being disclosed!!!, 2) the diffusion treatments are undercutting important segments of the gem market - therefore, despite the short-term profits realized by the treaters, these treatments are ultimately counterproductive.

Cheers!
Greg


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PostPosted: Thu Feb 02, 2006 12:34 pm 
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That sounds to me like good news for people like Aussie Sapphire, Edward and others who are selling unheated and untreated stones. Look at what happened to the yellow sapphire market.


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PostPosted: Thu Feb 02, 2006 4:24 pm 
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This news is not unexpected but will hurt us all. A flood of good blue into the market at this time of already depressed prices can only have one effect (supply/demand).

It may benefit the natural sellers long-term but short-term I can only see it helping the burners who have developed it. And depending on the severity of the effect, some of us may not survive to see the long-term. Vincent alluded to a possible new blue treatment in Sri Lanka, perhaps this is it?

The whole idea of disclosure stinks - when is it disclosed ? Gems pass through a lot of hands usually before reaching the customer, it only takes one in the supply chain to somehow forget this info for the whole thing to fall over.

hehheh talked of my example of $10/ct BE treated yellows and said that this was just proper disclosure and at that level I agree. The problem being there is no way that this buyer will disclose that fact to their customers - they will almost certainly be sold as Natural Australian yellows, just because they were bought in our local area. It is extremely unlikely that this rough would have been Australian but their retail customers will walk out the door thinking these are beautiful natural yellow sapphire mined just up the road.

A large miner here is trying to decide now whether to continue working or sack their staff and close for good - this news might force this decision at last. They have been hanging on for a long time hoping for an improvement in the market but this news will change market conditions quite significantly I expect. I guess it will become more clear in coming weeks.

If they are talking about turning "landfill into saleable items" it just brings the price of real gems back to the landfill levels - and that does not help the miner - it only helps the burners. And one day, when miners go out of business and the burners realise that they cant get reliable supply, nobody wins. Again, in my $10/ct example, the buyer was using that price to bargain us down lower and lower. And I can tell you, we cannot survive on a price that is "just cutting with a little profit".

Kind of ironic that we are also discussing how Ebay is such a shark-pit: full of fraud and misinformation. I am not sure many B & M outlets are all that better - just more expensive. I remember clearly asking a shop manager (one of the larger chain jewellery stores) whether he stocked natural sapphire or could source it - he flatly refused to believe that sapphire was treated and claimed to not know that almost all sapphire was routinely heated. I can guarantee that in those types of shops, the issue of beryllium would not be even considered, let alone mentioned !

This is not good news and I'm feeling a bit down as I go off to another day at the mine.

regards

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Andrew Lane
(Aussie Sapphire)
www.aussiesapphire.com.au


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PostPosted: Thu Feb 02, 2006 5:42 pm 
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Andrew,

Rest assured that there will always be customers out there for high-quality and natural stones. I just hope that there are enough to weather you through the storm. :(


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PostPosted: Thu Feb 02, 2006 5:49 pm 
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I am sad Andrew, but tend to agree with you – I think it only can be bad news at the end of the day.

The issue of acceptability I think is in line commonality. Like heating, it is accepted, because everybody does it, and most end consumers don’t know or care. I now have this sinking feeling that in the blink of an eye be. treating will also become so prevalent that it becomes accepted – and you just assume that a stone has been “treated”, rather than just “heated”.

Andrew, time to get cooking?

Martin

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Martin


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