Description
Genuine Czech moldavite, 0.63g, and how to check one yourself.
How to tell genuine moldavite from glass
Four checks, none of which need equipment. Do them on this piece when it arrives, and do them on anything you are offered anywhere else.
The bubbles. This is the clearest one. Hold it up to a bright window and look inside. Moldavite carries elongated, stretched, irregular bubbles, pulled out of shape while the glass was still moving. Manufactured glass carries round bubbles, evenly spread, because it cooled sitting still. Round and tidy is the wrong answer.
The surface. Genuine Czech moldavite has a deeply sculpted skin full of pits, grooves and ridges, dissolved into the glass by groundwater over millions of years underground. Moulded copies have soft, repeating dimples that look pressed rather than eaten. If two pieces in a seller’s photographs have the same pattern, they came out of the same mould.
The shine. Rough moldavite is matt. Sellers sometimes rub a trace of oil across a piece to bring the colour up, and once it is washed it goes dull again. A rough piece that arrives glossy and stays glossy is worth a second look.
The colour. Mossy, olive or forest green, and never uniform. A bright even emerald with no variation through it is the colour bottle glass comes in.
What genuine moldavite is not
It is not always certificated, and a certificate is not the test. Plenty of honest pieces come without one and plenty of certificates accompany material nobody independent has looked at. What a seller can tell you is where a piece was mined, and whether the photograph is of that exact stone rather than a weight band with a stock image. Those two answers are worth more than a printed card.
It is also not the same as fine faceted material. Cut and polished moldavite is genuine too, but polishing removes the surface, and the surface is the evidence. Raw is the harder sell in a photograph and the easier one to trust in the hand.
About this piece
This piece of genuine Czech moldavite weighs 0.63g, which makes it one of the larger stones in the batch. It is undamaged, and it has not been cut, tumbled or polished.
It came out of the Chlum sand mine in South Bohemia, sifted from sand and gravel rather than cut from a seam. Every moldavite in the Grove is from Chlum, and that is on the listing rather than left vague. There is more on the impact it came from and how to sit with a first piece in the guide to what moldavite does.
Most sellers on the first page of results start at a full gram and price upward from there. A piece under a gram is the affordable way into real moldavite rather than something to save up for, and the glass is identical either way. Every piece in the batch is priced by its exact weight.
What you receive
The piece in the photographs, which is the piece that arrives, together with the clear hexagonal display base shown. Nothing else is included. Wrapped and posted from Shropshire by Royal Mail Tracked.
One piece only. When it sells it is gone, because there is no second one like it. See the rest of the raw moldavite in the Grove, or the wider raw and rough specimens.
