Caribbean Amber

Is there something like REAL “Caribbean Amber”? Definitely. It is found in the Dominican Republic (not Dominica, mind you!!). But it has not been “discovered recently”. To the contrary. Columbus and the Taino Indians exchanged amber gifts when he arrived on the island he called “La Hispaniola” . Besides the Green Amber one of the specialties of the Dominican Republic is the Blue Amber. It is green and blue by nature, not enhanced like most Baltic amber. There are different versions of green amber, the rare translucent kind, a opaque green, a green with black stripes, a bluish green, smokey green, olive green, but also the regular honey, brown, black etc. and the most rare BLUE, purple, eggplant, teal and others. How do you recognize natural Caribbean Amber? In natural amber one piece never looks like the other. Most of the time it has some natural inclusions as characteristics that make it unique. But people are being told that amber has to be clear, pure, transparent like glass, and they believe it because most of them have no idea what amber and amberization are all about. And because of this, they fall easy prey to the mass industry. A renowned scientist, Prof. Dr. Mark R. Mayer writes: ‘First of all, beware of pieces that are too uniform or too perfect. Amberization involves processes that result in imperfection in pieces, imperfections that often give amber its personality. So, bubbles, plant debris, clouds, inner layers, cracks and fissures, insect parts, opacities, swirls and stress lines are present to some degree in most pieces and can help verify authenticity. Beware, for example, of a necklace of perfectly matched, transparent beads — that would be most unlikely.” Also beware of “Caribbean Amber” which comes in clear greenish tones and is sold over TV marketing. It is nothing else but just artificially colored (pressure, vapor and heat) Colombian copal. See: Wikipedia: Caribbean Amber. This so called and much advertised “Caribbean Amber” made with Colombian Copal is beautiful, clear, well presented, exquisitely mounted. But it is far from 30 – 50 million years old – probably less than 2000 years. It is: de-naturalized, not green by itself, not what commonly is accepted as “amber” (see Wikipedia/amber), not from the Caribbean, but from South America not been found “recently in 2005″. What they have “recently found” was the way to make Colombian Copal look green.

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