How to tell a dyed crystal from a natural one
The crystal trade has a fake problem, and most of it is not counterfeiting in the legal sense. It is undisclosed treatment: stones that have been dyed, heated, irradiated or reconstructed, sold as if they came out of the ground looking like that.
Here is what actually works.
1. Look at the colour where it pools
Dye collects in cracks. On a dyed stone, the fractures are darker than the crystal around them — colour runs into the flaws. On a natural stone, colour comes from within the crystal lattice and the cracks are usually lighter, or white, because they scatter light.
Turn the piece in bright daylight and look for colour that outlines a crack like a pen line.
2. Check the colour distribution
Natural colour is almost never perfectly even. It bands, zones, fades or concentrates. A stone that is uniformly saturated all the way through, with no variation anywhere, is either very expensive or treated.
3. Look at the base and the drill holes
Dye accumulates in the least visible places: the base of a tower, the inside of a bead hole, the rough underside of a cluster. If those areas are noticeably darker, or if the bead holes are dark inside, that is dye.
4. Wipe it with acetone
Nail polish remover on a cotton bud, rubbed on an inconspicuous area. Dye from a cheap dye job will come off on the cotton. This is not conclusive — a good dye job will not budge — but a positive result is definitive.
5. Ask what the treatments are, in writing
The only check that scales. A seller who cannot tell you whether a stone is dyed, heated or reconstructed does not know, and a seller who will not put it on a card is telling you something.
Every piece we ship has the treatments stated on the card that comes with it. If it says none, we mean none.
The test that does not work
Scratching it with a knife, or the “glass test”. Quartz is harder than glass, so a real quartz point will scratch glass — but so will plenty of other minerals, and dyed quartz is still quartz. The scratch test tells you whether you have quartz. It tells you nothing about whether it has been treated, and it damages the piece you are trying to assess.
Also useless: holding it to your forehead, putting it in water, and “feeling the energy”. None of these distinguish anything.
What we do about it
- Treatments stated on every card — dyed, heated, stabilised, reconstructed or none
- The district and date recorded where we can trace it
- Photographed and filmed before shipping, so the piece you receive is the piece you saw
- 30-day returns if it is not what the card said
