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Washington—Science has put the bite to a notorious wooden nickel—fake turquoise jewelry.
An Arizona analytical chemist has iearned how to fingerprint turquoise, determining whether a stone is natural, doctored up, or an outright fake.
His technique of reading stones’ makeup has proven what police, gem dealers, and jewelry makers long have known: An awful lot of those turquoise rings, bracelets, and necklaces being sold during the ongoing boom in American Indian jewelry are not what they seem.
They are low-grade stones dyed and treated to look like good turquoise, or tiny chips of turquoise glued together and polished to appear to be a single gem, or made-inHong Kong glass.
Half are Fakes
Mines in five states produce most of the greenishblue stones in America— Arizona, California, Colorado, California, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico, .the NatiQnal Geographic Society says. Almost all is made into Indian jewelry, a growing business of $750 million a year in New Mexico alone.
Dr. Michael Parsons of Arizona State University at Tempe says about half of the hundreds of stones he has analyzed are not turquoise at all, but look-alikes of little value or clever or crude imitations.
Of stones that are genuine, only 3 to 5 percent are “natural gem grade” turquoise, about the same percentage found in mining.
Turquoise is a hydrous phosphate of aluminum and copper, formed through the eons by water seeping through rock. It’s usually found in arid regions, seldom in mines deeper than 100 feet. We call the semiprecious gem turquoise thanks to the French who, among others, thought it came from Turkey. But the trade routes led farther East, to mines in Persia. In the ancient world,
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