Tagged “imitations”
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Density, and what a stone weighs
Specific gravity separates jadeite from serpentine cleanly and separates nothing in the crowded middle. The method, the arithmetic, and the error bars.
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How imitation stone is made
Dyeing, waxing, polymer impregnation, reconstitution, glass and resin — each is a different process, and each leaves a different trace behind.
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Horn, bone, and wood as tool materials
Organic tool materials behave nothing like stone: they take up moisture, move with it, and soften with heat rather than cracking.
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Stainless steel and metal tools
Steel does not fail like stone. It bends instead of shattering, and the interesting question is whether a metal tool is solid steel or a plated casting.
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Reading a polished surface
A polished face records the material's structure and the workshop that finished it. Undercutting, pitting and orange peel each mean something specific.
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Heat, irradiation, and coatings
Dyeing is the treatment everyone knows about. Heating, irradiation and surface coating are equally common, and each leaves a different kind of trace.
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Aventurine, goldstone, and the glitter
Aventurine glitters because of flat mineral flakes inside it. Goldstone glitters because someone put copper in molten glass. They are not the same.
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Obsidian, and natural glass
Obsidian is volcanic glass — genuinely amorphous, genuinely a stone. Which makes it the one material where looking like glass proves nothing.
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Rose quartz, and what makes it pink
Rose quartz is a cloudy pink quartz aggregate coloured by microscopic inclusions — which is why the clear, evenly pink version is usually something else.
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Synthetic, imitation, simulant, composite
Four words that get used interchangeably and mean four different things. A synthetic stone is the real mineral; an imitation contains none of it.
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Lustre, translucency, and what light shows
Lustre is how a surface reflects; translucency is how the body transmits. Both are observable without equipment, and both are routinely misread.