My name is John Bennett and I first saw Victoria Stone for sale at Cloud's Gemboree in Quartzsite AZ, in January 1994. It fascinated me. Its bright colors, its amazing chatoyancy, the way the color jumped around, coming and going, depending on how the light hits the cabochon. I bought some slices and had a green stone cut and set as a bolo. I still wear it today in 2017. Its moving beauty fascinated me and I wanted to see more. But I was told it was no longer being made. So I put recreating it on my bucket list. I toyed with working on a recreation back in 2001 and 2002. I contacted Artur Birkner, who I knew was a chemist and a geologist - and who had developed a process to grow emerald crystals hydrothermally - he called his creation BIRON EMERALD - back in around 1990. I contacted Artur but he was busy floating a public company and said he simply didn't have the time. There the project rested until I returned to live in Western Australia in July 2012. By that time Artur had retired [more or less] and agreed to help me to try to recreate this very colorful, chatoyant and attractive, man-made, stone-like glass. Trials and tribulations aplenty we slowly [and how] worked to overcome the challenges to make Starburst Stone as a [yet another] Victoria Stone recreation. It’s not the same, it’s NOT Victoria Stone, but we believe it is a very reasonable recreation. And to that extent we are satisfied with Starburst Stone as a recreation of VICTORIA STONE. So there you have the motivation and a summary of the journey. And now we are pleased to be able to offer you STARBURST STONE and hope you enjoy working with it. It is available as rough unworked material - as whole or part boules, as sawn slices and as finished cabochons.
https://starburststone.com/
Starburst Stone is a colorful new devitrified glass, reminiscent of the product once marketed as Victoria Stone. Photo by Kevin Schumacher; courtesy of Australian Rough and Tumble.
This year at the Tucson gem shows, this author encountered an interesting new product of chatoyant devitrified glass (glass that has converted to a crystalline material) marketed as “Starburst Stone.” This material (see above) closely resembles the chatoyant glass known as Victoria Stone, which was developed in Japan by Dr. Satoyasu Iimori in the 1950s and produced for almost 40 years (http://victoriastone.sakura.ne.jp/JP-30-88-B.pdf).
John Bennett, in partnership with Artur Birkner (both based in Perth, Western Australia), began developing Starburst Stone in 2013, and this is the first year of commercially available production (approximately 100 kilograms). This devitrified glass is made from a chemical mixture that is cooled at a rate to facilitate nucleation and growth of dense networks of elongate lath-like crystals, and each batch of glass is colored by the addition of certain metals. Darker blues are achieved by adding cobalt, lighter blue by adding copper, and green by adding chromium to the glass mixture.
Standard gemological testing revealed properties consistent with manufactured glass. The RI was between 1.51 and 1.52 and varied slightly between the different colors tested. The average SG, measured hydrostatically, was 2.62. Raman analysis identified the devitrification product responsible for the chatoyancy as apatite, which was also responsible for the chatoyancy in the devitrified glass product known as Victoria stone.
Dark and light blue, green, and golden Starburst Stones are being manufactured, with additional colors in development. This new ornamental glass showing chatoyancy is a welcome addition to the gem trade. Those interested in the material once sold as Victoria Stone will certainly appreciate this very similar phenomenal glass product.
https://www.gia.edu/gems-gemology/summe ... yant-glass