Rosewood furniture is known for its comprehensive quality and is widely used in manufacturing expensive home furniture, but a few manufacturers add a fake tag to get more money.
How To Identify Rosewood Furniture? You can identify rosewood furniture by the typical rosy aroma that comes out of it due to oil. Moreover, it appears ruddy or purplish brown and consists of circular rings. It has a hard and tough texture and attractive wood grain. It is costly due to its high resistance against water and damage and better strength. Furthermore, it has the ability to oxidize in the presence of sunlight and lose color over time.
Manufacturers use different types of wood to make a wide variety of products, but rosewood has better durability and an attractive appearance.
You can find its different types in the market, but Brazilian rosewood has a special place due to its floral aroma and beautiful grains.
A few physical features, including color, texture, smell, and other properties like stress resistance and oxidation, make rosewood different from other types of wood material.
Rosy aroma
It has a good oil content that makes it suitable to use for different purposes, as it gives off a sweet aroma. In addition, the oil has a distinct smell that is a rose-like fragrance.
This fragrance is one of its most distinguishing characteristics, as no other woody plant gives off a rose-like scent.
You can easily identify it by the distinct smell that is sometimes masked off by polishing material, but it never fades away completely.
Furthermore, the oil contains 90% to 93% of linalool oil that dominates over other ingredients and produces a floral aroma.
Color of furniture
It has a typical reddish tone, making it easy to identify the furniture. It appears ruddy brown, dark brown, or purplish brown, with a slight touch of golden and rich red shade.
These deep and dark colors give warmth to the place and make you feel cozy when you have a table or a bed frame made of this wood type at your place.
Moreover, you can easily differentiate between real and fake material by observing it under black light. This is because there will be no fluorescence and a change in color in the black light if it is real.
Furthermore, fake furniture that is not made of true Brazilian rosewood will change its color and appear in a pale greenish or bluish shade.
Highly expensive
It is one of the most expensive wood materials due to its fine quality and heavy weight, which gives better strength and ensures durability.
The manufacturers get a ton of rosewood at around $16,000 to $18,000, which is far more than teak wood which is also considered good for tables and chairs.
In addition, this tropical wood has high demand and less availability, which makes it expensive.
It is used for manufacturing decorative pieces, musical instruments, and home furniture like beds and cabinets.
Most probably, you are looking at rosewood furniture if it appears reddish and is labeled with a higher price tag than others in the store.
Heavy and hard
It is a heavy and hard wood that makes it strong to tolerate mechanical and environmental stress. Its diameter is around 87 to 98 inches, and the height of the tree is almost 34 to 38 meters.
Moreover, it weighs around 4.2 to 4.5 pounds per board foot, and hardness is about 2430 to 2480 according to the Janka scale, which means it is highly resistant to wear and tear.
Accordingly, it is heavier than oak, maple, and mahogany due to its high density, which is around 0.82 to 0.89g per cm3.
It is a popular material for constructing wooden frames for beds and sofas. You can quickly tell about real and fake wood by determining their weight and strength.
Wood texture
It has a slightly rough or coarse texture and a hard structure that makes it suitable for furniture and decorative wooden items.
You will find an attractive grain pattern that is also considered spider-webbing for having a unique structure due to black streaks in the center.
It has a uniform texture with medium-sized pores interlocked in a specific pattern or arranged in a wavy and spiraled form.
Therefore, it becomes easier to differentiate it from other wood furniture types when looking at the grain pattern and texture.
Type of finishing
The finishing material can help identify the real or fake wood type. It is most commonly polished with high-quality items to make it look glossy.
The black and dark brown ring structures and grain pattern become visible in rosewood furniture after polishing, that help confirms real wood.
However, some manufacturers paint the wooden furniture and form rings on it to make it feel real; that is a warning sign that it is fake.
Moreover, you can look at an unpolished surface to tell if it is real, as the grain pattern and ring structure are its unique properties.
Remove the paint with a cotton swab dipped in nail polish remover or any suitable solution that can help remove the paint coat and rub it on the corner.
Accordingly, the paint stains will come out if it is coated with a stain to make it look natural.
Oxidation property
It becomes lighter as it oxidizes with age and appears like a walnut wood shade. It changes color to light brown after continuous exposure to sunlight.
The dark purplish brown color gets dull and appears brownish over time.
Oxidation is not the only reason for color fading, as the accumulation of dirt particles and oil on the wood are also responsible for color change.
So, your wooden furniture is made of rosewood if its color gets dull with age, particularly if it is placed in outdoor areas where sunlight reaches it directly.
Resistance to stress
Rosewood furniture is highly resistant to damage and stressful conditions due to its better strength, coarse texture, and thickness.
It is resistant to mechanical and environmental stress, which means heavyweight air particles, and weather changes cannot affect its quality if properly maintained.
It contains a good quantity of oil, making it indestructible when exposed to moisture and rainwater. Moreover, it has a small pore size that restricts water molecules to get entered.
In addition, it is hard enough to resist mechanical stress and does not break due to outstanding strength. It becomes resistant to termites and rot after getting dried.
Furthermore, the outer edges are softer than the heartwood, which allows water and rot to cross the outer layers, but it does not get entered inside the heartwood due to its high density.
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