Fakes and Forgeries

Man made crystals are wonderful teaching tools, often made of elements that are not found in nature, or rarely as exciting as crystals created in a controlled environment. Alumium and magnesium from refining operations are often sold as natural crystals, as well as the supposed smokestack, but truly, lab grown, zincite crystals. Sulfur stalactites are sometimes sold as natural occurrences, yet, form on the side of pipes, precipitating out the element. Lab grown crystals of Zircon, Emerald, and Ruby are often sold as the real thing, embedded in matrix in some extremes. Gemstones known for a rare source for desirable hues find labs searching for ways to duplicated them, such as “Siberian” amethyst or “russian” ametrine. Some specimens, like the crafted Malachite stalactites from the D.R. Congo, contain copper wires inside, with a layer of malachite produced by man, with druzy malachite glued to the outside.

Coatings or treatments of crystals are common as a way to create new items to market. The world can only take so many quartz crystals, geodes, danburite crystals and zeolites. Years ago it was discovered that you could take a somewhat tough mineral and place it in a vacuum chamber and fuse it with an element in gas form. The result is a durable bond of elements such as gold, titanium, indium and iron oxide, to the surface of the crystal, giving it a beautiful sparkle and color. Gold creates blue, or Aqua Aura, indium produces a violet hue, titanium produces a opalescent white coating and iron oxide colors the quartz a predictable orange, with a vibrant sparkle. Most dealers are very up-front about the origin of these specimens and most buyers are not turned off by this fact. The crazy colorful sparkle is something that could not be found in nature for such a price! The other treatment of quartz was a Teflon coating, which created “jelly quartz” in all sorts of bright colorful hues. Electroplating and similar treatments can be used to fuse quartz with chromium and produce bright green quartz clusters.

Chemical Reactions create all sorts of colorful results in crystals. The most common would be the results of Copper Sulfate, which makes colorless carbonates turn bright blue and green. The result is “pseudomorphs” of malachite after calcite and malachite after aragonite.

Mechanical alterations are when someone takes a natural specimen and uses a tool to alter it in a completely un-natural way to produce a fake that is intended to be a natural find. Fluorite is often the victim to this, as the material is very soft and can be made into fluorite octahedrons by cleaving, then sold as natural crystals, or carved into spheres or crude crystals and sold as natural formed specimens. In the 2000’s there was a batch of galena crystals which were found to be the product of creative, aggressive, micro-abrasion. Some people unscrupousially take minerals from some locations and glue them onto matrix from other locations, or many times, their own local matrix in attempt to increase value.

Irradiation of mineral specimens is a fairly common thing, as it is simple to turn colorless quartz into deep black smoky quartz or take pale aquamarine and turn it into a vibrant golden helidor. With Quartz, the source of natural smoky coloration comes from radioactive sources in the formation and host rock. These natural smoky quartz crystals tend to retain their color when exposed to sunlight, where as irradiated crystals will fade fast when exposed to sunlight. People who sell Helidor from Tajikistan will swear on their mother’s good name that the material is natural, but many of the examples have been textbook representations of aquamarine deposits in Pakistan. Most blue topaz that is seen on the jewelry market is irradiated to bring out the deep blue colors.

Heat Treatment causes changes in crystal color that are sometimes necessary to make a mineral valuable as a gemstone. Tanzanite is a perfect example of heat treatment in a gemstone, as most of the crystals out of the ground have lots of brown hues in the crystal, which turn violet and blue when exposed to heat. The most common heat treatment of a mineral is Citrine, where the common purple quartz of rio de sol is cooked in a kiln to produce a rich reddish orange citrine color. These specimens can be found in examples all over the world as one of the most common treated specimens found at museum gift shops, truck stops, gem shops, mineral shows, metaphysical store, interior design stores and any other imaginable place you could find a brazilian agate or an amethyst geode. This photo is the perfect example of this in heat treatment in action, as half of the plate was broken in half, one side heated and the other side left natural. Together again, they show what heat can do to some minerals. Another quirky heat related fake can come from the heat applied to silver ore, acanthite, silver wires will precipitate out, and sometimes in a way that looks an awful lot like natural silver wires. The roasted specimens have a tail-tell roasted soot tarnish at the base of the crystals. The glut of Moroccan silver wires on matrix were seen to have these signs of roasting.

Dye plays a role in mineral fakes, as many rocks would not sell readily en mass as drab clear, colorless and light brown/gray rocks. With several ways of processing, agates from Brazil can be dyed to green, blue, red, black and purple quite readily. One of the main reasons for coloring a mineral can be the lack of contrast. In the case of the uncommon mineral Okenite, the white puffballs on white quartz matrix did not have much contrast, but the okenite would draw in food color willingly, making colorful blue and yellow okenites a common sight on eBay. Howlite was a very common material from southern California, commonly dyed blue to mimic turquoise. Now, as howlite has become scarce, magnasite from Africa is being marketed by Chinese lapidaries as howlite.

So many other fakes can fall into the category of misrepresentation. The most common of all would be switching localities, saying that a specimen comes from a more desirable or uncommon locality. A classic example from the early 1900’s notes that Amethyst from Maine were labeled as coming from Brazil, in order to make it more valuable, when quite the inverse would be true now. Misrepresentation comes in the form of items labeled as things that they are not, such as brightly colored glass being sold as obsidian. Simply put, obsidian comes in earthy colors, dark in nature. Colors such as blue, green and red are simply not available because the earth did not produce them in any form suitable for lapidary use. Jade is seen as a valuable gem stone, so gem serpentine minerals such as antigorite, are often labeled “New Jade” and passed off as a replacement for jade. In the world of jade beads, all sorts of plastic, green quartz and serpentine are sold as jade. A lapidary stone called “Cal-Silica” has been sold as a natural stone, but it is clearly comprised of car paint. Chinese stone factories are often sending out stones that are not what they are labeled. A purple, white, orange and black fluorite/quartz/iron mix is being marketed as “chinese charoite” and red glass is being sold as polished red quartz.

Another form of fakery in the mineral community comes from outright hoaxes. Diamond scandals always used to either be about fake salted locations used to swindle investors out of money for a mining project that would never materialize, to a diamond stimulant or topaz being passed off as a diamond. But, a more complex hoax involved the taletell diamond crystals of the Crater of Diamonds state park and their unique look. One person figured out that diamonds from the Panna Mine in India looked SIMILAR, so, he ordered a bunch of raw diamonds from India and took them to the Crater of Diamonds state park, pretending to find them and get them certified as real Arkansas diamonds, worth 20x the price of diamonds from India. He would have gotten away with it if someone had not contacted the original vendor of the diamonds from India for photo comparisons. You can read all about it on FakeMinerals.com or in the Fakes issue of The-Vug.com, reprinted in hardcover along with 15 other issues of The-Vug.com, available on this page. Another hoax similar to the diamond scam is when people take gold leaf and apply it to the outside of some quartz rocks, selling it as gold ore. The biggest forgivable hoax would be the entire metaphysical market, with the needle going towards the unacceptable when it comes to trademarked minerals. On one hand, they are simply woven stories, told to entertain. You certainly can not read the things that are said about Azeztulite or Atlantispar with a straight face, the real problem is that you are taking a mineral, like Quartz, with a value that is negligible, and selling it for the price of fine gem stones. Named metaphysical stones are priced at a premium for the sole reason that they have a story attached to them.

And finally, the most unique kind of “fake” is the artesian products of miners and people living in mining towns around the world. Cemented quartz crystals in a flowery cluster, pyrite chispas piled on top of flower pots. One of my favorites was a tower of brown tourmaline crystals stuck in a towering stalactite of black tar matrix. It is a unique difference in cultural perception that fuels these items, making them, perhaps, the most desirable of all these items listed.