How to Identify African Ebony

Start with color and grain. African Ebony heartwood is deep black to black-brown, frequently with fine lighter or greyish streaking rather than a perfectly uniform tone, set against a sharply paler pinkish-to-greyish sapwood that is usually trimmed away. The grain is very fine, dense, and even, typically straight with subtle radial patterning and a smooth, almost waxy luster — the look captured on our sample. Unlike open-grained tropicals, the surface shows no visible pores to the naked eye.

The end grain is a strong confirmation. Ebony is diffuse-porous with very small vessels that are hard to see even with a lens, giving an almost featureless, homogeneous end surface — quite different from the large, obvious pores of iroko, wenge, or the ring/diffuse pores of oak and walnut. That poreless fineness, combined with the near-black color, is a reliable tell.

Weigh it in the hand. Genuine ebony is strikingly heavy and hard — roughly 950–1,050 kg/m³, Janka around 3,080 lbf — noticeably denser than most woods, and a small offcut will typically sink in water. It resists a thumbnail completely and feels cold and solid. It has little characteristic odor when worked, so a strongly scented 'ebony' is suspect.

Separating it from look-alikes matters because black is easy to fake. Wenge (Millettia) is dark brown-black but distinctly coarser, with prominent open pores and a visible black-and-tan striped figure — far from ebony's poreless surface. Katalox, black palm, and other dark tropicals are dense but show different pore or fiber patterns. Most importantly, watch for dyed or ebonized substitutes and 'black-and-white ebony' (Diospyros species with pale streaks): a wipe with solvent on a rag lifts color from a dyed board but not from true black ebony, and true ebony's weight and poreless end grain are hard to counterfeit. Streaky brown-black boards that are still very dense and poreless are usually genuine crassiflora that simply isn't fully jet black.