"Demasking" -- is this a real chemical process??

Question

There is a lot of BS around so called "Black Sands" that some people claim contain huge amounts of gold, platinum, palladium, etc.

But they also claim you can't get it out unless you use some "mystery", "secret", "proprietary" process to unlock the stuff.

Whenever I hear such things I become skeptical! But I don't really know -- is "Demasking" something real in chemistry?

Here, this company even claims to be able to do it right on their website...

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" --- unique Black Bands liberation process. This is a highly successful, one of a kind, pretreatment for Classic Black Sands that has been developed at MRA/Advanced Analytical in conjunction with collaborative scientists, which removes the black coating (Fe, Fe2O3 and others) from black sands and for the first time in history allows for easy recovery of Gold and the PGM's.

nemo · Accepted Answer

Of course this is BS. If the issue was just a coating, they could remove it by grinding or crushing the grains. If there were gold in the sand, it could easily be removed by existing chemical processes. I am not an expert in mining practices, but I do have a chemistry background and sand can be dissolved in various acids. The gold can then be extracted easily.

BTW, read between the lines of their BS. "highly successful" means "good enough to fool someone who doesn't know anything about it". "one of a kind" means, "we made this up ourselves". "MRA/Advanced Analytical" is who exactly? "in conjunction with collaborative scientists" means they paid some other people to do some work for them.

Rick

"Demasking" -- is this a real chemical process??

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