Heated Gemstones, What Does That Mean?

Recently, I've been touring around different parts of the world for my day job. Blogging is more of a getaway from work to be honest. The thing about traveling a lot, is that you'll always find time to meet new people and chit-chat about your favorite topics. For me that's obviously jewelry, however during some of my trips I've noticed that not a lot of people know what it means when a jeweler tells them that a certain gemstone is "heated". Do you guys know what that means? As far as my research can tell, heating a stone can have various effects. Most of the time, it's done to improve color. Adding some kind of chemical component to the process can also improve other attributes like clarity. This is good for the apparent image of the gem, but in some cases treatments like this aren't permanent.



Rubies and sapphires, along with diamond, aquamarine and alexandrite are among the most commonly heated gemstone material. This is usually done before the stones are set into jewelry mountings (as heat can damage designs). Almost all of the world's rubies undergo some kind of heat treatment I'm told, although there exists a premium price for top quality stones that are verified to be unheated. Gemological laboratories like GIA or AIGS can easily tell if this is the case for your stones.



Apart from heating, there's actually a huge list of enhancements that people do to improve the look of their gemstones. Emeralds and jade can be filled with oil or resin, pearls can be bleached, turquoise can be impregnated with wax, and so on so forth.



It's really too much to cover for one short post, but I'm fairly new to this idea of enhancing gems, so it's really intriguing.

Image Credit to www.gia.edu