Ruby. It has held July only since 1912, when the American trade moved it there from December, and by then ruby had been coming out of a furnace in Paris for over a decade.
Auguste Verneuil announced his flame-fusion process in 1902 and published the details in 1904. GIA records ruby as “the first gem to be created in a laboratory”. A paper on the history of the technique notes that “By 1900 there was brisk demand for ruby manufactured by Verneuil’s method, even though Verneuil did not publicly announce his work until 1902”, and, more cautiously, that “In 1885 a dealer in Geneva began to sell ruby that is now believed to have been created by flame fusion”. That hedge is the paper’s own and it stays.
Set 1900 against 1912 and the order runs the other way round from the one people assume. Ruby was being manufactured, in commercial quantity, before it was July’s stone.
None of that is a scandal. It does mean a July buyer chooses between a mined stone and a laboratory-grown one, both of them ruby, and that the American rule covering what a seller may call each is public and short.
Whatever went into the 1912 decision to give ruby to July, a manufactured supply of the stone had existed for years by then. The calendar and the furnace grew up together.
The difference between synthetic and simulated
GIA defines a synthetic gem as one that “is made in a laboratory, but which shares virtually all chemical, optical, and physical characteristics of its natural mineral counterpart”. Virtually all is GIA’s own hedge. The two are not declared identical; they are declared to share the properties that matter. A synthetic ruby is ruby, with the composition and the structure and the hardness of one.
A simulant is a different thing entirely. GIA describes simulants as materials that “look like another gem and are used as its substitute but have very different chemical composition, crystal structure and optical and physical properties”. Cubic zirconia standing in for diamond is the familiar case. A simulant resembles; a synthetic is.
The distinction is not between real and fake. It turns on whether the material in the setting is corundum. A synthetic ruby and a mined ruby are both corundum coloured by chromium; a red cubic zirconia is neither, however convincing it looks from a metre away. That is the question a buyer is really asking, and the trade’s two words answer it.
Underneath both, the mineral is unremarkable to describe. Ruby is the red variety of corundum, which the Handbook of Mineralogy gives as “Nearly pure Al2O3; with traces of Fe, Ti, and Cr” at hardness 9. GIA identifies the chromium as the trace element responsible for the red.
The rule, which is short
American law is specific about how the word may be used, and the specificity is the useful part. The Federal Trade Commission’s Jewelry Guides, at 16 CFR 23.25, makes it unfair or deceptive to use the word ruby for a laboratory-grown or imitation stone “unless such word or name is immediately preceded with equal conspicuousness by the word ‘laboratory-grown,’ ‘laboratory-created,’ ‘[manufacturer name]-created,’ or some other word or phrase of like meaning, or by the word ‘imitation’ or ‘simulated,’ so as to disclose clearly the nature of the product and the fact it is not a mined gemstone.”
Immediately preceded, with equal conspicuousness. The qualifier goes in front of the noun, in the same size type, and not into a footnote or the small print at the bottom of a listing.
A rule written that way does not regulate stones at all. It regulates a word. The regulation cannot tell a synthetic ruby from a mined one and does not try; what it governs is what may be printed on a ticket and said across a counter. The burden of knowing sits with the seller, and the burden on the buyer is reduced to reading.
That makes one half of the July question easy to hold in the head. If the word ruby appears on its own, the seller is representing a mined stone and can be held to it. If it appears with a qualifier in front of it, that is the disclosure working as intended, and the stone is still ruby.
Only one half, though, because this section of the Guides governs the name on the ticket and nothing else. What has been done to a stone after it came out of the ground is covered by a separate section of the same Guides, and that is the part where a shopper still has to ask.
The part the naming rule does not cover
Treatment is the harder question, and GIA’s wording on it is more direct than the usual hedging.
Its ruby buying guide does not give a percentage. It gives an instruction instead: “You should assume your ruby is heated. Rubies with a report from an independent laboratory like GIA that confirms there is no evidence of heat command a premium due to their rarity.” That is not the same as saying most rubies are heated. It tells a buyer what the default position is and what the exception costs.
On filling, the same guide is measured. “Some gems on the market also have had color diffused into the surface or fractures filled with lead glass to improve their appearance.” Some. A lead-glass-filled ruby is a different proposition from a heated one, and it is the thing to ask about by name.
The fuller answer runs to four cases rather than two. A mined stone the buyer should assume is heated. A mined stone with a laboratory report saying it is not. A mined stone with glass in its fractures. A laboratory-grown stone sold as one. All four are legitimate, they are priced very differently, and a seller who knows which is in the tray can say so in a sentence.
What the furnace made possible
The manufacturing story has a coda that has nothing to do with jewellery, and it shows what the material can do once you can grow it to order. In 1960 Theodore Maiman, working at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, built the first laser, and the thing he built it out of was a rod of ruby. His paper in Nature, dated 6 August that year, reports “stimulated optical emission at a wave-length of 6943 A.; the active material used was ruby (chromium in corundum)”. The Smithsonian holds a candidate for that rod, calls the crystal in it synthetic, and dates the demonstration to 16 May 1960, while adding that “No one knows with certainty which crystal actually generated the first laser light”. Chromium, the same trace element that gives the stone its colour, was doing the optical work.
A laser rod has to be uniform and made to a specification on a schedule. Verneuil’s furnace and its descendants could supply that; a deposit in the ground has no way of being asked. For this one purpose the manufactured stone was never a substitute for the mined one. It was the only candidate.
Where a stone came from has never counted for much in crystal practice, which reads ruby for vitality and for courage and puts the colour down as the reason. The colour is the same chromium in either kind of stone.
In all four cases the mineral is the same one, described once for all of them in the Crystalance Mineral Library. The histories differ, and so do the prices attached to the histories. The naming rule is one short paragraph, and it does not settle everything. A July buyer still has a question to ask about treatment, and asking it is on them. On the narrower question of what the material in the setting is, the answer is written down, and a seller is obliged to give it before being asked.
Sources
- GIA, synthetic gem materials, including the 1902 Verneuil announcement and the definition of a synthetic: gia.edu
- GIA, gem imitations and simulants: gia.edu
- Harris, Daniel C., “A peek into the history of sapphire crystal growth”, Proc. SPIE 5078 (2003), for the 1900 demand, the 1904 publication and the hedged 1885 Geneva ruby: zenodo.org
- 16 CFR 23.25, Federal Trade Commission Guides for the Jewelry, Precious Metals, and Pewter Industries, misuse of the words ruby, sapphire and similar: ecfr.gov
- 16 CFR 23.22, the separate section of the same Guides covering disclosure of treatments: ecfr.gov
- The Jewelers’ Circular and the Horological Review, 14 August 1912, for the adopted list giving ruby to July: archive.org
- Handbook of Mineralogy, corundum: handbookofmineralogy.org
- GIA, ruby description, for chromium as the chromophore: gia.edu
- GIA, ruby buying guide, for the heat assumption and the note on lead-glass filling: 4cs.gia.edu
- Maiman, Theodore H., “Stimulated optical radiation in ruby”, Nature 187 (1960), 493: nature.com
- Smithsonian National Museum of American History, ruby laser rod: americanhistory.si.edu
