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