The most valuable amber, and therefore the most manufactured. Perfection is the warning sign.
The Baltic coast, the Dominican Republic, Myanmar, Mexico
An organism trapped in resin forty million years ago is a genuinely extraordinary object, and the market prices it accordingly. That price is what produces the fakes, and the fakes have a consistent signature: they are too good.
Consider what actually happens when an insect is caught in fresh resin. It struggles, so the body is contorted and legs and wings are often torn or missing. The resin flows in stages, so there are usually flow lines, layers, and debris — plant fragments, bark, other smaller organisms, air bubbles. Decay proceeds before the resin seals it, so the specimen is frequently partly hollow or discoloured. And as the resin shrinks over millions of years, stress fractures radiate outward from the inclusion.
A manufactured inclusion has none of that. A modern insect is placed in a mould, resin is poured, and the result is a whole, undamaged, cleanly presented specimen floating in optically perfect material with no debris, no flow structure and no stress halo. It is also very often the wrong size — genuine amber inclusions are usually small, because a large insect had a better chance of escaping.
The one further check is the boundary. In genuine material the insect and the amber are the same object with no interface. In a two-stage casting there is frequently a faint plane or a slight difference in clarity where the second pour met the first, visible when the piece is turned in a strong light.
These apply to this model and not to the rest of Amber. Work them alongside the maker's general checks, not instead of them.
Genuine inclusions are messy: contorted posture, missing or detached limbs, plant debris, bubbles, layered flow lines and partial decay. A pristine, complete, well-posed specimen in clean material is a manufactured one.
Turn the piece slowly in a strong light and watch for a faint internal plane or a change in clarity where a second pour met the first. Genuine amber has flow structure but no flat optical interface bisecting the specimen.
Resin shrinks over geological time and cracks around a rigid inclusion, so genuine specimens often show a faint halo of fine radiating fractures. Fresh cast resin has had no time to do this.
Big, dramatic, easily photographed insects are rare in genuine amber, because a large creature could usually pull free. Most authentic inclusions are a few millimetres. A spectacular centrepiece specimen is a claim that needs evidence.
Enormous range. A small genuine fly in Baltic amber runs tens to low hundreds; scientifically significant Burmese specimens reach five figures.
An orientation for honest, unrestored condition — never an appraisal, and never a quotation.
Lovenhall StoneThe tests tell you what it is. The instrument reads a photograph and offers a name to start from — then hands you back to the tile and the coin, which are what settle it.