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Greetings I have here this Chinese snuff bottle looked to be craved out with some kind of purple material. I have no information about it and would really appreciate to have info about the materials. I would like to know about the figures. There's no initials on the bottle itself. The width of the bottle is 65mm by 48mm. The cap of the snuff bottle is 14mm. Thanks in advance.

Is your object a solid piece hollowed out of the same material? In other words, if you take the cap off, the cross section of the top of the bottle is the same material as the outside?

Your black and white photos make it more difficult to help you, because one of the first things I look for when given these carved items is to ascertain what the material might be based on it's appearance, again hard to tell with black and white.

At any rate, many "carved items" are either ivory-like or cinnabar-like in appearance, and they are often made of composite materials or plastics, which are poured into a mold, and then usually hand finished so that most mold marks are removed or lessened.

The extent of the hand finishing, and buffing would affect the appearance, quality and price of the object, and sometimes make a simple tourist piece into something that might be meant to deceive someone into thinking it is something it is not, this also applies to carved stone or jade objects.


At any rate, I have seen some of these molded snuff bottles which are molded around brass bottles.

Getting back to appearances, if ivory, there are Schreger lines, which are visual artifacts that are evident in the cross-sections of ivory. A composite won't have them. If cinnabar, you can see the layers of built-up lacquer in the carving, composites won't have them.

Like your black and white photos, we are often given photos which don't clearly show what we need to see as described above, yet often we can see things which send up a red flag.

In the photo of the bottom of the bottle, there is what appears as a black dot, but I am guessing that if you took a toothpick, it would not be a dot, but a concavity the tip of the toothpick could be inserted into. Since there is no reason for the concavity to be found in the design of the carving, it must be a bubble which had formed in the mold.

This leads me to believe it to be a molded composite material, and not some (purple) stone.

Hand finishing on molded composite items almost never addresses these bubbles, so they are often a good indicator. Another thing to look for when trying to tell if something is molded, are small nodules of the material which are found in the recesses of the carving, often in places which are more fragile.

In many of the more well produced pieces of Faux-ivory, they are well finished to remove as many mold artifacts as possible, and sometimes buffed and patinated so well that they really look like ivory, especially in photos which don't show enough detail to see the Schreger lines. In fact, most ivory you will see for sale online is a composite material.

Maybe some in-focus color close-up photos of your bottle could change my opinion, but I don't think so.


Hope this helps
Gman

Bubbles such as shown can also be characteristics of an organic material such as coral.

Also, are these black and white photos or is the color of purple just not that evident?

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