Is it Real Amber?

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hawke

Lifer
Feb 1, 2014
1,346
4
Augusta, Ga
I need some lessons on how to ID real Amber. Ive read a little and looked at a few pictures. Never held a piece. If someone has an old unusable broken amber stem I'd love to have it for reference purposes. Amber is fairly translucent with cloudy streaks and can be yellowish to a dark color I read.
Would someone have images of true amber and fake or synthetic copies side by side you could provide here maybe?

 

condorlover1

Lifer
Dec 22, 2013
7,994
26,608
New York
Let me have a look - I think Andre has a busted stem and I am having dinner with him at the club tonight so let me bell him Hawke and see if it still knocking around his apartment.

 

papipeguy

Lifer
Jul 31, 2010
15,778
35
Bethlehem, Pa.
Got this from Wikipedia.
The Vienna amber factories, which use pale amber to manufacture pipes and other smoking tools, turn it on a lathe and polish it with whitening and water or with rotten stone and oil. The final luster is given by friction with flannel.
When gradually heated in an oil-bath, amber becomes soft and flexible. Two pieces of amber may be united by smearing the surfaces with linseed oil, heating them, and then pressing them together while hot. Cloudy amber may be clarified in an oil-bath, as the oil fills the numerous pores to which the turbidity is due. Small fragments, formerly thrown away or used only for varnish, are now used on a large scale in the formation of "amberoid" or "pressed amber".
The pieces are carefully heated with exclusion of air and then compressed into a uniform mass by intense hydraulic pressure; the softened amber being forced through holes in a metal plate. The product is extensively used for the production of cheap jewelry and articles for smoking. This pressed amber yields brilliant interference colors in polarized light. Amber has often been imitated by other resins like copal and kauri gum, as well as by celluloid and even glass. Baltic amber is sometimes colored artificially, but also called "true amber".

 

smokeystover

Might Stick Around
Sep 20, 2012
87
185
Here's an old WDC meer with an amber stem.
wdc.jpg

If I remember correctly, you can do a hot needle test on amber similar to what's done with ivory. Touch a hot needle to a hidden spot, and smell the little bit of smoke that wafts up. Being a resin, real amber has a definite pine smell. Plastic smells like, well, plastic.

 
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