Fire Agate Rough Buyers Guide from FireAgate on eBay

The following Fire Agate Rough Buyers Guide is to help assist you in shopping for that high quality fire agate rough. It will attempt to answer common questions and assist you in what to look for in buying fire agate rough for lapidary cabbing, carving, or mineral display purposes. Shopping for Fire Agate Rough online is a challanging task, always be sure you know what you are purchasing. We hope to help explain what you may encounter when looking to purchase fire agate material and help you in making an informed decision on your fire agate purchase.

True fire agate rough should actually contain a real fire layer. Often substandard forms of fire agate are sold on the internet, but these would actually be better descibed as just chalcedony, banded agate, carnelian agate, or just colored agate. They are very similar to true fire agate, but the fire layer that makes the fire agate gemstone is missing. There is also a lot of items that are falsely labeled as Fire Agate, do a search on eBay and you will get thousands of hit for fire agates, most are just what are called 'fired agate', a manmade product that is cooked, or fired, to create cracks in the material (FIRED AGATE IS NOT FIRE AGATE) Someone very familair with true fire agate rough can usually tell if a piece of rough actually contains a fire layer, or at least has a good possibility of containing one due to the structure, coloration and nature of the rock. It may be difficult to ascertain the final colors and/or quality of the final cut gem from a piece of rough but someone, in our opinion, should at least be able to say that there is a very good possibility of getting true fire out of a piece of rough.