All This Indonesian Amber?

[NZ_Fossil_Collecta]

i have heard the indonesian amber is rare yet when i search it on ebay there are loads of small pieces that are blue/green in colour, and they can be often around $10 US. is this legitimate or is some not what it is represented as?

[fossilized6s]

I know there are a LOT of fake amber producers out there. And you can't really tell it's a fake unless you have it in your hand and run it through a gamut of tests. At least that has been my experience. Hopefully others can give you some sound advice.

Edited March 30, 2014 by fossilized6s

[Taogan]

I only really have one piece of advice about buying amber, get to know your dealer. There is a lot of fake amber out there - copal sold as amber, plastic and resin with modern insects. There is also a lot of real amber out there. Impulse buying from an unknown dealer might be OK, you could be lucky, there are reputable dealers .... If you research your dealer, start off with a few small items, build a relationship you can shop with confidence when it comes time to get the bigger things and you never know, as a regular customer you could even get a better deal. I collected Bitterfeld (East German) amber for a few years and I narrowed down my dealers so I only ever bought from 2 people, but at least I was confident in what I was buying.

[Mediospirifer]

I'd stay away from buying anything rare on EBay, unless either you know it well enough to spot fakery in a photograph, or it's an item for which fakery is difficult enough to be wildly unlikely. From what others are saying, amber isn't going to fall into either category.

[NZ_Fossil_Collecta]

ok correction: most is actually around 25-30 US dollars. i bought a piece with a natural crust still on it with a window polished into it, so it is obvious to have come from the ground. also the seller was based in indonesia.

[NZ_Fossil_Collecta]

my guess in this situation is that the price has not had a chance to rise quite enough yet (as would be expected in blue amber) as it is a very new discovery and although has turned up at big amber events (cant remember the name) but generally not enough people know about it to raise the price.

[painshill]

First of all, Indonesian amber is not rare. Green amber isn’t particularly rare either (and is also the most commonly faked colour… see later). There are numerous sources across the Indonesian archipelago and blue amber (with varying degrees of blueness) is found in most of those deposits. It’s the truly blue stuff that’s rare and most of the Indonesian material doesn’t have a pronounced deep blue colour. It has a violet-blue tinge. The largest supplies of blue material come from the Comatillo Basin in the Dominican Republic. Annual “output” of the best grade Dominican blue amber probably doesn’t exceed 30 Kg a year; decent grades probably don’t exceed 150 Kg; low grades probably don’t exceed 600 Kg. There are only a few mines which produce high quality material. Inferior blue amber from the other mines may fade after a few months, losing its blueness. There are smaller quantities coming out of Chiapas in Mexico and from the sources in Indonesia.

There’s no real point in providing false locations for genuine material since it’s generally rare from all locations where it is found. However, it is being faked (and has been for a long time). Most Dominican amber has been heat-treated to improve its integrity for potential jewellery use but you can’t do that to blue amber without destroying the “blueness”, so autoclaving techniques to convert copal and young ambers into harder material are generally not used (but see later comments about autoclaving).

A number of faking and enhancement techniques are used for the Dominican material:

Larger pieces that have broken apart during mining are frequently super-glued back together and polished to obscure the join.

Pieces of ordinary amber are chipped to create a cavity and a fragment of blue amber super-glued into the hole. The protruding blue portion is then ground and polished on a lapidary wheel to create the impression that it’s a “window” into the entire lump.

Several windows are ground into the piece until one is found that has at least some appearance of blueness (which you can often see even in pieces of ordinary amber). The other windows are then covered up.

In all cases, the manipulation is usually concealed with a coating made from superglue mixed with dirt and argued as proof of authenticity (“look… it’s still got the original dirty crust”). These techniques are referred to in the trade as “Coqui-ing”, from the “Coqui” brand name of the glue most commonly used.

It wouldn’t be surprising if some or all of those techniques are now being used for Indonesian material.

The other fakery widely used in all cases is autoclaving. An autoclave is an oven that enables you to achieve temperatures well above boiling point using supersaturated steam. It’s what hospitals use to sterilize surgical instruments. If you “cook” copals and younger ambers in an autoclave they harden up and begin to resemble older ambers. Mostly, such material will still fail the acetone test, but perhaps not always, depending on the start material.

It's the most common technique used to produce fake green amber, but blue amber can also be faked in this way. You simply melt copal, mix some artificial colourant into it, mould it to a convincing shape and/or break it up a little and then autoclave it. The natural colouration of blue amber wouldn’t survive that process, but artificial colouration of copal would. This kind of material would fail the acetone test but an autoclaved young amber might not. Since young amber mostly doesn’t melt readily in the way that copal does, fakers are generally limited to surface and subsurface staining for fakery. One thing to look for is the tendency of fakers to “overdo” the colouration. I would be extremely suspicious of Indonesian material which has a deep colouration.

One other thing to note is that blue amber (at least from the Dominican Republic) has not been found with recognisable fossil inclusions. Fossiliferous material may be stuck to the outside of pieces (including marine snails and fish teeth etc), but not encased within it. What characterises it is the presence of largely unrecognisable pulverized debris, which is believed to be the result of repeated heat liquefaction of the copal prior to fossilization. That process is potentially important to the mechanisms that create the blue colouration and so perhaps could be regarded as a partial diagnostic for genuine blue amber in general. But you could easily fake that too.

The other diagnostic is that blue amber is highly fluorescent with a blue glow (largely from the presence of the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon perylene). It’s the only amber which might exhibit fluorescence strong enough to be seen in bright sunlight. I guess you could fake that too if you put your mind to it, since perylene can be purchased as synthetic chemical dye for use in histology… but I’m not aware of anyone taking fakery to that level.

Edited May 5, 2014 by painshill

[mammothhunter]

I used to live in the Netherlands and a lot of people from Indonesia were (Are) bringing Indonesian amber. I've seen genuine amber chunks in the kg range and I was told that in Indonesia, it is commonly used for medicines and burned for the smell as well.

My background is in Gemology and I was also extremely curious about the Indonesian material.

I believe the 'rarity' of the material is highly in question.