![]() “By cutting directly into the color planes, you are cutting over a cleavage plane,” Penn says.Īlthough Finland has ceased to produce spectrolite, there are ample supplies of this labradorite coming from Madagascar. Polishing takes great skill and patience. To get maximum light sensitivity, the entire top of the stone must be perfectly level. Like opal and ammolite, spectrolite’s color-magic depends on how well it reflects light across its top. The greater the slant, the less the spread.” If you tilt the table plane more than one or two degrees, you will sacrifice color spread. So you must cut the table perfectly perpendicular. In an interview just before his untimely death last month, Tucson-based cutter-dealer Jeff Graham (whose articles can now be found at ) said, “Imagine a ream of paper lying flat with each sheet parallel. Labradorite has colors running in layers parallel to its surface. Just based on the difficulties of cutting spectrolite, the gem seems woefully underpriced. But there is clearly a part of him that misses the labors of labradorite. Given the fact that spectrolite is a challenge to cut, Penn says spending less time cabbing this gem isn’t causing him grief. Now, Penn admits, he doesn’t cut as much of the material as he used to-“in part,” he explains, “because there’s not much left and in part because I don’t get the calls I used to.” Spectrolite first appeared in meaningful quantities during the early 1990s. “The only people you’re going to find with backlogs of fine material are those who have been into spectrolite for a long time,” says Penn. Supplies that were considerable five years ago have dwindled to nearly nothing. With diesel fuel now at nearly $10 per gallon in Scandinavia, production, which depends heavily on heavy machinery, is a losing proposition. Spectrolite fetches so little money that miners can no longer afford to extract it from the tundra-like environs in Finland in which it is found. Indeed, the price gap between spectrolite and black opal is so vast that one wonders why the former isn’t better known-just by dint of being such a bargain beauty.Īlas, low price is a two-edge sword. “When spectrolite has everything going for it,” says lapidary Jason Penn, based in Tijeras, New Mexico, 25 miles east of Albuquerque, “we’re talking $100 per stone.” This similarity helps to explain why many of the miners of this feldspar have been Australians keen on providing an opal impersonator at a fraction of the cost.Īnd by fraction, I mean a tiny sliver. At its best, spectrolite, a type of labradorite first found in Finland, looks like a cross between black opal and ammolite-the world’s two best-known spectral color-play gems (hence the name).
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