Jewelry Lovers

The British are prejudiced against synthetic gemstones, in other words those that have been produced in a laboratory, and look upon them quite simply as fakes. I recently showed a ring set with a 40 point cubic zirconia, the latest man-made diamond simulant, to a group of women. It was a really beautiful little stone, white and clean, and the people to whom I showed the ring were suitably impressed. However, the moment I told them that it was not real they lost interest completely. When I questioned them, they said without exception that they would want neither to own it nor to wear it. This is further proof – if proof were needed – that where jewellery is concerned sentiment and emotion are often more important than appearance. It didn’t matter to these women that nobody would know that what they were wearing wasn’t `real’. They would know. Cubic zirconia is, however, being offered to the public in many shops, treated as an imitation stone as paste once was, though it is of course an infinitely better substitute for the real thing than paste. Ear-rings set with cubic zirconia are proving particularly popular probably because not only are diamond ear-rings very expensive but also because they so easily go astray.

In other countries – in the USA, for instance – coloured stone synthetics are sold in great numbers as less expensive substitutes for natural stones, fine examples of which are scarce and beyond the means of all but the very wealthy. In America synthetics are respectable. In Britain, on the other hand, we don’t feel right wearing something that is not natural. Should we feel like this about synthetics? PierreGilson, the most ingenious of the producers of these stones, argues that his synthetics are more beautiful than all but those very few natural stones which would fetch a king’s ransom. He also points out that, except under extensive laboratory examination, his synthetics are indistinguishable from natural stones and that, unlike the diamond simulants, they have the same chemical and physical attributes as the real thing. Indeed, one can’t help feeling suspicious these days when a top-quality stone is on offer. You look at a lovely ruby, and say to yourself it’s so fine it must be a synthetic.

In my opinion it is possible that in the years ahead we may all come to accept, perhaps have to accept, synthetic coloured stones in the same way that we now accept cultured pearls. When they first came on the market cultured pearls were treated as fakes, but today natural pearls are almost unobtainable. There may well come a time when coloured gemstones become unobtainable too, when men are no longer prepared to live in the wilderness and dig them out. Already in Brazil the miners are finding less arduous and more rewarding work elsewhere. One Brazilian emerald mine, which employed 10,000 miners five years ago, now has only 1,500 workers.

Another consideration which may lead to wider acceptance of synthetic stones is the increasing difficulty of obtaining insurance for fine natural gems. No insurance company is going to like policy-holders wearing thousands of pounds of jewellery in public. More and more of the really fine stones are going to have to be locked away in a bank and the owners will have to have synthetic imitations made to wear every day.

The first synthetics were made in the nineteenth century and their commercial production resulted from the discovery by a French scientist, Auguste Verneuil, of a method of making candle-shaped boules of corundum by fusing aluminium oxide in an oxy-hydrogen furnace. The material he produced was chemically identical to natural corundum. Further, by including other metallic oxides in his mix he could produce boules of various colours to simulate ruby, sapphire and so on. Synthetic gems are still produced in this way, but they do not pose a very serious threat. Experienced jewellers can usually detect a Verneuil synthetic with the naked eye and can confirm their suspicions by simple laboratory tests. Synthetic ruby produced in this way is, incidentally, the material from which watch jewels are cut.

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