As 21st century consumers, we want everything we buy to be organic, free range and all natural. But the bitter truth is that the necessary volume of organic, free range, all natural things simply doesn’t exist in today’s world to satisfying the overwhelming market demand.
Colored gemstones, particularly sapphires, are an excellent case in point. Everyone wants them, but there aren’t nearly enough good quality stones mined to support this massive demand. Luckily, through trial and error, the gem industry has discovered how to improve poorly colored or heavily flawed gemstones. The latest of these industry innovations is known as beryllium diffusion.
A beryllium diffused sapphire is a natural, non-synthetic stone that has been dug out of the earth, but is then subjected to high heat in an oven in the presence of a beryllium-rich material. This causes beryllium atoms to penetrate or diffuse into the sapphire, altering its color. Thai gem cookers perform this operation because it can substantially improve the color of an existing sapphire.
Sometimes, it turns unsalable material salable. In other instances, it merely turns a stone with good color into one with great color. Beryllium diffused sapphires can come in many different colors, but are most often found in incredibly vivid, eye-catching shades of orange, yellow and pink-peach.
However, there are some people who adamantly refuse to touch beryllium diffused goods. They believe that beryllium diffusion is a step too far for the gem industry. They think these stones have been excessively treated and are therefore not comparable to more traditional, heat-treated sapphires.
This attitude is partially the fault of the Thai gem cookers who accidentally discovered the beryllium process around the year 2000. Instead of giving full disclosure of this new treatment to their clients, they instead sold them – at great profit – as conventionally heat-treated stones. It was only 12 to 18 months later that Western gem certification labs discovered the deception. As you can imagine, buyers of these stones were outraged by the Thais’ unethical behavior.
However, beryllium diffused sapphires don’t deserve their poor reputation, assuming their treatment is properly disclosed. Beryllium diffusion is entirely stable. It doesn’t fade over time or from exposure to sunlight. The new, vivid colors are also usually consistently distributed throughout the entire gem. Due to beryllium’s very low atomic weight, it diffuses very quickly into a sapphire, penetrating right into the middle of the gem. This means that if you must re-polish or even re-cut a damaged beryllium diffused sapphire, it will still retain its new, improved color.
Beryllium diffused specimens aren’t all-natural, untreated stones and they will never sell for comparable prices to completely untreated sapphires. It is clear that sapphires that come out of the ground already looking beautiful will always sell for a healthy premium over any treated stone. However, I find it equally unlikely that the price differentials between traditionally heat-treated sapphires and beryllium diffused sapphires will end up being significant. Instead, it is clear that the prices for traditionally heat-treated sapphires and beryllium diffused sapphires will converge over time.
Interestingly, the sapphire industry went through a very similar scandal several decades ago. In the late 1970s, some enterprising Thai gem cookers discovered that heating colorless (or geuda) sapphire at extremely high heat (greater than 1,500 degrees centigrade) resulted in some stones acquiring a fine blue color. In addition to this, the heated geuda also showed markedly improved clarity as the high heat – near the melting point for sapphire – healed many internal fractures within the crystals.
This resulted in a flood of good quality blue sapphire hitting the market in the early 1980s as every gem dealer in Southeast Asia rushed to treat his previously useless stockpile of colorless sapphire. Predictably, prices for blue sapphires collapsed. These depressed prices for good quality blue sapphire persisted for over 25 years.
But then a funny thing happened around the year 2010. The price of blue sapphire skyrocketed, increasing by anywhere from 40% to 100% almost overnight. This permanent, stair-step price increase occurred because the temporary abundance of blue sapphire in the international gem market was just that – temporary. The massive stockpiles of colorless geuda accumulated over decades of painstaking, artisanal hand-mining had been completely exhausted. Now colorless sapphire that responds well to heat treatment is almost as rare as blue sapphire straight out of the mine.
I suspect there will be a very similar outcome for beryllium diffused sapphires today. At first they are poorly understood and hated. Prices soon collapse due to a glut of supply. Then, very slowly over time, the overhang of treatable material is consumed. Eventually, everyone will realize that beryllium diffused material is durable, stable and stunningly gorgeous. It is also mined from the earth by hand, just like every other natural sapphire. Once the markets fully digest these concepts, beryllium treated sapphires will trade at similar price points to other, traditionally heat-treated sapphires.
Time is running short. It has been over 15 years since the beryllium diffusion process was introduced. If the current situation unfolds anything like when the heat treatment of geuda was developed in the late 1970s, there won’t be many more years until the price of beryllium diffused material increases permanently. Organic, free-range and all natural may always be our first choice, but raw, breathtaking beauty – even when helped a little by science – also has its own visceral allure.
