Amber

Organic gem · also called Succinite (Baltic amber), Fossil resin, Electrum (historic Greek: elektron)

Amber is fossilised tree resin, hardened and polymerised over millions of years. It is organic, amorphous, and at a specific gravity near 1.05 to 1.09 the lightest material in regular gem use. It is the only gem that routinely preserves complete organisms, and its closest and most common substitute is copal, the same material at an earlier stage.

What is amber?

Amber is fossilised tree resin, hardened and polymerised over millions of years. It is organic rather than mineral, amorphous rather than crystalline, and at a specific gravity of about 1.05 to 1.09 it is by a wide margin the lightest material in regular use as a gemstone.

It is not fossilised sap. Sap is the sugar-bearing fluid that circulates within a tree; resin is a separate, sticky terpenoid secretion produced in response to injury, and it is resin that survives. Burial in an oxygen-poor sediment allows the volatile components to escape slowly while the remainder cross-links into a stable polymer. The process takes millions of years, and the intermediate stage — resin that is hardened but not yet fully polymerised — is copal, which is the material most often mistaken for amber and most often sold as it.

Amber is also the only gem material that routinely contains complete, three-dimensionally preserved organisms. That fact governs both its scientific importance and much of its commercial value.

What gives amber its colour?

Amber runs from nearly colourless through the full range of yellows, oranges, browns and reds to green and, rarely, blue and near-black. Most of that range is simple: oxidation over time darkens the resin, and iron-bearing and organic impurities push it toward brown and red. Older and more oxidised material is generally deeper in colour.

Opacity is a different matter and comes from bubbles. The cloudy, buttery material variously called butterscotch, egg-yolk or royal white amber owes its appearance to millions of microscopic gas inclusions that scatter light. The density of those bubbles, not any pigment, decides whether a piece is transparent cognac or opaque cream, and the two grades are valued quite differently in different markets — clear material has historically been preferred in Europe, opaque white and yellow strongly preferred in East Asia.

The Dominican blue amber is the outlier and the most interesting case. Its colour is fluorescence, not absorption: under daylight containing ultraviolet, the surface emits blue while the transmitted light through the piece remains amber-coloured. Move it against a white background and it looks brown; against a dark one, blue. Nothing else in the amber family behaves this way.

How is amber identified?

Start with weight, in the hand. Amber is so light that it feels wrong for its size, and this is the first thing an experienced buyer notices. It is also warm to the touch and never cold, which separates it from glass immediately.

The saltwater test formalises this. Dissolve salt in water until no more will dissolve — roughly one part salt to four of water by volume — and amber floats while most plastics, glass and mineral imitations sink. It is a genuinely useful test, but it has one limitation that matters: copal floats too, because it is chemically the same material at an earlier stage.

Refractive index reads about 1.54 by the spot method. Amber is amorphous and therefore singly refractive, although strain from burial commonly produces anomalous double refraction in the polariscope. Under long-wave ultraviolet, Baltic amber typically fluoresces a milky bluish white, and Dominican blue amber fluoresces very strongly.

The definitive test is infrared spectroscopy. Baltic amber — the variety succinite, which contains three to eight per cent succinic acid — produces a characteristic feature in its infrared spectrum known as the Baltic shoulder, a broad absorption in the region between roughly 1250 and 1175 wavenumbers. It is used routinely by laboratories to confirm Baltic origin and to separate amber from copal, and it is the only test that does both non-destructively and conclusively.

The distinguishing feature: what is inside it

No other gem material preserves biology. Insects, spiders, mites, plant fragments, feathers, occasional small vertebrates and, in Burmese material, structures of considerable scientific consequence have all been recovered from amber, trapped in flowing resin and preserved in three dimensions rather than flattened as they would be in rock.

For a buyer, inclusions are also the main route to being deceived, and there are reliable signs to work from. A genuine inclusion is usually incomplete, distorted or damaged — an insect struggling in resin loses legs and wings — and is often surrounded by a whitish film, the residue of body fluids and gases released during entombment. Fine stress cracks may radiate from it. Fakes tend to be the opposite: perfect, complete, well-posed specimens, often too large and too centrally placed, with a visible cavity boundary or a plane where two halves of the piece were joined, and with bubbles trapped along that plane.

Modern insects embedded in copal or in polyester resin account for most of the fraudulent inclusion trade. The remedy is the same as for the material generally: establish that the host is amber before assessing what is in it.

Is amber treated?

Yes, extensively, and most of it is accepted practice with a long history — but it changes what you are buying and should be asked about.

Clarification is the most common. Heating in rapeseed or linseed oil dissolves the microscopic bubbles that make cloudy amber opaque, turning it transparent. The process often produces internal stress discs — circular, iridescent, lily-pad-shaped fractures known in the trade as sun spangles — which are frequently sold as an attractive feature and are entirely a product of treatment.

Autoclave heating under pressure darkens amber toward cognac, red and near-black, and simulates the appearance of much older, more oxidised material. Pressed amber, or ambroid, is made by heating small fragments to a few hundred degrees under pressure until they fuse; it is a genuine amber product but a reconstituted one, and it shows flow structure, elongated bubbles and cloudy streaks under magnification. Dyeing occurs, particularly for the strong greens and cherry reds, and surface coatings and backings are used to strengthen apparent colour.

The two questions worth asking are therefore whether the piece is natural or pressed, and whether it has been clarified or heat-darkened.

Where does amber come from?

The Baltic region dominates. The deposits worked at Yantarny in the Kaliningrad oblast constitute by a large margin the world's biggest single amber source, with further production from Poland, Lithuania and the Rivne region of Ukraine. Baltic amber is Eocene, in the region of thirty-four to forty-eight million years old, and the identity of the tree that produced it is still debated; the traditional attribution to a pine has been challenged by later work.

The Dominican Republic produces the blue amber, from Miocene deposits in the northern mountains, generally placed at roughly fifteen to twenty million years. Mexican amber from Simojovel in Chiapas is of similar age and is the source of much of the material sold in the Americas.

Myanmar produces burmite, from Kachin State, which at around ninety-nine million years is Cretaceous and far older than any other commercial amber. Its scientific importance is exceptional and its sourcing is not: the mines lie in an area of active armed conflict, and since 2017 a substantial part of the palaeontological community has argued against acquiring material extracted from it. Anyone considering Burmese amber should treat the provenance question as a real one rather than a formality.

Lebanon holds Early Cretaceous amber of great scientific value, at roughly one hundred and thirty million years, but it does not enter commerce.

Where the name comes from

The English word descends from the Arabic *anbar*, which originally referred to ambergris — the waxy substance from the sperm whale — and transferred to fossil resin in medieval European usage, leaving the two materials sharing a name they have nothing else in common with.

The Greek name is the more consequential one. Amber was *elektron*, and the observation that a rubbed piece attracts light objects gave the phenomenon its name and, eventually, gave electricity its name too. Rubbing an amber bead on wool and holding it over torn paper still demonstrates the effect.

The Amber Road, carrying Baltic material south to the Mediterranean, is documented from the Bronze Age onward and is among the oldest long-distance trade routes in Europe. Baltic amber has been found in Mycenaean and Egyptian contexts, and its movement is one of the clearer archaeological signals of prehistoric European exchange.

What sizes are available?

Large, by gem standards. Baltic nodules of several hundred grams are regular and pieces over a kilogram are recorded, so amber is used for substantial carvings, large beads and decorative objects in a way that most gem materials cannot support.

Size on its own adds relatively little, though, because the material is neither scarce nor dense. What is scarce at size is a large piece that is clean, evenly coloured and free of the fractures that riddle most nodules, and scarcer still is a large piece with a good inclusion positioned where it can be seen. Those command the premium.

How much is amber worth?

Inclusions come first, and by a very large margin. A well-preserved, complete, identifiable insect in a clear piece can be worth many multiples of the same piece empty, and an unusual or scientifically interesting organism more still. Nothing else in amber pricing moves numbers by the same factor.

Colour and market come second, and the two are linked. Dominican blue amber commands the highest per-gram prices of any locality material. Opaque white and butterscotch material is priced strongly in East Asia, where demand rose sharply from around 2010, and less so in Europe. Deep natural cherry red is scarce and priced accordingly, though much red amber in the market is heat-darkened.

Then clarity, then whether the piece is natural or pressed — pressed amber is a fraction of the price of natural — and then size. Origin matters chiefly where it is verifiable: Baltic origin can be confirmed by infrared spectroscopy, which is why it is the one origin claim in amber worth paying for.

Is amber durable enough to wear?

It is the most fragile material in common jewellery use, and this needs saying plainly. At 2 to 2.5 on the Mohs scale amber can be scratched by a fingernail at the low end and by almost anything else at the high end. It is soft, it is brittle, and it will lose its polish through ordinary handling.

It is also chemically vulnerable in a way that most gems are not. Alcohol, acetone, perfume, hairspray and many household cleaners will etch or dissolve the surface. Heat softens it well below the temperature of a jeweller's torch. Prolonged exposure to air oxidises and darkens it over decades and eventually produces a crazed, crackled skin, which is why antique amber often looks quite different from the day it was cut.

The practical position is that amber suits beads, pendants and earrings, and is a poor choice for a ring worn daily. Store it away from light and heat, put it on after perfume rather than before, clean it with a barely damp soft cloth and nothing else, and never put it near an ultrasonic or steam cleaner.

How to buy amber without being caught out

Weigh it in your hand first. Amber's lightness is the most immediate diagnostic there is, and glass and most mineral imitations fail it instantly. Warmth to the touch is the second free test.

Then establish that it is amber rather than copal, because that is the substitution that actually happens. Copal is younger, softer, floats in brine exactly as amber does, and carries the same kind of inclusions — often better ones, since the insects are recent. It softens and becomes tacky where a drop of acetone or ether is applied, it smells sweeter and melts sooner under a hot point, and infrared spectroscopy separates the two conclusively. On anything expensive, and on anything sold for its inclusion, that is the test to insist on.

Assess an inclusion the way a sceptic would: too perfect, too complete, too well-centred and too large are all warning signs, and a visible join plane with flattened bubbles along it settles the matter.

Finally, ask two direct questions — is it natural or pressed, and has it been clarified or heat-treated. Both are ordinary trade practices and a good seller will answer without hesitation. It is the hesitation that tells you something. See our specimens and our gems, or tell us what you are looking for.

Looking to buy amber? See the collection, the rough, or send us a brief.