Gem Treatment Value Impact Calculator

Heat treatment is the most widely accepted treatment in the gem trade because it's permanent, cannot be reversed, and has been standard practice for decades across ruby, sapphire, tanzanite, and aquamarine -- in fact, the vast majority of sapphires and rubies on the market today are heat treated. Because buyers and the trade broadly accept it as normal, this calculator applies a much smaller discount factor to heat treatment than to less-accepted treatments like glass filling or beryllium diffusion.

Both are treatments that add or fundamentally alter material within the stone -- beryllium diffusion introduces trace elements to change color at high temperature, and glass or lead filling fills fractures with a foreign material to improve apparent clarity -- rather than simply enhancing what was naturally already present, the way heat treatment does. Because they're considered less permanent and less desirable by collectors, this calculator applies a much steeper discount to those treatments than to heat treatment.

No -- the Discount percentage is determined entirely by the combination of Gem Type and Treatment Type you select, not by Carat Weight. Carat Weight scales the dollar totals (Treated Value and Untreated Value both grow proportionally with it), but the underlying discount factor and percentage stay the same regardless of how large or small the stone is.

In many jurisdictions, yes -- full disclosure of any treatment is standard trade practice and, in several places, a legal requirement, particularly for treatments that are not permanent or that significantly affect durability or value. This calculator is meant to help estimate what a disclosed treatment should mean for price, not to serve as a substitute for that disclosure itself.

It reports "Not modeled -- consult a gem lab or specialist" for Market Acceptance and leaves the dollar and percentage outputs blank rather than guessing a number. Only twelve of the twenty-five possible combinations have an indicative discount factor behind them; some of the missing ones are commercially significant -- lead-glass-filled composite sapphire, for instance, is a real product whose trade discount typically runs well over 90% -- so a generic fallback figure would be more misleading than an honest "not modeled" result.