I've had this lying around for quite a while. The beads have seams so I keep wanting to throw in a junk lot, but it looks so much like genuine amber that I don't. This weekend I made a bowl of salt water to test a couple of necklaces which had potential. For grins & giggles I threw this one in & to my surprise, it floats.
I also put acetone & alcohol on it....didn't turn tacky, so not copal. Is the salt water test supposed to be 100% accurate? Also, would pressed amber have seams (I looked at some pressed amber listings & can't see them, but you can barely see them in mine either)?
Apologies if pics are too large, but it's been years since I posted here & I'm a bit out of touch.
No, not on the inside. They can barely be felt with your fingernail, but they are there & look like actual seams, albeit low relief. Each one has a seam up one side and down the other, as though two halves have been merged. I'll try posting one more pic & hope that it shows at least one of the seams. Believe it or not, I tried deliberately positioning some of the beads with seams face up, hoping they would show in photographs.
The large darker mottled color bead, showing at about 3:00 position in first pic & approximately 1:00 position in second pic, shows the most obvious seam line (in these pics, but easier seen on most beads in person).
Here are the pictures I have posted before.
The bottom strand in this picture is amber, and the top one isn't (it is Bakelite).
You can see that the amber strand looks quite different under UV light compared to its appearance in normal light, and also compared with the strand that isn't amber. Maybe you can experiment with a known example of amber just to get an idea of how amber behaves under UV light. That is what I did when I was first figuring this out.
Lots of experimenting.
I can see the seams in the beads in your pictures. These might be some kind of reconstituted/pressed amber, rather attractive looking beads I think. Not seen anything like this before with those seams, so this is quite interesting!
@lucille.b Hi Lucille, I am sorry that my post was not very clear, I can see how that might happen.
To answer your question the strand that is brighter under UV light is amber, that is how the fluorescence shows. The Bakelite strand is the one that exhibits no colour change, the amber strand appears milky white. I hope this clears the confusion!
I love being hands on so I have tested different colours of amber and Bakelite and plastics to see how they react to UV light.
Not all amber reacts the same, and some plastics do have some fluorescence as well just to add to the mix, but they will not pass the other tests for amber like the flotation test for example.
Here are a few more pics to show you what I mean.
I have taken photos of amber and Bakelite in natural light and then under UV light for comparison.
So you can see them as "before and after" pics in a way. Please note that I do not use the flash when I take the pics of the items under UV light.
Now here are two facetted necklaces that look quite similar in natural light, but react very differently as you can see under UV light.
Next we have the example I have show before: These both look like amber at a quick glance, but the story comes out under UV light. Note the colour change of the amber necklace on the left under UV light.
More pics of amber under UV light
