this gem could knock your socks off
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black opal g'day and welcome to black opal direct my name is justin and welcome to opal school
today we're going to uh open up this piece i've been saving it for a while because
i've been studying it for a long time now
it's an interesting piece it's very different to a lot of the other opal i've had and it has an
amazing red bar going through it and don't know how far it goes through until we clean it up but
if this thing faces with a nice stone one to two carats it's going to make an absolute ripper of
a gem so um i am stressed there could be high anxiety levels on this one i don't know we just
have to open it up and see first so put your seatbelt on make yourself a cup of tea with
some whiskey in it and let's get on the wheel and see what happens so absolutely sublime color there
and it follows in a little bit but not all the way so there's a little telltale window there
from this color and that gray this is like a bubble like a meniscus bubble inside the knobby
and this gray mostly has to go and the amazing part about this piece is that everywhere where
there's color it's naturally black so none of the potch really matters on this stone
so let's start cleaning it up and see if we can get ourselves a nice gem
so
hmm
wow
so so far wherever i touch it it seems to be losing its color which is a bit scary
we have an issue here
i have an issue here with this white cloud the white cloud goes into that color to a point
and if i was to um try and take that out i may lose a lot of color that i want to save
just to get that out so this is a challenge right there
see
all right so there's the where the color is starting
and we need
far out we need that color bar to be clean
of all that porch because every time i'm touching the wheel the pouch seems to come into the color
we don't want that
i'm sorry but this is one of these stressful ones this is this is thousands of dollars a carrot
oh my goodness
extremely nice color in there look at that
i'm not too sure but i'm going in
oh where's the color starting to show through
oh look at that color
oh my goodness
that white is coming off quite easily but will it come off
totally look at those cloudy bits in the color
oh this could be unreal
man
that white cloud doesn't want to come out
oh come on
oh look at that look at that red
oh come on
so
oh boy
so
so i've run into a bit of difficulty um this white cloud is going right through the piece so
i was hoping i would get a big nice stone there but if i get this light and i shine it through
you can see that there's a massive white window right in the middle of this piece
and man that's ruined me that has absolutely ruined me so i've got no choice but to slice
it right through that white go for a little stone here a nice little stone but very little
and whatever i can salvage out of that side so we're going to the slicing machine
not for a second did i think i'd be doing this
my hunch was right that white went right down to the bottom and that black line there
of color was too thin to make anything out of
all right
so we've sliced him in half and we just got to make do with what we can
now that white cloud as i predicted went deep down into the color both sides so all we can
do now is really trim them into where the better color is and go for some nice little red stones
it's not the 10 000 stone i was hoping for but it's still still some color there to be cut
as someone said life is like a box of chocolates you never know what you're gonna get
the surprises that opal can throw at you is uncanny
and while i'm cutting these pieces emerging is something that i was not expecting
thinking that one piece would be larger and cleaner than the other i had the other piece
clean up to a similar size making a nice pair that will carry the value better than i was expecting
did you know that australian opal is very different from the rest of the world's opal
we are blessed to have a sedimentary type of opal rather than a volcanic hydrophane type of opal
meaning australian opal cannot take any treatment like others you can get it wet and it won't change
australian opal was born from water and loves water but can be left out to dry
and won't craze or crack or go clear or go white what you see is what you'll get
we really are a lucky lucky country
so this is very different to what i expected um was hoping for so this piece was part of the
parcel that i saw red and i thought this was going to make the profit in the parcel and with that
white cloud that went straight through the guts of it took away any chance of me having a three carat
beautiful red on black so what we've had to do now is slice it in half and shape it to however
we can get it now fortunately i've got it to two of the same sizes with the similar color and the
similar pattern so we're going to cut a nice pair for earrings and it is quite rare to find a nice
gem red pair for for a nice set of earrings so not all is lost and we still have a few
thousand dollars worth here but it's not the ten thousand dollar gem i was hoping for
so we'll still go through the process of polishing and um adjusting these two to perfect little ovals
in all the years of cutting opal i rarely get a stone that cuts exactly what i hoped for so the
expectations are pretty low but that one time it does is when it's a good day and on the rare
occasion when it cuts way better than expected it's a special day and one for celebration
and i think it shows just how rare a top gem opal is because mother nature didn't make it easy to
find the opal nor did she make it easy to cut and when we say australian opal was formed 110
million years ago not through pressure like diamonds but through a much more unique way
and in only one country makes it for a pretty rare gemstone
what a pretty little pair wow well it was not the three carat stone that i was hoping for
but when you get a decent amount of carrots in in a pair it makes quite a difference because
a beautifully matched pair is worth more than one stone of its true value so if you put two
identical it's really rare and so we're still going to probably get i'm not going
to guess i don't actually know what these are going to weigh so let's put the scales on
1.60 carats combined wow 1.60 carats of that nice red it's a very nice pair
we're still looking at about 3 000 that nice red because it's a really really nice red
as you can see they they do match quite nicely and
that was quite fun even though it didn't work out as usual like i had totally planned
and that's what opal does to you um we still got 1.60 carats i was hoping to get one to two
best case scenario was three carats of that just gorgeous red but 1.60 in a pair is still very nice
so i'm happy with that well i hope you enjoyed and i'll see you next time thanks for watching