Amber fakes

The AmberCollector does not deal in pressed or in any way aggregated amber. Although we accept that this is usually genuine Baltic amber, we feel that these processes destroy the ancient value of the pieces - the become essentially modern reproductions. The only process acceptable to purists, and certainly to The AmberCollector, is the use of an autoclave to explode tiny air bubbles which makes a stone clearer.

Sadly, amber is sometimes sold heated, melted and pressed or even mixed with or made from synthetic materials. Most true Baltic amber is milky and pale under the crust. The warm amber colour occurs first after it has been exposed to oxygen for about a hundred years.

To make amber more attractive to purchasers, today's industrial amber jewellery producers are manipulating to get the warm brown-reddish amber colour, often also including discs, called sunspangles.

The common, and only defensible way, to make amber clearer is to put the material under pressure and heat in an autoclave.

Sometimes amber it is put into an oven to obtain the sunspangles and the cognac colour. This heating and treating is made to make amber jewellery more attractive.

It is possible to melt amber fractions and press them to bigger pieces. It then becomes harder, and less brilliant when cut. Any colour can be added in this procedure. This pressed amber is still considered as natural amber by some producers - but not by The AmberCollector, as we do not deal in such material.

Since the bakelite and plastic era began early last century, there has been a number of fake amber qualities in the commercial market. Bakelite necklaces were sold in Europe in the early twenties, when amber was in fashion.

In the markets in Morocco, North and East Africa, as well as in the Middle East and India, amber coloured plastic necklaces are very common. They are often sold as antique trade beads. Sometimes they are old, very beautiful, large egg-yolk coloured strands, but they are still plastic, and tend to be heavier than amber.

The original, real trade beads, which were distributed from northern Europe around 300 years ago, are very rare to find in the market. It is difficult to see the difference, but if a heated needle is put into the hole of a bead, the smell of burned plastic immediately appears. Baltic amber smells like pine resin.

Even without heating the needle, you can tell the difference. Plastic is elastic, and the needle gets stuck in the material, but true amber is brittle and small pieces will chip off by the pressure.

A scientist from British Museum of Natural History, found a falsification in their collection. A very well preserved fly was described as a palaeontological rarity from the beginning of the 19th century. Someone had divided the piece and carved a concave hole and then put the fly in and covered it with an amber like material before gluing the halves together again.

Since the "Jurassic Park" movie, fortune hunters from all over the world have tried to create attractive plastic-imitations with inclusions, sold as true amber. Sometimes even mammalian hair and feathers are skilfully baked in. They are often carved as a Buddha or other figures, sometimes presented with lumps of the same plastic material with a surface that looks like a natural amber crust. To complete the imitation the faked raw lumps are dipped in oil with a smell of resin.

Resin has always oozed to protect trees all over the world, and the process is still going on. The older the resin is, the harder. It takes millions of years for the resin to harden to amber. When the resin is younger than one million years, it is called copal, a product traded as raw material for varnish and lacquer before the modem synthetic products were developed.

In New Zealand, copal was mined and exported all over the world in the beginning of the century. Today the industrial remains are shown in museums on the North Island.

Among the large pieces in the showcases there are quite a few with perfect lizards and giant spiders enclosed, the result of a kind of melting technique used by the miners. There are almost no inclusions in the New Zealand /"Kaurigum/", opposed to the very fossil-rich copal from East Africa and Colombia.

Copal turns sticky and smells like fresh resin if heated. It does not take a good polish and the crust comes back in a few years. It is transparent in a champagne colour and very brittle. There are different sources in many places, varying in age from a couple of thousand years to one million years.

Some rudimentary tests and observable results