Turquoise dust and powder bound in resin, pressed into blocks and cut. Sometimes called block turquoise.
Iran, the American Southwest, China, Egypt, Mexico
Reconstituted or 'block' turquoise is made by taking turquoise fines — the dust and unusable fragments from mining and cutting — mixing them with resin and often dye, pressing the result into a block, and slicing cabochons out of it. The material contains real turquoise, which is how it gets sold under the name, but it is a composite rather than a stone.
Its signature is uniformity. Because every piece is cut from a homogeneous manufactured block, a whole strand or a whole squash-blossom necklace can be exactly the same shade with identically scaled webbing. Natural turquoise cannot do that: two stones from the same pocket differ, and a matched suite of genuinely similar natural stones is expensive precisely because matching is hard.
Under a loupe the give-away is the boundary between 'stone' and 'vein'. In natural turquoise the host rock and the turquoise interlock irregularly, with the vein wandering and varying in width. In block material the dark lines often look drawn — even in width, evenly spaced, sometimes with a faint granularity where powder met binder.
These apply to this model and not to the rest of Turquoise. Work them alongside the maker's general checks, not instead of them.
Identical colour and identical webbing scale across many stones in one piece is the clearest sign of block material. Natural turquoise varies stone to stone, and a genuinely matched natural suite carries a large premium for that reason.
Natural veining is host rock interlocking irregularly with the turquoise — wandering, varying in width, sometimes stopping. Block veining tends to be even, regularly spaced and slightly too clean, and may show a granular texture where powder meets resin.
Because the binder is polymer, reconstituted material commonly gives the acrid smell of burning resin, more strongly than stabilised stone does. Do it inside a drill hole or under a bezel, and only once.
Low. It is a manufactured composite and should never carry natural-stone prices.
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.