Im always looking for the hard to come by, or rare stones for my pendents, this one is like hens teeth to find in this color, yellow spinel, most people have never seen it, i had the chance to buy some, not verified as yet, with pretty good color & size. This stone is just over 5.5cts, 11x9x6mm, VS class. A similar material known as rubicelle is on the market, same stuff, different name, with little value market wise because of lack of demand & product. Pic enclosed, if anyone interested, will post appraisal when complete-m76steve…
Interesting… just from the picture, that looks to me like beryllium treated corundum (sapphire). When they heat sapphire with Be, it reduces or eliminates any blue tones. This orangy-yellow hue looks almost exactly like most of the Be sapphires I’ve seen. Typically they take subtle/weak yellow or greenish-yellow gems, heat them with Be, and this is a typical result.
So my money is on it being a beryllium treated sapphire, not a spinel. Who is appraising/ID-ing it?
As an aside, I wrote about a case of mis-identification of sapphire as spinel pretty recently in this article. It’s a common mistake that, in that case, worked in my favor
gemguy, as it stands now, nothing is on the table, i agree with u this stuff could b anything, thats why i posted. The stones i bought, 3, were cheap, listed as unheated/untreated, yellow spinel. For the money & a little professional testing, im sure our ?'s can be answered. If the stuff test as spinel, the wife has another nice pendent, if not, the stones will make a nice gift to someone who likes gemstones. Ive been burned by a seller of gravel out of hollywood, fl. [ruby], & after the seller told me to basically pound sand, no refund from a sale 2 yrs ago & a proven bad stone, i told them i would give them as much bad pub. as i can, even with the threat from their lawyers. In this case money is not the issue, but what they r selling is interesting & many of my friends r curious also-will post results here in @ 7-10 days-curious-m76steve…by the way, if i rid me of the stones, they r giveaways, i would never sell a stone mis-ID’ed to anyone…
My bet is that this is not natural spinel. Could be Be sapphire, but I doubt it because even a 5.5 carat VS Be treated sapphire might be hard to get for “cheap”. Of course inexpensive is a realtive term.
Could be (probably is?) synthetic. The only thing that pushes me away from synthetic is the fact that it is only graded as VS, but even some synthetic spinels and corundums have inclusions. Could even be quartz. At any rate, I’d about fall out of my chair if this came back natural spinel.
Im posting pics of the same material, different stones-maby these pics can add to the mix a little info. One of my appraisers is already looking into what is & could be.-m76steve…
the followup appr is SYNTHETIC SPINEL, stones r too clean, under the scope, bubbles can b seen in the material, more properties of synthetic than natural, value is poopoo on the stones-this seller on the bay has almost as many negative feedback as positive. probably one of many bad guys selling on the site-m76steve…
