hi I'm Steve Moriarty from Moriarty's gem art in Crown Point Indiana
we're also online as MoreGems.com - I'm here today to talk to you about barrels
the barrels include aquamarine key lead or emerald morganite and the red barrel
bixbite so I'm going to start out with aquamarine the blue form of Beryl aqua
and all the barrels are good tough stones they have good hardness so very
wearable stone and for us as cutters it's an easy stone to cut in polish it's
just a pleasure to work with the barrels generally form in these long hexagonal
crystals as you'll see here in these beer crystals these are from Madagascar
the aquamarine these are from Madagascar these from Nigeria in general aquamarine
the value of aquamarine is based on how deep the color is the depth of color
determines the price but there are also secondary colors that can affect the
value of the stone and these would generally be Gray's all aqua pens have a
little bit of gray to it the more gray the less the value and the yellow color
that causes it to be green aqua is generally heated to remove the yellow
color in heating you get rid of the ferric iron that's that's in aquamarine
aqua is colored by iron and also has the yellow color the ferric pardon sir the
colouring agent and that's what we're trying to remove occasionally you'll get
the aquas that have a little bit of green that are very attractive and we
don't heat those but but mostly aqua to get to the straight blue color is
heating as you can see from the crystals we have on display these crystals from
Madagascar were quite large maybe six inches long so you do get very
large crystals of aquamarines because of the shape of the natural crystal we tend
to cut emerald cuts they can often be long pencil shapes as you see in some of
the pendants we have and the clarity of aqua we have high expectations for
clarity we generally cut them to be flawless
occasionally you'll have a minor inclusion in them but but we try to cut
very high clarity stones this pear-shaped that you see in this video
this was cut from a broken piece of aqua that's what gives you the unusual shapes
otherwise if you have a natural crystal you get those long emerald cuts so the
next gem and the Beryl family is the most famous and most valued which is
emerald emerald started back in Cleopatra's time the source later
produced the emerald but not a very good quality emerald Columbia by far produced
some of the biggest and finest emeralds ever to come out of the ground - mines
where the primary producers Muzo mine she bore with the Muzo mind being the
finest and biggest ounce deeper color she bore was generally a lighter color
and even towards slightly blue whereas Muzo was slightly yellow in color
both those mines produced a large quantity of material were the really the
only game for quite some time after that he found material in Brazil Brazilian
material very deep color a lot of issues with clarity but it's typical of
emeralds but for probably in the 80s and 90s it was one of the major producers of
emerald in the world about that time we also found emerald in Africa Zambia
produced huge quantity of material very deep
color often strongly to the blue but just very beautiful stones then my first
trip to Madagascar I was kind of shocked to see emerald there I didn't even know
that existed there at the time I I arrived there in early 2000s but the
quality of the mo there was just amazing and I had to go to a local geologist
just to make sure that this stuff was real and come to find out he pulled out
an article from gems and geology of the recent discovery of the material and I
found many many fine emeralds at that source another new source is in North
Carolina I don't think it's ever going to be a commercially commercially viable
source but they do produce emeralds here in the United States the newest source
just in the last year late 2016 was found in Ethiopia
I bought a stone at Tucson this year and cut it and it's this gem right here
so so this gemway security not only does it have beautiful color and appears to
be i cleaning this stone has received no treatments and GI a is certified it as a
non treated stone so no filling with oils which this is probably the first
gem in my entire wealth that's not true I've had gems from Madagascar that are
treated but this is one of the few in my entire tiny business that is completely
untreated and it does increase the value by 40 to 50% over the treated stone so
Ethiopia is a new source and promises to be one of the most exciting new gem
finds probably in this decade so one question I get is when is an emerald
green barrel I think technically green barrel is a gem that's not colored by
chromium which is colouring agent for emerald is chromium so it would
generally be a lighter color and no chromium present in the Jim would pretty
much categorize it as as green barrel these lighter colored crystals that are
here they actually are colored by chromium but some people might want to
say that it's green barrel because it's not a rich enough color to be
categorized as as emerald
so this is an emerald crystal that I also bought in Madagascar the Madagascar
emeralds come from a place around rue is the source and they really do produce
some great stones and like I said it is a place that I've found natural colored
emeralds because at the time I was buying there they had no ability to
treat their stones when I buy they would be sticky and just covered with actually
honey is what they used to to make the stones look better they use oil they
used honey because it was what was available to them so the next gem in the
barrel family would be Helia door or golden barrel yellow barrel Helia door
translates as gift of the Sun because of its yellow color the desirability of the
color is greater when it's a pure yellow it'll tend to be golden yellow and in
its less value colors will be greenish yellow Helia door often is irradiated to
color mostly material on the market is irradiated these stones that we see here
they also are irradiated to color very difficult to identify whether they're
trees or not the only stones that I know definitely that weren't treated that
bought over the years were from Madagascar again you know the market was
so new that they did not have the ability to radiate this was in late
1990s early 2000s today you can't be sure of it because we ship to somebody
that can radiate and chip it back so you're never sure about a radiation
because it's a very difficult identification for radiation so most
times we assume irradiated and the radiation uses a crystal that's either
light blue or colorless barrel and it radiates to this yellow cops you like
aquamarine hylia door comes in larger sizes you'll find it cut in similar
shapes and the clarity is typically high on it although the expectations are not
for flawless as like it is in aqua and when it comes to value because of the
yellow color being a little less desirable than the other colors of
barrels Helia dory is at a lower price range than an aqua or emerald of course
or big spike or Marga the next gem and the Beryl family would be morganite as
large stone which is probably the finest morganite the deepest color anyway that
I've ever seen this material which is real common on the market right now
because they've taken a light to colorless barrel and irradiated it most
of it coming from Mozambique as well this material right here is also a
radiated recently we've got a few gems that are completely natural and those
are coming out of Nigeria they'll be from pink to peach
whereas mostly we irradiated material currently on the market gives us peach
color that's what tends to be produced rather
than the pink so it's an interesting story about morganite the discovery and
how it got named at the time Koons was the head gemologist at Tiffany & Company
and his friend and probably a big purchaser was JP Morgan and Koons had
promised JP Morgan that he would name a gem after him so along comes pink spot
me and looking for a name Koons decided JP Morgan oh no I think goodnight would
be a proper name for it so he kind of left JP Morgan out and so the next gem
that come along JP Morgan got his name used for morganite one other gem in the
barrel family that we don't have is Bix bite which is the red barrel it's very
expensive very rare so I don't currently have it I had a chance tack in the early
80s in 1981 I did the show in Tucson and across from me was the owner of the
Vicks pipe mine which is in the Wawa mountains in Utah and he at that time
offered to let me mine for him because he was in his 70s and he needed to mind
to keep his license with the government but of course I had a family and
couldn't do it but I do wish I'd had the time to to mine that but the mining is
in very hard rock they use explosives but it is a beautiful gem so one one
final gem in the barrel family that's barely worth mentioning his colorless or
Gosha night and I say barely worth mentioning because due to the lower
refractive index of arrow it doesn't produce a really bright gem so Gosha
night rarely comes as a beautiful brilliant colorless gem like you would
see in zircon and I'd like to thank you for watching if
you have any questions about barrels or any other jams leave them in the comment
section below you can visit us at Moriarty's gem art or on the square in
Crown Point Indiana or online at more jams com