Published on the Italian Gemological Review, issue N°2, Sep 2017
One of the essential requirements of gemological analysis is that the gemstones should not be damaged or permanently altered. In other words the analysis must be non-destructive. This perfectly understandable limitation prevents gemologists and gemological laboratories to use many techniques widely available for analyzing other kind of samples by sacrificing small parts of them. Raman spectroscopy is considered to be the best-known identification technique in material analysis as it is extremely reliable and, at the same time, fast and absolutely non-invasive for gemstones.