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 Post subject: "Smoked Opal" auctions
PostPosted: Sat Jul 13, 2019 5:10 am 
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Im pretty sure if the colors on your Opal look like this, you have been smoking a lil too much of something... Not Opal from Oelo though

https://www.opalauctions.com/auctions/1 ... j12-790359


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 Post subject: Re: "Smoked Opal" auctions
PostPosted: Sat Jul 13, 2019 2:12 pm 
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I have seen smoked/dyed ethiopian opals that actually looked this nice.

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 Post subject: Re: "Smoked Opal" auctions
PostPosted: Sun Jul 14, 2019 2:17 pm 
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Fair enough. I feel like (although this could be BS) I have developed a sense of the synthetics based on how much shift in position you see from the flashes of light vs a change in perspective (maybe due to the fact that the light is not generated by interference phenomena between layers of spheres which means it will not show as extreme a perspective shift as reflection off of something).

Maybe this could serve as a place to discuss some definitive ways to distinguish synthetics without advanced forms of spectroscopy.


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 Post subject: Re: "Smoked Opal" auctions
PostPosted: Sun Jul 14, 2019 4:54 pm 
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I have not seen a synthetic showing large scale honeycomb/digit patterns, but this is 100% typical of ethiopian material.
Synthetic opals have the exact same mechanism of coloration, though there is so much resin in most that they areb't insanely hard to distinguish. Simulants are even easier to disti guish with basic gem tools.

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 Post subject: Re: "Smoked Opal" auctions
PostPosted: Mon Jul 15, 2019 7:06 am 
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Stephen Challener wrote:
I have not seen a synthetic showing large scale honeycomb/digit patterns, but this is 100% typical of ethiopian material.
Synthetic opals have the exact same mechanism of coloration, though there is so much resin in most that they areb't insanely hard to distinguish. Simulants are even easier to disti guish with basic gem tools.


100% agree, its quite easy to spot synthetic honeycomb, the one in the link looks typical of natural.

heres 1 I recently sold, perfect honeycomb but natural

Image


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