The Lotus laboratory has, over the years, assembled physical reference sets of stones representing characteristic inclusion patterns, treatment effects, and locality fingerprints in corundum and spinel. These sets are used internally for training gemmologists and externally in workshops and travelling exhibitions hosted at trade fairs and gemmology schools.

What the sets contain

A representative set will include unheated stones from each major source - Mogok, Mong Hsu, Madagascar, Mozambique, Sri Lanka, Kashmir, and others - paired with heated equivalents at H(a), H(b) and H(c) classifications, plus diffusion-treated and lead-glass-filled comparators. The user is able to examine and compare the same locality and the same treatment grade across multiple stones, building calibration that pure image study cannot provide.

Use in trade education

Hands-on access to such sets is increasingly rare outside large laboratories and a handful of advanced trade-school programmes. Lotus's willingness to deploy reference sets for teaching has helped raise the floor of inclusion literacy among coloured-stone dealers and appraisers in the Asian trade and at the major international fairs.