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The red variety of corundum owes its color and strong fluorescence to the presence of Cr, as well as traces of Fe. The latter can reduce the fluorescence and thus impact the appearance of the final gem. Gem quality rubies are rarely available for scientific study and even less common in their rough form. Opaque inclusions in rubies are often removed during faceting and remain unidentified. This study aims to identify opaque inclusions in rubies from the two most common origins seen in the high end market today: Mogok, Myanmar and Montepuez, Mozambique. Using electron probe microanalaysis (EPMA) the inclusions were identified as sphalerite and pyrrhotite in Mogok rubies. The paragenesis of Myanmar, marble-related rubies is fairly well understood and no Fe-rich minerals apart from sulfides have been identified. Opaque inclusions in Mozambican rubies are a complex mix of Fe-Cu-Ni sulfides with exsolution textures. These inclusions are interpreted to be small amounts of sulfide melt trapped during corundum formation. The different sulfide phases crystallized from this entrapped melt and some phases experienced later exsolution during cooling. The formation of amphibole-related, Mozambican rubies is not well understood, but it is obvious that very different processes are at work compared to the marble-related Myanmar ruby deposits.

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Heat treatment has been used to improve the color and/or clarity of corundum for more than a thousand years. Various parameters such as temperature, heating and cooling time, and oxidizing or reducing atmosphere will affect the final color (Emmett and Douthit, 1993;Emmett et al., 2003;Hughes et al., 2017). The border between high-and low-temperature heat treatment has been defined by Emmett as the temperature needed to dissolve second-phase microcrystals, which is somewhere between 1200° and 1350°C. Heating at high temperatures will damage most inclusions in ruby and sapphire and is often detectable by trained gemologists. In contrast, heating corundum at low temperatures, sometimes below 700°C, will only subtly affect their internal inclusions, making the treatment much more challenging to detect without advanced instrumentation (figure 1).Previous studies on the effect of low-temperature heat treatment on inclusions have focused on rubies from Mozambique (Pardieu et al., 2015;Sripoonjan et al., 2016;Saeseaw et al., 2018) and blue sapphires from Madagascar (Krzemnicki, 2010;Hughes and Perkins, 2019). In these studies, rubies showed slight inclusion alterations when heated to 900°C and developed clear