Featured Does anyone know what this necklace is made of please? x x

If they are glass, they could be lampwork beads - individually made, with the "facets" pressed on with a tool. But it would be difficult to produce that mottled effect in the inclusions. Which leaves me leaning more toward real stone.

 

The stones look like jasper with some type of inclusions.The "street" stone cutters in India and other countries start at around 12 years of age.The stones are not cut with precision faceting machines,but hand held usually with hand powered laps... see link. http://www.shieldsaroundtheworld.com/pichtml/p0004460.html

 

Like Kiko, I also find the look of chips & cracks informative about the nature of the material.

Think this is the photo referred to:


If it is the right photo, not sure where the fracture line is. What I do find curious, & it may in part be due to my misreading the photos, is that beads seem to have a zigzag cut into both ends, but sharper on one side (blue squiggles) & less defined on the other (yellow).



Bou, can you show or explain what's going on in these places? Are those points smooth to the touch or ragged?

 

Wondering if they are kind of translucent...
If your phone has the torch/light app, try to put it under a bead and look if you can see some light through the red part of the "stone"

 

Cracks/fissures which were filled in with "quartz" over a period of time.

 

I'd say they're glass, just to be annoying. The polish on them just doesn't look like rock from here. It looks like glass. That said, I'd have bought them for the copper spacer beads if nothing else; those have gone up in price if you're buying them from a beading supply place either locally or on line.

 

But quite similar to how fine frit applied to hot glass works.

I have no idea if these are glass or rocks (I'd guess glass, but some of the pictures of minerals are compelling), but that's how I'd guess it was done if glass.

 

Here is my slab of genuine orbicular jasper. While this jasper comes from the shores of Madagascar, it demonstrates that rock indeed can grow in patterns that look like drops.

 

True, plenty of jaspers have eyespots, like the nuclei of geodes. But the patches on the beads are different.

You can see a great array of spotted jaspers with red as the dominant color in this search on etsy. Browsing through, I am not seeing much that truly resembles the beads in the colors & their distribution.

 

It would be an impossible task to find those exact beads as they are a natural process, and there are so many types of red jasper with impurities. I found these brecciated ones, which have mottled surfaces. There are also Mexican Snowflake Red Jasper which have splotches of color. There is also poppy jasper