Low-Temperature Heat Treatment of Pink Sapphires from Ilakaka, Madagascar

Abstract

GEMS & GEMOLOGY WINTER 2020 Heat treatment has been used to improve the color and/or clarity of corundum for more than a thousand years. Various parameters such as temperature, heating and cooling time, and oxidizing or reducing atmosphere will affect the final color (Emmett and Douthit, 1993; Emmett et al., 2003; Hughes et al., 2017). The border between highand low-temperature heat treatment has been defined by Emmett (in Hughes et al., 2017) as the temperature needed to dissolve second-phase microcrystals, which is somewhere between 1200° and 1350°C. Heating at high temperatures will damage most inclusions in ruby and sapphire and is often detectable by trained gemologists. In contrast, heating corundum at low temperatures, sometimes below 700°C, will only subtly affect their internal inclusions, making the treatment much more challenging to detect without advanced instrumentation (figure 1). Previous studies on the effect of low-temperature heat treatment on inclusions have focused on rubies from Mozambique (Pardieu et al., 2015; Sripoonjan et