Calsilica - Fake or Real - Is Still Very Pretty
By: Dale Arnold
A couple of decades ago, calsilica started appearing in jewelry shows and gem and mineral exhibitions around the world. The specimens shown had bright and vivid colors that spanned the spectrum of the rainbow! Quite naturally, jewelry designers and fashion jewelry fans became enamored with this beautiful gemstone.
Over the next several years, there was a steady increase in the demand for calsilica for jewelry designs - soon calsilica earrings, silver pendants, rings, and other items began to appear on the market. Online and traditional jewelry stores could barely keep up with demand and the price for this stone increased steadily.
Once the initial euphoria for this new and beautiful gemstone in the world of jewelry died down, gemologists started to ask questions about the origin of this stone. Some were natural curious, while other were suspicions concerning the authenticity or naturalness of calsilica.
At first, suppliers staunchly claimed that calsilica was a natural stone that was discovered in a mine in the State of Chihuahua, Mexico. They claimed that mining of the stone continued to present day and even provided a few photographs of the mining operations.
The photographic evidence was inconclusive and doubts about the origin of calsilica persisted. Gemologists and geologists requested permission to visit the mine and visually inspect and confirm the deposits in Chihuahua. All these requests were denied on the grounds of proprietary information...
Suppliers persisted with the claim that calsilica was a natural material – a natural form of microcrystalline calcite, that was found in the veins or seams of the volcanic rhyolite rock formation. Their claim was that the binding agent in the stone was a mix of natural clay minerals that hardened under high pressure and temperatures, rendering the stone in the form that we now see today.
This did little to quiet rumors that calsilica was indeed a man-made material and not a naturally occurring stone as was originally claimed. Then came rumors of a spectacular deposit of natural calsilica in China. These specimens were supposedly obtained from a mine in China and were quite beautiful with colors and patterns rivaling those of the specimens from the "original mine" in Mexico.
To quell these rumors and answer the many questions surrounding this gemstone the Swiss Gemological Institute (SSEF) undertook a laboratory investigation of calsilica in 2002, and published their findings in one of their newsletters in 2003.
To begin their investigation, SSEF purchased two calsilica specimens at a gem and mineral show in France in 2002. The seller, of course, claimed that the stones were natural and even produced photographs of the mine in Mexico. To further bolster their claim, they even had a letter of authentication from a laboratory in the United States stating that the stones were not man-made.
SSEF performed microscopic examinations and laboratory tests on the specimens, and found that the base materials were indeed a natural form of calcite. They also discovered however, that the colored streaks in the stone contained man-made coloring pigments. They also found that the binding agent was a transparent soft, plastic-like material very similar to paraffin wax, and not natural clay minerals as was originally claimed.
This investigation proved once and for all that calsilica is a man-made stone.
On the other hand, this synthetic gemstones is still very pretty!
Author Resource:-> Dale is geologist and an amateur gemologist. He lives and works in Phoenix and maintains a website http://www.jtvjewels.com that contains informative articles on gems and gemstone jewelry. ---- Article From Articles For All
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