Pulled Czochralski Red Spinel

Synthetic Red Spinel – Lab Created Red Spinel – Pulled Czochralski Red Spinel

Natural spinel initially used as jewelry in the ancient times. Natural spinels traditionally found in alluvial deposits or gravel from a washed eroded material. Hence it is not sought from primary rock deposits. The cleaned deposits enable these natural spinels to be recovered with a readily smoothed crystal with a rounded shape. This leads to ease of mining and separation methods. Natural spinels deposits are abundant in many various sites, such as Sri Lanka with a wide variety of colorful spinels, Myanmar with smoothed spinel shapes and Afghanistan with fine red spinels.

Spinel was initially recognized as the gemstone family of corundum, where the ones with shades of blue are considered as sapphire, and the ones with red shade are regarded as ruby. However, the chemical composition of spinel and corundum is different. Ever since this composition difference has been discovered, the value of natural spinel became lower, regardless of its use in the past as jewelry. As the value decrease, natural spinels are nowadays rare in gem trading. However, its similar color properties with corundum trigger the production of synthetic spinel.

Synthetic spinel was initially produced by flame fusion process in the late 19th century to obtain the color of sapphire. However, these spinels obtained through flame fusion often shows distinguishable crosshatched birefringent patterns. At the beginning of 20th century, a pulling method was perfected by a Polish chemist and named Czochralski method after the chemist. The process starts with a mixture of initial chemical elements melted into a molten solution, where a substantial seed crystal is added and mixed with the hot solution. As the seed crystal start to grow and solidified, the seed crystal is slowly raised and pulled from the solution, creating a significant solid crystal in the end. The pulling method is an efficient method and produces a high-quality crystal.

Red spinel has a distinctive strong red spectrum, where the red color occurs from the presence of trace chromium. Production of red spinel using pulled method enables the flexibility of a full rich red color, from a deep-red ruby-like color to pale reddish-violet color, by merely manipulating the content of trace chromium during the production. Nowadays, the deep red color that resembles Ruby enables pulled red spinel to attract gemologists, increase the value of spinel and lower the gap with ruby.

The attractiveness of a laboratory created Pulled Red Spinel is due to its single refractive feature and transparency. A top-quality lab created Pulled Red Spinel has no visible inclusions. These enable the valued rich red color to be clearly visible and seemingly polished-like. The efficient pulling method also allows more flexibility with a better fine-quality into the cushion and oval shapes to further enhance the proportion as the standard size for jewelry. A perfect octahedron cut can even occasionally be sold as jewelry without any further faceting.

Loose lab created Pulled Red Spinel gemstone is available in all shapes and sizes.

Some physical and chemical properties of Pulled Red Spinel:

• Variety: Spinel
• Chemical formula: MgAl2O4
• Hardness (Mohn’s scale): 7.5 – 8.0
• Refractive index: 1.719
• Birefringence: –
• Optical character: Isotropic
• Dispersion: 0.020
• Fracture: Conchoidal
• Specific gravity: 3.55 – 3.63
• Transparency: transparent

Here at gemsngems – we can cut the Pulled Czochralski Red Spinel in all shapes and sizes. It is very popular with jewelers as it is used both in silver and gold jewelry. I have all the prices for the Pulled Czochralski Red Spinel on this page. If you do not find anything that you are looking for then send me an e-mail at info@gemsngems.com