Recognize fake citrine

Burnt citrine: a particularly easy-to-recognize counterfeit

Burnt citrine is bright orange and is most commonly found as a druse (a piece of rock with many small crystal spikes) or as a tumbled stone. What is striking is the very strongly saturated color and often also the hard color gradient between opaque white and bright orange. This type of citrine is a heat-treated amethyst: it is fired at over 500 degrees Celcius, the purple tips change color under the effect of heat. However, the quartz parent rock remains white. Over 90% of tumbled and gemstones (pearls, faceted stones etc.) are burnt amethyst. Often without any indication of it.

"Citrine" druses are particularly easy to unmask: real citrine does not occur as a druse in nature. Incidentally, burnt amethyst is a typical product from Brazil.

Irradiated citrine: treacherous counterfeit

Irradiated citrine is more difficult to detect. These fakes are currently flooding the market. Almost without exception, they come from industrial mass production in China, but are offered as "citrine from Brazil", "citrine from the Himalayas" or "Tibetan citrine". Experienced collectors can tell the difference to real citrine with the naked eye: irradiated citrine has a neon undertone that tends towards yellowish or greenish. They are sometimes very clear and sometimes even show light reflections and prisms inside.

Radioactively irradiated rock crystal becomes “citrine”

Even if it seems absurd: In fact, rock crystals are treated with cobalt-60 gamma radiation, i.e. radioactively irradiated, so that they change from transparent to bright yellow. Although the radioactive radiation no longer poses a danger to the consumer, this laboratory procedure negates pretty much everything that crystal healing is about. From our point of view a real sin among the artificial treatments. In particular, because the irradiation is often kept secret and these pieces are very often offered as real citrines.

The irradiated, bright yellow to green-yellow "citrine" can not only be recognized as a fake by its strikingly different color: the shape, size and price also indicate that this cannot be the valuable natural citrine. Irradiated citrine is often offered as a double point or as a point (sometimes as a very large, long point). Double spikes and large spikes are very rare in nature, only occur occasionally and have collector's value. So it's worth doing the math: You shouldn't get real citrine for much less than €1,000 per kilo.

Irradiated smoky quartz as a fake citrine

Not only rock crystal, but also light smoky quartz is radioactively irradiated to make fake citrines. The crystals have a very distinctive look: a greenish color with neon undertones, often with cloudy inclusions in an otherwise transparent crystal. So-called phantoms can also indicate that it is smoky quartz that has been irradiated. However, phantoms are not a sure sign of a forgery, as they are very rare in genuine citrine (particularly in citrine from Namibia and Madagascar).

Irradiated smoky quartz and real citrine in comparison

If you look at the two crystals next to each other, the fake can be seen with the naked eye: Irradiated smoky quartz has a green instead of brown undertone, and the color image is not consistent. In our research, this type of counterfeit was particularly common. Sometimes also with the indication that it is irradiated citrine. In this case, at least you're not buying a pig in a poke. Nevertheless, we think it has very little to do with real citrine. A laboratory product like this cannot keep up with the effect of the valuable gemstone.

By the way, we buy a lot of our crystals from Brazilian family companies - we have never seen a neon yellow or neon green citrine there. Irradiated citrine from Brazil is almost always a lie - the source of supply is somewhere else entirely.