How Does It Get Treated?
The Vienna amber factories, which use pale amber to manufacture pipes and other smoking tools, turn it on a lathe and polish it with whitening and water or with rotten stone and oil. The final luster is given by friction with flannel.

When gradually heated in an oil bath, amber becomes soft and flexible. Two pieces of amber may be united by smearing the surfaces with linseed oil, heating them, and then pressing them together while hot. Cloudy amber may be clarified in an oil bath, as the oil fills the numerous pores to which the turbidity is due. Small fragments, formerly thrown away or used only for varnish, are now used on a large scale in the formation of "amberoid" or "pressed amber". The pieces are carefully heated with exclusion of air and then compressed into a uniform mass by intense hydraulic pressure; the softened amber being forced through holes in a metal plate. The product is extensively used for the production of cheap jewelry and articles for smoking. This pressed amber yields brilliant interference colors in polarized light. Amber has often been imitated by other resins like copal and kauri, as well as by celluloid and even glass. Baltic amber is sometimes colored artificially, but also called "true amber".

What’s the Story On Fake Amber?
Often amber, especially with insect inclusions, is counterfeited using a plastic resin. There are several tests that can be performed to see if amber is real. One such test requires you to touch the object with a heated pin. In real amber there should be a smell of wood resin. This test, however, may not be conclusive, because sometimes fake pieces are coated with a thin layer of true amber. Another clue is to look at how the inclusions (i.e., items trapped in the amber) are set in the amber. If the poses are too perfect, the chances are that the amber is counterfeit. Other tests will be discussed at length in another article.

What’s the Origin of the Word “Amber”?
The English word amber stems from the old Arabic word anbargris or ambergris and refers to an oily, perfumed substance secreted by the sperm whale.

The presence of insects in amber was noticed by Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia and led him to the (correct) theory that at some point, amber had to be in a liquid state to cover the bodies of insects. Hence he gave it the expressive name of succinum or gum stone, a name that is still in use today to describe succinic acid as well as succinite, a term given to a particular type of amber by James Dwight Dana.

The Greek name for amber was (translated into English) “electron” and was connected to the Sun God, one of whose titles was Elector or the Awakener. It is discussed by Theophrastus, possibly the first ever mention of the material. The modern term "electron" comes from the Greek word for amber (which was then translated as electrum), and was chosen because of the material's electrostatic properties. It was coined in 1891 by the Irish physicist George Stoney whilst analyzing elementary charges for the first time.

Heating amber will soften it and eventually it will burn, which is why in Germanic languages the word for amber is a literal translation of burn Stone (In German it is Bernstein, in Dutch it is barnsteen etc.). Heated above 200°C, amber suffers decomposition, yielding an "oil of amber", and leaving a black residue which is known as "amber colophony", or "amber pitch"; when dissolved in oil of turpentine or in linseed oil this forms "amber varnish" or "amber lac".

Amber from the Baltic Sea has been extensively traded since antiquity and in the main land, from where amber was traded 2000 years ago, the natives called it glaes (referring to its see through similarity to glass).

The Baltic Lithuanian term for amber is Gintaras and Latvian Dzintars. They and the Slavic jantar are thought to originate from Phoenician jainitar (sea resin). However, while most Slavic languages, such as Russian and Czech, retain the old Slavic word, in the Polish language, despite still being correct, jantar is used very rarely (even considered archaic) and was replaced by the word bursztyn deriving from the German analogue.

The next article in this newsletter will discuss several ways in which you can differentiate true amber from copal (new resin) and plastic.