How is amber formed and how to identify amber?

Amber was 4500 years ago? 99 million years ago, the resin of coniferous plants dripped, buried underground for thousands of years, and turned into fossils under the action of pressure and heat. What is the specific formation process? I'll tell you how amber is formed.

The formation of amber Amber, popularly speaking, is a kind of plant resin, similar to what we often say? Rosin? At a certain temperature, plants (mostly woody trees) can only secrete a viscous or colloidal liquid secretion, which gradually loses its volatile components after long-term burial, and then gradually forms resin fossils through oxidative consolidation. This fossil seems to have no stone texture of rocks, but it has gone through millions? Thousands of years of underground burial have experienced all the processes of fossil formation, which we call special fossils? Organic fossils, similar to coal concentrate. Because of this, it is essentially different from modern natural resin. If the resin oil drops happen to be mixed with other biological fragments such as branches and leaves, and there are insects, it will be very precious.

For example, a long time ago, a small insect was lying on a pine tree, and a drop of pine oil fell, which just wrapped the body of the small insect completely and made it unable to move. After a long time, pine oil became hard and transparent, and it still remains the same as it did thousands of years ago. This is amber.

Characteristics of amber amber ecological environment

It is mainly distributed in the sediments of Cretaceous or Tertiary glutenite and coal seam.

Harvest and storage

Remove impurities such as sand, gravel and soil after digging out from the stratum or coal seam. Amber is light in texture and easy to store. Perfect amber has a high collection value.

Animal and plant morphology

Most of them are irregular granular, massive, stalactite and granular. Sometimes it contains fossils of plants or insects. The colors are yellow, brownish yellow and red yellow. The stripes are white or yellow. It has a turpentine luster. Transparent to opaque. Conchoidal fracture is very obvious. The hardness is 2 ~ 2.5. Specific gravity 1.05 ~ 1.09. Sex is extremely fragile. Triboelectric charging.

The category of amber is classified as opaque amber, which is traditionally called? Secret wax? We often meet other names of amber:

Old honey? Refers to the opaque amber, red and orange handed down from generation to generation.

Blood pearls? Refers to blood-red amber. The color is like the color of fine red wine.

Aunt? It means white amber.

Jin Po? Refers to golden yellow transparent amber.

Beeswax is translucent to opaque, and can be in various colors, with golden yellow, brown yellow, egg yellow and other yellow as the most common, with waxy feeling and waxy luster? Resin luster, but also glass luster.

Golden twist? Refers to amber interwoven with transparent Jin Po and translucent beeswax.

Champ? Refers to amber with fragrance.

Bugs? Refers to amber wrapped in animal and plant remains.

Shipper? Refers to amber with a certain petrochemical degree, which is harder than others.

Blood beeswax? Translucent to opaque, pure natural, non-optimized and red, waxy, waxy.

Flower woman? Amber with various colors and uneven colors.

Raw ore? Refers to the ore mined without beneficiation or other processing.

Lanpo? Dominica and a domestic amber with a light yellow body and a blue surface facing the sun.

Blue-green pearls? The colors produced in Mexico are green to blue, similar to Dominica and Golupo.

Yellow honey? Yellow beeswax.

Half honey and half pearls? Also called pearl honey or egg honey, it means that transparent amber is wrapped with opaque beeswax.

White honey? White beeswax.

Water bravery? Amber is hollow and contains water. This is a very rare and precious piece of amber.

Chopper? An amber that is black when viewed vertically with naked eyes and bright red when illuminated.

Shipper? Yellow, transparent, petrified and hard amber.

The criteria for identifying amber are solid texture, no crack and beautiful color. The most precious amber is highly transparent and insect-like. There are grades according to the cleanliness, shape and size of insects, and the best grade can be classified as gems. Golden yellow and yellow-red amber are the top grade. Amber with insects is used to make face stones and chest pendants, which is of great value. Amber with many cracks, soft texture, dull color or similar color to ordinary stone is of no use value.

Eliminating the false and retaining the true is the main purpose of distinguishing amber from other jewels and jade. Therefore, it is particularly important to understand the characteristics of real amber and its imitations. There are several kinds of imitations: glass, plastic, resin (resin with insufficient years, such as Barker resin) and synthetic. Imitations are called imitations because they imitate some characteristics of the real thing, and are similar to the real thing in perception, feel and feel, which makes inexperienced people mistake it for the real thing.

Amber is an organic gem, which is warm and light to the touch, which makes it different from glass. Natural amber blocks float in salt water and sink in clear water. Natural amber has a special smell? When rubbed, heated or burned, natural amber gives off a pleasant resin smell, which helps to distinguish amber. Scratching the surface of the sample also helps to identify? Scraping natural amber surface will produce fine powder, while scraping plastic imitation surface will have spiral scratches. Compared with artificial resin blocks, natural amber is easier to pulverize. If there are large, rare and precious inclusions in amber, they are probably imitations. The optimized amber, including those with inclusions, has a characteristic that only the surface has bright colors, while the interior is almost colorless. Amber raw materials are precious? If its price is much lower than the market price at that time, we should realize that it may be an imitation.

Natural amber reacts weakly with ether and various solvents, while imitations made of Coba resin react weakly with ether and acetone (nail polish remover). After a while, the surface will become dull and sticky.

Copa resin has a strong fragrance. When the hot needle comes into contact with Coba resin, it will melt and stick to the needle, forming a long? Line? . Products made of Coba resin will produce very small and deep hairlike cracks when exposed to sunlight and air.

1. Experiment: Natural amber is very light. If you put it (without any inlay) in water, it will sink to the bottom. But you don't have to worry. When you add dissolved brine to it, when the salt concentration is greater than 1 4 (1 salt, 4 parts water), the real amber will float slowly, but the fake amber will not.

2. Sound: Amber chains or beads without inlay will make a very soft and slightly dull sound when gently rubbed in your hands. If the sound of plastic or resin is crisp.

3. Aroma: Amber rough stone that has not been finely polished can smell a faint special fragrance after it is rubbed by hand to generate heat. The aroma of white beeswax is slightly heavier than other ordinary amber, so it is called? Champ? . Generally speaking, amber that has been polished or carved by hand smells bad when rubbed by hand.

4, visual inspection: this is a trick to identify true and false amber; The texture, color depth, transparency and refractive index of true amber will change with the observation angle and illumination. This feeling can't be found in any other substance. Just as we identify true and false people, for example, superb artists can create lifelike wax figures. Confuse the real with the fake? By the way, even the best wax figure can't escape our eyes. Amber is transparent but moist, unlike glass, crystal and diamond, which can be seen at a glance. Fake amber is either transparent or opaque, and the color is fake when it dies. Artificial fake amber is dazzling, and it will feel lifeless cold light.

5, ultraviolet irradiation: put amber under the money detector, it will have fluorescence, light green, green, blue, white and so on. Plastic fake amber does not change color.

6. Friction with static electricity: Amber can attract small pieces of paper after rubbing on clothes.

7, feel: amber is a neutral gem, generally not too cold and too hot. Glass imitations will have a cold feeling.

8. Hot test: the needle is burned in an inconspicuous place of amber, with a faint pine fragrance. Bakelite and plastic smell pungent and stick to needles. Friendly reminder: Too hot will leave black spots on the amber surface, which will affect the appearance.

9. Needle-picking test with a knife: cutting amber with a paper cutter will turn into powder, resin will fall off in pieces, plastic will roll up, and glass will not be cut. When amber is washed with a hard needle at an angle of 20 ~ 30 degrees from the horizontal line, it will have an explosive feeling and extremely fine powder residue. If it is plastic or other substances with different hardness, it will not stick, or it will feel sticky, or even stick in. Friendly reminder: this experiment will damage your jewelry. If you pick out the cut part, you can only find a professional to repair it. It is best not to do it or do it less, so as not to cause harm to amber.

10, nail polish lotion: wipe the amber surface repeatedly with a cotton swab, and there is no obvious change. Plastics, pressure and amber have not changed, but resin and Coba butter will be corroded because they are not petrified, resulting in sticking pits. Rosin will melt slowly when it is soaked in liquid medicine. Friendly reminder: some amber has a layer of polishing substance, which will turn into white spots when wiped with drugs, but this layer of white spots can be scraped off with nail shells to expose the surface of amber, and there will be no change when rubbed with drugs. The liquid medicine still has the solubility of 18% ~ 20% for amber, and the surface may become foggy after soaking for a long time.

1 1, eye scale: This is the most important method to identify inlaid amber. Amber usually has beautiful scales of lotus leaves, which have different feelings from different angles, have different refraction and emit spiritual light. The transparency of fake amber is generally not high, and the scales emit dead light, which is similar from different angles and lacks the aura of amber. The scales and patterns in fake amber are mostly injection molded, so most of them are the same. The most common one on the market is the red scale.

12. Eyeballs: Most of the bubbles in amber are round, while most of the bubbles in pressed amber are long and flat.

13, spend money for identification: take it to CMA Jewelry Identification Center to measure refractive index, density, etc.

The best test methods: visual inspection, hand feeling and salt water. Even if other methods are more or less true, they will do some harm to amber. The above identification methods cannot be used alone, and multiple test methods are used for layer-by-layer separation.