Identification – Summary

Unit 4: Identification – Detective Words

Time to become gem detectives! These words will help you understand how gemologists identify different stones.

• Loupe – A small magnifying glass used to look closely at gems.
• Identify – To figure out what something is.
• Lab-grown – Gems made in a lab, not from the Earth.
• Inclusions – Tiny marks or flaws inside a gem.
• Altered – Changed from its original form.
• Optical – Related to how something looks or works with light.
• Mohs scale – A way to measure how hard a gem is, from 1 to 10.
• Specific gravity – How heavy a gem feels compared to its size.
• Density – How heavy something is for its size.
• Atoms – Tiny pieces that make up everything.
• Refractive index – How much light bends when it goes through a gem.
• Dispersion – When light splits into rainbow colors inside a gem.
• Pleochroism – When a gem shows different colors from different angles.
• Dichroscope – A tool that shows if a gem changes color from different angles.
• RI – Short for refractive index, a number that shows how light bends.

International Gem Society

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