Lapidaryforum.net
Let's Rock => Rock Talk => Topic started by: finegemdesigns on December 27, 2017, 07:43:22 PM
-
A video I made with photos and analysis:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzD6_TGEnec
-
Nice jade. Tried to watch the video and kept getting commercials.... aaargh Do you have a link to your web site?
-
that is nice jade. i love that blue hue it has.
-
Commercials? I guess it's because of the music. As far as my website, I do have information about blue jadeite but not this specific material yet.
https://www.finegemdesigns.com/guatemalajadeite.htm
It's too dark for me to get excited about it based on my sample and the color doesn't match the seller's photos. This seems to be par for the course for many of these Guatemalan sellers. The photos are bad and they always seem to be bad to their benefit not worse. So based on my research I won't be ordering this material again.
(http://www.zbestvalue.com/images26/jadeite-2slabscompare-labeled.jpg)
If anyone else has purchased this jade and got a better grade please post your experiences here. Lastly the tan crust is strange and almost looks like the material could have been heat treated. Is this even possible with jadeite and has it ever been done before? Heating jadeite to change the color?
-
I bought some quite a few years ago, and also was disappointed in the range of color. My understanding is that they don't let the good blues out of the country, and haven't since shortly after the blue was rediscovered. The brown rind is from weathering and is usual in jadeite (though the rind flakes off and is often not present in stream-tumbled cobbles). AFAIK heat treatment isn't used to improve jadeite's color or translucence (this is done by bleaching and acid baths and/or dye followed by resin treatment). The only people I know that have tried heat-only treatment reported that it either turns the stone shades of yellow-brown or red-orange, rather than improving anything. Supposedly, some have treated the Turkish purple to drive off some of the yellow-browns, but that seems counter-intuitive and no verification on that. Heating weakens the stone and doesn't produce the more desirable colors, so I wonder why anyone would do it unless it was very low grade stone to start with.
-
Thanks rocks2dust good information.