Mariacka Street, Graded Stone by Stone

Item: cognac-toned pendant, sold as solid amber. Clarity grade: SI1, one visible seam under the loupe. Flaw note: a price tag written with more confidence than the stone can back up.

The street runs narrow and cobbled from St. Mary's Church down toward the old moat, low stone houses on both sides with their ornate entrance stoops still standing, przedproża carved with gargoyle rain spouts that have been grimacing at passersby since long before anyone here sold amber for a living. Every second doorway holds a glass case of it, warm and stacked, and every third seller has the same three-language pitch ready before you've slowed your steps.

A woman at a corner stall lifts a chunky pendant the colour of steeped tea and tells me it is a hundred years old, mined by her grandfather's cooperative before the war. I turn it under the light instead of answering her. The surface throws back a flat, waxy shine with none of the internal fire real Baltic amber gives off, and a seam runs dead straight through the centre, the kind pressure-melted scrap leaves when chips are fused and moulded under heat, never the kind fossil resin grows on its own.

I ask the price. Four hundred złoty. For fused scrap that cost her supplier a fraction of that in bulk chips, dressed in a hundred-year story it has no claim to. I tell her, flatly, that it's ambroid rather than solid amber, and she drops to two hundred and eighty without blinking, which is its own kind of certificate.

Verdict: three carats out of ten for the pendant, and all ten for the stoops it was sold beside.

Item: claimed Baltic amber, loose piece, no certificate offered. Clarity grade: eye-clean, suspiciously so. Flaw note: the absence of flaws is the flaw.

The next seller hands me a teardrop pendant with a beetle suspended dead centre, wings spread symmetrically, posed like it knew the camera was coming. That is the first flag. A real insect trapped in resin fights before the sap closes over it, legs bent, wings folded wrong, sometimes a trail of tiny air bubbles where it struggled. This one sits too neat, too central, and too large for a stone this size, which is the classic tell for an insect dropped into cast resin or young copal rather than one caught by accident forty million years ago.

I ask for salt water, which is an unusual request at a market stall but not an unreasonable one, since genuine Baltic amber floats in brine strong enough to hold an egg up, while glass and most plastic sink straight to the bottom. He doesn't have any mixed, so I fall back on older tests. Rubbed hard against wool, the pendant should raise enough static to lift shredded paper off the counter, and it does; the Greek word for amber, elektron, is the reason the phenomenon got called electricity in the first place, so this isn't a parlour trick, it's the oldest one amber has. Then I ask him to hold a lighter to a scrap edge for a second, carefully, and it gives off a sweet, resinous, faintly pine smell rather than the acrid plastic stink copal or celluloid produce under flame.

Copal is the trap most buyers walk into with their eyes open. It's tree resin too, only young, sometimes decades old rather than tens of millions of years, softer under a hot needle and cheaper to source, so plenty of stalls sell it as amber to anyone who doesn't ask for a test first.

Verdict: six honest carats, once you take off the two it was trying to borrow from a beetle that never had to fight for its life.