Gold Sheen Sapphire – Beyond Rare

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Some feature combinations of Gold Sheen Sapphire make a particular gem not just rare, but unique.  These one of a kind pieces are true collectors and investment items.

Here is a showcase of some of the unique Gold Sheen Sapphires so far discovered:

Gem Ct Size What makes it unique
Gold Sheen Sapphire Collectors piece full hex pattern 96.65 Full clear hex through the entire stone, large carat size
Gold Sheen Sapphire Collectors Piece 133.3 50% partial hex, large carat size
Gold Sheen Sapphire Collectors piece Unique ~60 Partial clear hex, 3D window with yellow sapphire, large carat size
Gold Sheen Sapphire Collectors piece 164.5 Carats 165 Partial hex, large carat size, natural shape polish
Gold Sheen Sapphire Collectors Piece 223.9 Carat 223 Partial hex, very large carat size, natural shape polish
Gold Sheen Sapphire Pendant 40 Intense colour, intense sheen effect
Gold Sheen Sapphire Collectors piece Unique 107.9 Blue/metallic banding, large clearly defined blue area, carat size
Gold Sheen Sapphire Pendant  29 Copper sheen, carat size

These are some of the finest pieces yet discovered out of several million carats so far cut.  Most of them are in my private collection, but available for sale to a serious collector or investor.

Please join my mailing list if you would like to be notified of new unique discoveries:

What to look for when buying Gold Sheen Sapphire

Gold Sheen Sapphire is different to other precious gemstones, while three of the ‘4 C’s’ – cut and carat size and colour, apply, clarity is all but irrelevant.  In some respects, Gold Sheen Sapphire is similar to opal, it is an opaque gem where the colour is a feature of different types of mineral inclusion. However Gold Sheen Sapphire also retains the properties of sapphire, and often the predominant colour is blue, clear, or fancy sapphire.

These are some tips of what to look for and what to avoid when buying Gold Sheen Sapphire:

  • Surface Flaws – the lustre of Gold Sheen Sapphire is a major factor in the beauty of the gem.  Stones should have an eye clean surface.  Comparing two similar pieces with a 10x loupe will show that the better the surface the greater the appeal of the gem.
Gold Sheen Sapphire with full hex pattern
Gold Sheen Sapphire with full hex pattern, minor surface flaws
  • Structural Flaws – as with any gemstone, cracks through the stone can cause problems with durability and jewellery setting.  However it is important not to mistake geometric and inclusion features of the gem as a structural flaw.  Generally this is obvious though, with closer inspection.
  • Asterism – All Gold Sheen Sapphire cabs will display some degree of asterism.  It will vary from very weak to strong, but it will be there.  Strong aterism is quite rare.
gold sheen sapphire with star
All Gold Sheen Sapphire cabs show asterism
  • Vary the light – look at the gem under warm and cool light, and in daylight if possible.  I am not sure if this should be classed as ‘colour change’, but the visual difference under different lighting types will be quite pronounced.
Gold Sheen Sapphire
The same gem under warm, cool and daylight
  • Geometric Patterns – One, if not the, most beautiful feature of Gold Sheen Sapphire are the naturally occurring geometric patterns.  These are most evident as parallel lines, partial or full hex patterns, often interlaced with clear or coloured sapphire.  These patterns made every Gold Sheen Sapphire absolutely unique, like a highly prominent fingerprint.  Partial hex patterns are rare, and the fuller the hex, the rarer the occurrence.  Full hex patterns are very, very rare, occurring in less than one in 100,000 pieces.
partial hex gold sheen sapphire
Partial hex in this 130 carat collectors piece gem. The features of this gem and its size make it unique.
  • Craze lines – not to be mistaken with structural flaws, craze lines are small fractured that are usually between 70 and 120 degrees to the crystal growth lines.  They have no structural impact on the gem.
gold sheen sapphire ring
Beautiful sheen effect with craze lines across the crystal growth lines.
  • Aurora Effect – in addition to the sheen effect, some stones will have a combination of green and blue colour that will change as light plays across the gem  Tanzim Khan (the discoverer of Gold Sheen Sapphire) calls this an ‘Aurora’ effect, because the colour effect is not unlike the Aurora Borealis.  I am not sure if this is a new feature or a type of iridescence, but in any event., stones that exhibit this are very rare.  You can see an example of the effect in this Youtube video – https://youtu.be/XCjCiT3q2TM
  • Colours – The primary colours of corundum in Gold Sheen Sapphire are blue, white, yellow, green, orange, red.  The metallic colours are gold, brass, bronze and copper.  The following table lists the colours and their occurrence:
Primary Colour Metallic Colour Other Features Rarity
Blue Under 20 carats Common
White Brass Common
Yellow Bronze Prominent blue/metallic banding Uncommon
Green Gold Partial Hex Uncommon
20 to 40 carats Uncommon
Copper Full Hex Rare
40 to 60 carats Rare
Orange Full Hex clear window Very Rare
Red Over 60 Carats Very Rare
Gold Sheen Sapphire
Green, blue, yellow and gold are evident when this gem is lit from the side.

The Beauty of Gold Sheen Sapphire

One thing I have been trying to get right for a while is how to capture the beauty of Gold Sheen Sapphire in a photo. I have tried many combinations of light and camera settings, with a very good digital SLR, and yet in some cases just the camera on my smartphone seems to take better pictures.

Gold Sheen Sapphire
How to describe a gem that gives so much variation in a single piece?
 The appeal of Gold Sheen Sapphire comes not just from the light it returns, but from the play of light across the gem. Lustre plays a major role, more so than almost any other gem. The included nature of Gold Sheen Sapphire is not unlike opal, and so different angles of light highlight completely different characteristics in the stone. While the sheen effect in Gold Sheen is not unique (Some rubies and black sapphire has it), it is nevertheless far more prominent than any other type of gem.
Gold Sheen Sapphire
Gold Sheen Sapphire gem under warm, cool and direct daylight.

Capturing the inherent beauty of Gold Sheen Sapphire is one thing, but then describing it is another. Using the standard gemology grading we only have ‘brown’ to describe the prominent colour. There is no descriptor for the metallic gold, bronze, copper and brass, not for the colours of metallic blue, greens orange and yellow that often appear as secondary and tertiary colours.

And then, how to describe the geometric patterns and craze lines within the gem? Which to me are by far it’s most appealing aspect.

Gold Sheen Sapphire
The hex is a geometric feature that forms transparent window through the gem that displays an intriguing 3D effect

Tanzim Khan, the discoverer of Gold Sheen Sapphire, describes the complex patterns as taking you on a journey. Indeed it does, as you gaze into the stone you see ever more richness and beauty that emerge from the depths. The 3D effect of the inclusions is unlike anything else.

Gold Sheen Sapphire
Nothing shows the journey of the eye in Gold Sheen Sapphire better than this unique gem. The depth and beauty of this stone has to be seen first hand to be believed.

Like ruby, Gold Sheen Sapphire is at its best under warm light, in the mornings and evenings. Yet under direct, cool light, aspects within the gem can be seen that were otherwise hidden, and vivid blues can emerge in strong white light that make it look like sapphire set in a cage of bronze.

Gold Sheen Sapphire
Blue sapphire band ‘captured’ in the gold and bronze of Gold Sheen Sapphire.

A Slow Day

And a slow month, and a slow year.

I don’t think I am wrong in saying that this is the quietest period the gemstone market has seen for a long time. Look around the JTC Tower in Silom Road and every day there seem to be more empty shops and booths. Reports from the Hong Kong and Bangkok gem shows describe them as having the lowest levels of customer traffic anyone can remember.

Natural, unheated 3.5 carat Ceylon sapphire, 18k white gold, 17 2mm white sapphires.
This is a natural, unheated 3.5 carat Ceylon sapphire, set in 18k white gold with 17 2mm white sapphires. It doesn’t relate to this article, but it sure is nice to look at
But is that a bad thing? Every industry has its cycles. It is certainly bad for businesses used to, and relying on, higher sales volumes to meet overheads. And those that are leveraged, well, as someone said recently (me in the first paragraph) “every day there seem to be more empty shops and booths”.

So of course it’s bad, why even ask. While it is sad to see businesses closing down, and imagining the human cost of that, those that remain will be leaner, stronger and better for the experience. Business owners now have time to pay attention to their business processes. There is time to take a breath and look at all the ways social media can be leveraged. Things that work can be improved and refined and things that don’t can be abandoned with confidence.

What’s more, employees can be trained up, especially sales people. In a busy market, anyone who holds out a product can be a good sales person, but in a slow market like this, people with real sales aptitude and, most importantly, tenacity, will shine.

For buyers though, there is an overwhelming benefit – a slow market is a buyers market. This is a bonanza for the customer and perhaps the best time in two decades for collectors. There are real bargains for both wholesale and retail. Cashed up wholesale buyers looking to build inventory have the best of it at the moment.

Cash
If you are interested in wholesale Gold Sheen Sapphire or Ruby, please follow the link to the Wholesale section of my website. For collectors and bargain hunters, check out the ruby, aquamarine and gold sheen sapphire here http://sjwgems.com/product-category/gemstones/.

Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon… Website Updates

Which, if I recall correctly was the name of a Queen song on the ‘A Night at the Opera’ album. What’s that Wikipedia, it was? Yes. Thank you.

From Sunday morning through to just now at 6:30 I have been updating the SJW Gems website with some new features. First, there is multi currency. It is really more a convenience for customers than a ‘must have’. All the product prices are in US dollars, and anyone buying will have the conversion done automatically by their credit card company.

Nevertheless, the customer can now select their currency from a drop down menu and it will update the prices in real time. Neat.

Second is a coupon feature for social media. Anyone who ‘likes’ on Facebook or follows onTwitter will get a coupon code for 10% discount off their order.

Not exactly lazing, but a productive way to spend a slow day.

The Problem with Ruby

I don’t know about you, but I love rubies. There is nothing like the flash from a ruby in warm light. Well cut natural rubies have, I think, the best light enhancing and return characteristics of any gemstone. I have seen several ‘pigeon blood’ rubies, selling for over $15,000 per carat, and they were so beautiful that if I had had the cash on hand to buy them, I would have.

But we have a problem in the ruby market. About five years ago, ‘neuvo riche’ Chinese were buying gemstones like their was no tomorrow. With a preference for red gemstones, with a preference for ruby. No problem with that, but demand far outstriped supply, and predictably, a lot of manufactured ruby started to enter the market.

No one who can afford it wants manufactured ruby when natural ruby is available. But it was cheap, and I believe very few vendors tried to pass it off as natural ruby. This is an example of manufactured ruby:

Ruby Earrings

It looks pretty, very clear, and not at all expensive.

However, the problem that developed was mines were opened that produced very low grade ruby, normally not even considered for gemstone use. The rough from these mines was then put in a bath of acid for a week or so, dissolving out all of the iron and other impurities. What was left was technically ruby, but looked like a pinkish chalky substance. This would then be placed in a furnace and packed with glass beads at high temperature (2,200 celsius), perhaps with some chromium to improve the colour, for 100 hours.

The intense heat fuses the glass to the chalky ruby and produces a clear, solid looking stone, somewhat similar to the rough, but with much cleaner optical properties. This is known as ‘glass filled ruby’. And it is still, technically, natural ruby.

Heat treatment for corundum is nothing unusual. It has been done for many hundreds of years and is an accepted treatment to improve colour. When done properly, the treatment is permanent and will generally increase the value of the gem. But intense heat treament (over 1,600 celsius) will cause structural problems, and though the stone will look good initially, it will become degraded and lose value.

Glass filled ruby is perhaps the worst of all possible heat treatment. For a few months it looks great, really clear, and with the right additives during heating can even approach the excellent colour properties of pigeon blood ruby.

As time goes on however, stresses caused by heating cause the glass to develop microfractures. As well, glass is still only glass, will scratch and crack with everyday wear in jewelry. Typically within a year the gem is not looking good at all. And this can never be fixed. Reheating will just destroy it and the flaws are embedded throughout the stone.

Because of demand, glass filled ruby flooded the market, being sold as ‘Natural Ruby’ – which is was, technically. More savvy buyers might ask if it was heat treated, to which the answer would be ‘yes’ – there being nothing wrong with heat treating in the normal case.

Perhaps the biggest issue is that when is is new, glass filled ruby is very hard to tell from normal heat treated ruby. Inspection through a 10x loupe or even gemologist microscope generally won’t reveal it, and it tests just like normal ruby with a refractometer. It requires a lengthy several hundred dollar lab analysis to identify it correctly in the early stage. (later on it becomes obvious, but by then it is usually too late).

What the buyer thinks is that they are getting a bargain. What looks like $5,000 per carat ruby being offered for only $2,000.

Here is a ruby I bought two years ago. It looked great when I bought it, and a bargain at only $200, I thought.

Glass filled ruby

It is easy to see just with the eye that there are cloudy areas in this gem. This is what happens with glass filled ruby, the glass develops fractures and destroys the appeal of the gem.

Magnified Glass Filled Ruby

At higher magnification even more problems can be seen. The white areas are shattered glass within the stone. Surface inclusions have also become apparent. None of these flaws were observable when I first bought this ruby.

And so that is the problem. The market was flooded with this utter crap glass filled ruby, and there is still a lot of it around today. Fortunately today though, it is fairly easy to spot – you can see many vendors on Silom Road offloading it for 50 Baht ($1.50) a carat or less. The signs still say ‘natural ruby’ but the price makes it obvious it is glass filled. Incidentally, it is not even worth 50 baht, you are better buying just coloured glass for a few cents, which at least will be more durable.

Nevertheless, ruby remains a truly beautiful gemstone, but understandable doubt has been sown in the minds of buyers due to the glass filling practice.

So if you want to buy ruby (and you should, because it is beautiful), look for ‘Natural UNHEATED‘. Whether glass filled or not, a loupe is usually sufficient to determine if a gem has been heated. If it is unheated, then there is simply no way it can be glass filled.

Price of Gold Sheen Sapphire – 2 Year History

I have been tracking the price of Gold Sheen Sapphire since I first started to buy it in 2014. Recently the street price has seen a dramatic increase, certainly due to its increasing popularity with designers and investors.

From the very start Tanzim Khan (the discoverer of Gold Sheen Sapphire) has been maintaining an impressive effort to provide information and education about this new variety of corundum. I have made a fact sheet available on my website and I am working on a grading system that I am developing in conjunction with Tanzim and Gemological Labs interested in participating.

This is the two year price history of Gold Sheen Sapphire:

Gold Sheen Sapphire Price History

Some explanation about the chart.

Currently we have 3 grades for GSS:

Grade 1 – No surface defects, no structural defects, or ‘very rare’
Grade 2 – Eye clean surface, no structural defects, or ‘rare’
Grade 3 – Minor surface defects, minor structural defects. or ‘common’

Anything less than Grade 3 is not available for sale and either discarded or re-cut.

“Buy” is the wholesale price for Grade 3 stones in large quantities over 10,000 carats

“Sell” is the price offered for sale from retail or trade fare for single stones or small sales.

“Street” is the negotiated price for small quantities of stones of various grades.

Gold Sheen Sapphire can also be ‘unique’, which are typically collectors pieces over 50 carats in size. The price for these can vary from $100 per carat to simply ‘no price’ since it only depends on what the seller and buyer are willing to negotiate. Some examples of wholesale stones in calibrated sizes are on my website.

The good news is that for jewelry designers and retailers, the wholesale price of Gold Sheen Sapphire has not caught up to the street price yet.

Special Promotion for Gold Sheen Sapphire

I am launching a special promotion for Gold Sheen Sapphire. The goal Tanzim and I have is to make Gold Sheen Sapphire famous, and to do that we want jewelry designers to feature the gem in their work. There have already been some industry award winning designs, and we want to bring this unique gemstone into the mainstream where it rightly belongs.

This is the promotion I am offering on my website:

  • Hand selection of stone from rough to your specification
  • Rare and very rare features at a single price
  • Fine cutting to your design specification 0.1mm tolerance
  • Locked in buy price for 12 months
  • We will list your design jewelry for sale on our website, or link to the listing on your site, and promote it through social media at no cost to you.  You will receive 100% of the sale price.

The price of Gold Sheen Sapphire has risen by 100% in the last 12 month. Common grade gems were selling at $20 per carat last year and now are $40 per carat, and I have seen rarer stones that were $50 per carat last year now being bough for $200 and more.

So first we are offering a very good price, cut to any specification the designer wants. We can offer even better pricing for stones already cut, and examples of those are in the wholesale section of my website – http://sjwgems.com/wholesale/gold-sheen-sapphire-wholesale/.

Second, locking in the price for designers lets them have the confidence that the price they buy for today will be the same for the next 12 months.

To give an example of the lengths we will go to to provide the exact specification required, we have just completed an order for a jewelry designer in New York for 5,000 carats. To meet their requirement we sliced over 400kg of rough to find the exact match they were looking for.