Diaspore (rare pink color) (recent find)

Item Description

If you look for gem quality Diaspore in the marketplace, you'll likely see the sandy colored gems from Turkey (sometimes marketed as "Zultanite" or "Csarite"). Recently (2020) there was an exciting discovery of rare beautiful purple to pink colored Diaspore reportedly coming from the Nangarhar Province in Afghanistan. One of our best contacts in Pakistan was able to get their hands on a parcel of this material and we're excited that we have some fine quality stones to offer here in the auctions. These new stones according to GIA "showed a very weak red fluorescence under long-wave ultraviolet light and an irregular chalky yellow fluorescence reaction under short-wave UV. When the samples were examined with daylight-equivalent illumination and compared to incandescent illumination, a slight color shift was observed." This color shift is also seen in the Turkish material, but the Afghani stones seems to be much more faint. With that said, this new and beautiful material is quite limited based upon the scattered information we can find online, so if you want one, don't pass this up, as we don't know when or if we'll have more. This particular stone is a beautiful "Brilliant Cushion" cut gem with very very slight inclusions and a gentle purplish-pink hue in incandescent lighting, but shows more of a yellow-pink hue in LED lighting. Outdoors, the colors is more of a pure pink, with no purple overtones. The fact that the stone is over 1 carat makes it collector quality, so if you're a serious gem collector, or if you're interested in something new and unusual for your collection, be sure to snag this stone now. For those of you who are curious, Diaspore is durable enough to set into jewelry, though I would recommend a pendant and not a ring for this stone.