Why buy amber beads?

Every now and then stumbling upon an announcement of buying up amber beads, one wonders: why buy it and is it time to join a profitable business? And how not to make a mistake in choosing the “Baltic gems”?

Curious! Amber has acquired many poetic synonyms - sea incense and the gift of the sun, the tears of the daughters of Phaeton and the white-burning stone. And one of the ancient peoples suggested that it was petrified urine of a lynx!

So why did someone urgently need such beads?

Signs of expensive and cheap stone

Amber is a hardened resin of conifers, the exact appearance of which has not been established, and some of them grew more than a hundred million years ago. During this time, the price of this resin has grown - in other periods of history, it was worth more than gold!

Curious! Amber is mentioned both in cuneiform verses of an unknown Sumerian poet and in the Odyssey.

The cost of a mineral depends on its variety and purity, as well as the presence-absence of inclusions (insects and the remains of prehistoric conifers). Brown amber remains the cheapest - it has a lot of pollution, and the duller the stone, the cheaper it is. The yellow mineral remains average in price. Green will cost more than yellow and orange. Red is even more expensive if it is clean.

Inclusion is a separate case. Shards with them are not found very often, especially when it comes to getting into the resin prehistoric spiders or motley butterflies. The transparent piece found in the Dominican Republic was recognized as the most beautiful, in which there was a bright soaring beauty with a wingspan of almost 15 cm . The minimum price of inclusion of average quality is not less than 500 dollars. Truly exclusive stones have long been counted and bought out by collectors. And imitations are offered to gullible customers constantly!

Curious! The craftsmen of Ancient Rome learned how to falsify inclusions, and for a long time their “masterpieces” were considered genuine. Only in the 19th century did they recognize a fake!

Why do buyers buy antique amber?

Old products are in demand primarily as traditionally expensive antiques . At the same time, the risk of acquiring a fake is quite high - they learned to falsify a stone for a long time, and if it is not acrylic with celluloid, then you can easily run into the purchase of digging (also resin, but not coniferous, but legumes, for example, Madagascar)! Or it could be a kauri tar.

The increased interest in the "tears of the sea", and even round, is due to several reasons:

  • in folk medicine, a belief has been established about the ability of amber necklaces to cope with thyroid diseases, which helps to increase demand for them;
  • the amber plant in Kaliningrad (the only amber-producing enterprise in the world) raised the prices of mined stone by more than one and a half times;
  • the possibility of reselling amber to China and the United Arab Emirates: the Chinese believe that oval or round golden pebbles help maintain health, and the Arabs returned the fashion for beads.

Important! Having bought kilograms of grandmother’s beads for buyers, be prepared to part with only a few grams of pebbles of a specific fraction: most likely, you will get only rich yellow beads of a certain size.

The negative qualities of amber

The stone, which has found application not only in jewelry, but also in medicine, has many useful properties - from the ability to cleanse and give energy to rejuvenation. All this is due to the “ability” to absorb various “dirt”: toxins, toxins, etc. But this property can also be excessive, accelerating metabolic processes to unacceptable when the body’s cells begin to process themselves. Most often this happens if you get too carried away with succinic acid.

Advice! Amber has the ability to collect negative energy, so the product purchased or inherited must be cleaned, for example, after holding it for a day in the freezer. From time to time, amber needs to be washed in clean water.

How to understand that the mineral is real?

It is not easy to distinguish a real stone from fakes by eye. There are several authentication methods:

  • a glass-like mineral should be slightly scratched with a copper needle - a trace will remain if the stone is real;
  • any sharp object should crumble amber slightly - artificial material will produce shavings ;
  • plastic imitation differs from amber in the property of peeling off if a piece is broken off (a natural mineral crumbles );
  • in saline (8 tbsp. per glass of water) genuine amber must float, in fresh - drown: the fake will drown in any case;
  • when you touch a natural mineral with a hot needle, the smell of resin should be felt. Curious! In ancient Greece, amber was used as incense in compositions with incense .
  • under ultraviolet rays, natural stone should luminesce.

Advice! Modern technologies sometimes allow you to get around the established methods of verification. It is better to consult a specialist - one can be found in a large jewelry store.