About Amber

Real or Fake?

Amber is a fossil tree resin which become hard stone alike in many millions ears of temperature, pressure and time impact. Only few kinds of fossil resin are interesting as a gemological material: The Baltic amber, Romanian amber, Sicilian amber and materials from Burma, Mexico and Dominican republic.The Baltic amber is most common and popular because of its natural beauty and good quality as a lapidary material. In small village in Kaliningrad area (Russia) are being mined approx 80% of all world amber raw material, there are some of amber sources in Lithuania and Poland. Amber has been known from ancient times as a powerful medicine and a magic amulet stone. Some amber jewellery and animal sculptures are dated 450 000 years b.c.. Amber was widely known in ancient Greece, the blind poet Homer mentioned amber in his famous poem "Odyssey". In ancient Greece the amber was widely used in jewellery and decorative arts with gold and ivory. In Europe amber was used mostly as a amulet and medicine against wide range of i illnesses as a headache, toothache and stomach pain. In Asia almost every reach muslim had a prayer beads made of good quality amber. Some amber pieces contains inclusions - ancient insects, leaves and even frogs and lizards trapped in the resin millions year ago. nowadays present technology allows to make some fake amber pieces from plastics and polymer resins, the difference is almost undetectable, some times it is impossible to reveal without make some damage to the amber article.

One of the ways to define real amber or not is the price. Just follow to simple common sense and logic, for example a rough material of mined amber costs currently around 400-500 euro depend on quality.To produce a piece of jewellery 2/3 of the material going to waste, so the price is 1,500 euro already. If we will add a labor, production and marketing costs it will be around £2,000 per kilo only for the amber. Average weight of the piece of jewellery is around 3-4g. So it is £6-8 only cost of the amber.Question : how the seller manage to sell an amber article for £5 and make some profit? There is only exception for some auctions eBay alike where sellers offer low start price to attract more buyers to their's Shops, but usually the price going up at the end of the auction. Yes you can grab a bargain sometimes, but not always. There are no miracles, just business.