IS IT REAL AMBER?

Amber fakes, and what to avoid when buying amber.

One hears so much about amber, and how it is imitated or faked.  How can one tell what is real?

It is not difficult to spot the blatant fakes.  A street seller in the Far East that sells bangles and necklaces in bright rainbow colours and tells you that they are amber is obviously twisting the truth somewhat.  An item being sold on the internet as a ‘rare eighteenth century red amber carving’ with an auction starting price of US$6, is almost certainly made of modern plastic, as the real thing would run to four figures and would not need to be sold as a bargain online. 

 

Plastic amber imitations.

 

But how do you spot the less obvious fakes?  How do you know whether a pendant set in silver is amber, and if it is, whether it ‘has had something done to it’?

The best way to buy amber is to purchase it from an experienced and reputable amber dealer, who will be prepared to put his reputation on the line.  You will not be paying bargain prices, but nor will you be throwing your money away.  However, that is undeniably less fun than bargain hunting, and it is a pity never to dare to buy anything.  But can we, for example, trust the antique dealers?

 

The real thing! Natural Baltic amber (left) and clarified Baltic amber (right).

There is a huge amount of faked material for sale, and very often the people selling it have no idea that it is not ‘real’.  An example of this is the online auctions, where individual sellers offer ‘cherry amber’, ‘green Caribbean amber’, and many other types for sale, truly believing that they are selling a genuine product.  These items are also found at local antiques fairs and in small antiques shops.  The vendors have usually bought the items in good faith, and are simply selling them on with the description they were given.

There are a few rules of thumb that we can use when buying amber.  Firstly: colour.  Basically, ambers occur in colours ranging from pale honey to dark brown, and some can be transparent or opaque.

BLUE amber does not exist.  Amber may have a blue tinge to it when viewed in light containing ultra violet rays (e.g. sunlight), as it can fluoresce giving a blue colour.  This is especially true of some amber from the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Myanmar. 

Amber never has a GREEN body colour, but it can be treated to give the illusion of being green.  Baltic amber is treated in many ways, one of them being to heat the back of a piece till it is burnt,  This makes the amber look green, when viewed from the front.  The same effect can be produced by backing the amber with black material, usually plastic.  Also, Dominican and Mexican ambers can  fluoresce and look green in the right light, but the amber is in fact golden. A new process has recently been developed which does turn amber green -- with very pretty results! But it must be emphasized that the resulting 'green amber' is not natural. Further, most of this new material is produced from imature amber called copal, which may only be 200 years old.

 

Baltic amber with a black backing, making it appear green.

RED amber does exist, but it is extremely rare, and the natural colour is a slightly rusty red. The amber found in Myanmar, called ‘burmite’ is 100 million years old and occurs in colours ranging from clear golden through red to very dark brown.  It is only mined occasionally and in very small quantities, so the chances of coming across it are remote. 

Baltic amber, which represents at least 98% of the amber on the market today, can be treated in a variety of ways, such as to turn opaque material transparent, induce the little, sparkly ‘sun spangles’ (usually thought to be proof that the amber is ‘real’), and to darken its colour, including turning it red (‘cherry amber’).  These are acceptable treatments.

 

Phenolic 'red amber' beads (left), and amber chips in plastic, called 'Polybern' (right).

It can also be ground into small chips or to a powder and re-formed (‘pressed amber’) which is difficult to discern and should be disclosed by the seller, but often is not.  Further, powdered amber  can also be mixed with plastic and possibly dyed, or small amber chips are mixed into plastic and moulded.  These should not be called ‘amber’.

And of course, there is pure plastic.  It is not a new way of copying amber.  One of the most common examples is the strands of red facetted beads (made of phenolic resin) which were made in quantity about fifty years ago, and which often turn up at antiques fairs or online auctions, where they sell for five or six times their true value. 

Finally, there is a relatively new amber imitation on the market.  Amber – which is millions of years old -- is now being copied by a younger, immature resin called copal which is probably only a few of thousand years old, and the resulting material can be very difficult to distinguish from ‘the real thing’.  Fortunately, this copal is often treated to make it pale, transparent green, and -- as we already know – real green amber does not exist.

 

Treated copal sold as 'green amber'.

So the final word of advice can only be that if you find something that you really like, but are unsure as to whether it is real or not, only pay what it is worth to you.

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This may be all you need to know about amber, but should you wish to learn more about it, and the treatments and imitations on the market today, subscribe to 'Organic Gems'and read the in-depth article on the subject of Baltic amber treatments. A further article covers the 100 million year-old amber from Myanmar.

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