Joined: Sun Oct 16, 2005 12:22 pm Posts: 21602 Location: San Francisco
On Sunday I went to the San Francisco Fine Mineral Show with Gem-n00b (Karim) and he surprised me with a gift of an unusual specimen,he found from a dealer specializing in Chinese minerals:
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With some magnification (10X), we see several platy, transparent, doubly refractive,purplish-pink crystals, some containing trigonal centers with higher color concentrations:
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You'll never guess what this stuff is.....or will you?
Joined: Sun Oct 16, 2005 12:22 pm Posts: 21602 Location: San Francisco
Don't you all post at the same time! You'll overload my bandwidth! No clue?
I personally have never seen anything like it and was surprised to find out, these crystals are synthetic ruby.....or simply, synthetic blades of light red corundum.
Joined: Fri May 12, 2006 11:24 am Posts: 7523 Location: Rome, Italy
Barbra Voltaire wrote:
I personally have never seen anything like it and was surprised to find out, these crystals are synthetic ruby.....or simply, synthetic blades of light red corundum.
So it's a fake/composed specimen or what? ciao alberto
Joined: Sun Oct 16, 2005 12:22 pm Posts: 21602 Location: San Francisco
It appears as though the corundum xls were grown on a matrix which I can not identify. There were several examples of this stuff; I recall seeing several flats at the show, very reasonably priced, perhaps $10-$20 each. Karim was fascinated by it and got me a piece so I could set it up with my new horizontal scope set-up.
Joined: Mon Oct 17, 2005 2:39 pm Posts: 3528 Location: San Francisco Bay Area, CA
It was advertised as synthetic ruby from a lab in China, cost was $10. I thought it would look interesting under magnification, and it appears I was right.
Joined: Tue Jun 03, 2008 4:40 pm Posts: 2667 Location: South Dakota
i was gone so missed the thread..wouldn't have guessed right either way..go figure it's from china too. I am surprised it was advertised as syn. LOL I bet a few are floating aroiund advertised as "natural" pretty cool though..i wouldn't mind having one myself..wonder how it's done
_________________ MrAmethystguy ~ Some jokes just fluorite over my head!
ehi its nice to see this stuff again!! yes it looks very similar to the one i posted on that topic... would be interesting to know what it actually is...they might sell it as synth ruby just to make it look important... can it be so cheap to produce it? if they sell specimen for 10$ plus...how can they grow synth ruby on that matrix? it seems "fragile" and i guess ruby needs some more "extreme" conditions.
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