The objective is to present you the different families of instruments, to draw up a list of them and the use. Each instrument will be detailed on a dedicated page, except for laboratory equipment, the use of which far exceeds the intentions of this site.
We can divide gemological instruments into 4 main families
- essential basic instruments
- field instruments, easy to take with you and which will follow us during trade fairs, trips and more
- office instruments, which take up more space and will stay at home
- laboratory instruments, the cost and technicality of which are beyond the reach of an amateur
The basic essential instruments are a good gemologist’s magnifying glass, a small flashlight and a pair of medium tweezers. These instruments should always have a place in your pocket. Over the years, I realized that my gemologist friends had a knack for showing me a stone or a piece of jewelry when I went out without my magnifying glass. Since then, my basic kit has never left me.
Field instruments include the basic kit to which is added the dichroscope, the polariscope with its conoscope, the hand-held spectroscope and the Chelsea filter. All of these instruments fit in a pocket. Personally, I add the refractometer (since I bought one with internal battery-powered lighting), the black field magnifier (darfield loupe), the small karat scale and a set of Hanneman filters. Note that there are now portable UVC-UVL lamps.
Office tools are inherently the ones you cannot take to the field. Here we find the microscope, the cold lamp, the UVC-UVL box, the spectroscope with measurement scale. These are very useful for precisely determining the nature of inclusions, the exact wavelengths of absorption lines, fluorescence reactions, etc.
Regarding laboratory equipment, you should know that there are Raman probes, infrared spectrometers and a whole arsenal of tools with names more complex than the others. It is these instruments that are used mainly by gemstone expertise laboratories.
Let’s see in detail these instruments and their use:
- gemologist’s loupe
- lighting
- tweezers
- darkfield loupe
- the polariscope
- the dichroscope
- the spectroscope
- the Chelsea filter and other filters (coming soon)
- the refractometer (coming soon)
- the microscope (coming soon)
- the UVC-UVL lamp (coming soon)
- the karat scale (coming soon)
To go further
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