Heated Benitoite
The most popular color for benitoite is that deep blue with violet color that benitoite is known for.
The benitoite blue coloring is 100% natural and any attempts to heat treat these blue benitoite just destroys the gemstones.
The rarest natural color for benitoite is actually colorless or some call them white.
These stones lack the popular blue color, but can look very much like diamonds.
However these crystals are very rare and most often form as very small tabular crystals.
What few people are aware of is that, ONLY these rare colorless benitoite can be heat treated.
When properly heat treated, they will never turn blue, but instead they turn beautiful shades of Peach to Orange.
Very few stones are ever heated and as you can imagine most stones are destroyed during this process,
leaving only very few to ever hit the market in any given year.
Also these heated benitoite not only show the blue fluorescence in shortwave UV lighting,
but also they show red fluorescence in longwave UV lighting.
This process for heating colorless benitoite is a proprietary secret and very few people know the actual process.
For this reason and the scarcity of the colorless gems, there will never be any commercial production of these colored benitoite.
