The expression “True Blue” connotes the real thing, top quality, excellence, beauty, value, et al.
So too in the world of Diamonds. Blue Diamonds are very rare, beautiful, and highly expensive. So how do you tell the real thing from the fake? This has always been a difficult endeavor for Gemologists until very recently.
A research team has now found a method to identify a rare blue diamond. Their process, recently published in Geology is termed the ‘diamond fingerprinting method’. The team includes a Penn State University minerologist, Peter J. Heaney, professor of geosciences, and researchers Jeffrey E. Post, Smithsonian’s curator of gems and minerals, and Sally Eaton-Magana from the Naval Research Laboratory.
The team conducted its experiments at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington on the Hope Diamond. Blue diamonds are known to react with ultraviolet rays. They exposed the Hope Diamond to the rays and noted that the diamond glowed with a reddish-orange phosphorescence color for five minutes and the emitted rays were of varying wavelengths which thus became one Identification Marker.
In addition, these scientists noted the time span it took for the intensity of the phosphorescence to reduce by half. Their results indicate that a combination of these two Markers provide a unique fingerprint. Each blue diamond tested displayed a unique ratio of wavelengths of red and blue light and half-life of its phosphorescence.
Also tested were two synthetic blue diamonds and a treated diamond, which produced significantly different results from natural diamonds.
The importance of this new finger printing method to determine true diamond color are obvious and an important advancement in Diamond Identification and Gemology.