Is the Mozambique stone the bejesus of bird's blood? Lotus Gemology's resident ruby wallah, Richard Hughes, weighs in on the state of the market and how Mozambique stacks up to historical heavyweights like Burma and Thailand/Cambodia.
An orangish pink “padparadscha” sapphire was submitted for testing at Lotus Gemology’s Bangkok laboratory. Testing showed a number of conflicting features that suggested the gem was a cleverly treated synthetic pink sapphire designed to imitate natural padparadscha.
This article discusses the factors that influence quality and what to look for when buying both jadeite and nephrite. A list of jade auction records is also included.
A discussion of the definition of padparadscha sapphire, from early to modern times, along with the difficulty in standardizing such definitions.
Welcome to Hyperion Sherlock, Lotus Gemology's Advanced Gem Inclusion Search Engine. This allows you to search for inclusions by the gem species (corundum, spinel, beryl, chrysoberyl) or variety (ruby, sapphire, emerald, alexandrite). You can even search by country of origin or locality. The result will be a table listing all known solid inclusions in that gem material. Each inclusion is fully documented with references of when it was first discovered.
Where we have photographs of that inclusion, those will also show up in the search. See anything missing? Let us know with the reference and we will consider adding it to the database.
Hyperion Sherlock is part of Lotus Gemology's ongoing effort to provide tools to help gemologists learn more about gems. Enjoy!