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The orange sapphire treatment controversy continues to disrupt Thailand's colored stone industry as dealers and heaters insist the stones should be labeled heat treated, not diffused.

It remains a problem of definition and disclosure. Dealers around the world feel burned by the controversy and are pushing for an agreement. The two sides of the debate remain bitterly divided, though: Americans want terminology that includes "diffused," whereas most Thai dealers believe that "heat treatment" is adequate. Japan, whose industry is still reeling from the thousands upon thousands of pink-orange stones laboratory certified as heated padparadschas, remains a question mark.

Can you tell the difference? LEFT: A 1.42-ct. untreated sapphire from the Umba region, Tanzania. RIGHT: A 1.65-ct. beryllium-diffused sapphire from Madagascar. Sapphires courtesy Nafco Gems, photos by Morgan Beard.

Some progress was made during and after the Tucson gem shows, held at the beginning of February. At a closed-door meeting, members of the American jewelry industry agreed that the treatment would be disclosed in the United States as diffusion. That message was carried back to Thailand and, after some discussion, members of the Chanthaburi Gem & Jewelry Association (CGA) agreed that the process should be disclosed separately from heat treatment, but not as diffusion. Their new system is as follows:

N = Natural Unheated Corundum
E = Thermal Enhancement
A = Thermal Enhancement of Corundum Together With Other Minerals in an Environment that Allows Inducing of Beryllium and Other Elements into Corundum
T = Treatments

Any member of the CGA who does not disclose will be expelled from the association. While only CGA members have adopted this system thus far, Chanthaburi is the only commercial source of the beryllium-diffused sapphire, and disclosure at the source could go a long way toward restoring market confidence.

Whether other Thai dealers would adopt similar language was still unknown at press time.

The Thai Gem & Jewelry Traders Association (TGJTA) plans to meet with several Japanese gem laboratories to come to an agreement on the issue.

Pornchai Chuenchomlada, first vice president of the TGJTA and president of Pornchai International, told Colored Stone that as of late 2002, 11 labs intended to come to the meeting. He suggests that the terminology issue will be solved by mid-2003, with the Japanese labs leading the way.

Why the resistance to calling the process diffusion?

"We should tell the truth. We prefer to use heat treatment. It is unfair to use diffusion [as a definition] for the beryllium treatment they do now," said Professor Sakda Siripant, director of the independent Gem and Jewelry Institute of Thailand (GIT), which among other things provides laboratory certification for gemstones.

The Thais' position is that in blue sapphires diffused with iron and titanium, those elements are the agent causing the color, whereas in the beryllium-diffused sapphires, the color change is caused by beryllium's interaction with other elements in the stone. Therefore, they argue that the process is closer to that of traditional heat treatment, in which hydrogen is diffused through the stone, reacting to cause a color change.

A joint statement by the TGJTA and the GIT said: "Our up-to-date findings suggest that the beryllium could not produce the yellow colour by itself. Beryllium, however, may take part in a complex colour-causing mechanism involving certain trace elements within the stones and their defect crystal structures. The mechanism and product results are quite different from the previously known blue-diffused sapphires produced by the direct interaction of titanium and iron as in the past."

United States-based researchers have argued that since beryllium must be present in order for the color change to take place, beryllium is responsible for the new color, and that the mechanism taking place is unarguably diffusion of the element into the stone. For now, the CGA's disclosure solution seems to be as close to an agreement as the two sides are likely to get.

Traders, meanwhile, are hoping to get back to business. Sales of the stones have fallen off dramatically since the controversy erupted, and the price has plummeted from between $150 and $200 a carat to $50 a carat, according to Pornchai.

And worse still, it has impacted the entire industry. Dealers who only work with ruby, blue and yellow sapphire, and emerald say the market is dreadful, and the question of what stones may have been treated is a big reason for that.

"The industry has slowed down; they have less business. They have lost money, there is no doubt about that. Some have lost a lot of money. But they have not stopped heating," said Jayesh Patel, who was in the trade for 20 years and now works for the Asian Institute of Gemological Sciences. "People are buying, people are coming. People say that as long as [the gems are] a reasonable price, they are buying."

The beryllium-diffused sapphires have found customers in the United States and Europe, who are still coming to buy despite the uncertainty. They are also being sold to Thai manufacturers, but no one is willing to guess how much is entering the market right now.

There's no doubt that the lack of disclosure up front has caused a serious crisis in confidence about Thai goods. Even once the situation is sorted out, Thai dealers said, it will take a long while for that confidence to be restored.