Heated Spinel?

[innerkitten]

I asked a dealer on ebay about his spinel. he said it was natural but heated for permanent color. That sounded really weird to me cause I hadn''t heard of heating spinel for color before. Could it be a diffusion stone or something like that? Sounded suspicious.

 

[DiamondExpert]

Natural spinel is not usually treated with heat - perhaps this is a clever way of telling you that it is synthetic spinel without using those words!...I hope not!

 

[mogok]

Hello,
Usually spinels are not heated... But well it does not means that nobody has tried it! I guess that there are some heated spinels here and there. To my knowledge there is up to know no real benefit to heat a spinel except if its to hide a fissure or fill a cavity using some glass filling process.
In spinel color is stable naturally.
But in Gemology never and impossible are 2 words that should not be used.

All the best

 

[innerkitten]

I see.
As much as I love gem stones and know that there are nice honest people in the gem world, I have to say there seem to be plenty of sleazy individuals in the gem business too.

 

[Cave Keeper]

----------------
On 7/12/2004 1:02:03 PM innerkitten wrote:

:
As much as I love gem stones .., I have to say there seem to be plenty of sleazy individuals in the gem business too.----------------

And on the Net, there are quite a few sites which describe opaque, etc., stones in superlative terms when gem-quality standards require translucency or trasparency, etc., for certain minerals.

I think I might go back to simply collecting natural quartz rocks where half a thousand dollars will get you a real, large honest-looking crystal.

 

[valeria101]

Seen this before... the "heated spinel" label that is. I am definitely not aware of what good heat can do to spinel, but I did ask why the label was there. One answer was: "we do not know to identify treatments, so heating is assumed". In this case, spinel was receiving the same labeling as sapphire or ruby. It is always worth asking!

As Mogok says, one may find glass or other fillers used to improve clarity of red spinel. Stones with particularly good color but imperfect clarity are the first suspects for this, as far as my understanding.