We buy padparadscha-range sapphire rough.
The pink-orange band, and the rough rarely shows it plainly. Frosted dry material reads pale peach at best.
Send photographs of what you have Tell us the weight and where it is from. There is no obligation.How to tell if this is what you have
Corundum habit — barrel-shaped or tabular hexagonal prisms, often with flat basal terminations.
trigonal
The pink-orange band, and the rough rarely shows it plainly. Frosted dry material reads pale peach at best.
What it gets mistaken for
Padparadscha-range sapphire is commonly confused with orange sapphire, pink sapphire and heat-treated material of either. That cuts both ways — people sell it as something less than it is at least as often as the reverse. If you are not certain what you have, send photographs anyway and say you are not sure. We would far rather look at something and tell you it is not what you hoped than have you throw it back on the heap.
Also traded as: padparadscha.
Where it comes from
We buy padparadscha-range sapphire from Sri Lanka, Madagascar, Tanzania — and from anywhere else it turns up. A locality we have not listed is an omission, not a refusal.
Treatment
Heating is common; beryllium diffusion produces the colour and is excluded outright.
Tell us what has been done to it, if you know. We buy treated material where the treatment is a normal part of the trade — what we cannot do is find out afterwards, because then it is a problem for whoever owns the stone next and eventually that is us.
How to photograph it
Daylight, on a plain white surface, and wet and dry both. Rough seen dry is frosted and reads far paler and greyer than the same stone wet — a parcel photographed dry has cost its owner money more times than we can count. Put a coin or a ruler in the frame for scale. The full guide is here.
Send photographs of what you have Tell us the weight and where it is from. There is no obligation.