Why all the hoopla over that curious copper color?

And why is Oregon Sunstone Labradorite so very, very special?

It is my experience that you can tell how well a student understands the subject being taught based on the questions they ask. And given the questions that we are receiving about the Oregon Sunstone Labradorite issues, I can tell that there are a lot of people who really don’t understand exactly how all of this plays out regarding copper and the feldspars. So I thought that this week we would take a look at this curious copper color and why there is so much hoopla over the issues.

So what we have is a very rare, very beautiful and very valuable gemstone that is native to Oregon in the United States . But there are many types of feldspar out there, and some gemstone dealers in places like Thailand and China know how to do some pretty creative stuff to make cheap gemstones look like expensive gemstone, and then pass them off for the real thing. So what if someone could take a cheaper and more plentiful form of feldspar such as an oligoclase (as seen below left), cook it up and infuse it with some form of copper to make it appear to be the far more rare and expensive Oregon Labradorite, even though it was not the Oregon material? (as seen below right).