Is this genuine ebony?

Ebony?

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/chess-equipment/genuine-ebony

That doesn't look like genuine ebony. Where did you buy it?

You could weight them - ebony pieces should be heavier than their boxwood counterparts.

Weigh them too! There should be a significant difference.

I've just weighed some of mine. For my 1895 Jaques the White King is 100g, the Black one is 113g. For a modern (~20 year old) set the White King is 79g, the Black one is 88g. All of these have lead weights too of course.

So the difference isn't huge but it is measurable. 

I recall from some other thread that even real ebony pieces are died black because people expect ebony to be blacker than it usually is. Apparently it is common practice, if I remember correctly. Maybe someone else with more knowledge than me can confirm or find the thread in question.

Yes this is correct. Sometimes you can see the grain, especially on older sets, but with modern sets they are often completely black.

I've got a guitar with an ebony fretboard and it's pretty darn black. I had to remove a little to change the nut and it's black all the way through, no lighter bits and no dye.

I believe some vendors might dye their ebony to give it a deeper black. Here you can see from left to right: Ebonized (HoS) Ebony (SC) Ebony CB. I have multiple SC sets and their Ebony is not as deep as others. Theirs is more brown shows more of the wood grain which I actually find more interesting and prefer. 

You can see here that the CB knight on the far right does show wood grain with the flash or in natural daylight. In person it's just slightly darker and the woodgrain is very slightly not as pronounced as the SC in the center. The far left knight us ebonized and shows no discernable woodgrain even in daylight. 

Yes most ebony is jet black all of the way through. But with a whole chess set, you would expect to see a few places where you can see the grain, or streaks of brown, if the pieces haven't been blackened. 

Yeah true but the streaks still tend to be fairly dark. The colour of the chip in example just looks far too light to be ebony. It's possible I suppose but I suspect it isn't. 

If I recall correctly, the tree from which ebony is harvested it not completely black. It's dark (maybe even black) in the center of the trunk, but the wood gets lighter outwards. Leading to a lot of waste when harvesting the expensive black ebony. So there is a natural variation in wood colour, but also, I guess, due to how much loss they allowed vs how black the needed the wood to be. Again, just something I recall from memory, might not be 100%.

By the way, did you also see the wood under a bright LED light? Or just normal inside lighting?

Edit: I went looking for confirmation and found this picture on Wikipedia:

While it does show that the center is black while the outside is not, it's not like there is some continuous gradient, which would result in having to make a balance between wastage and wood colour. I find it pretty interesting that there is such a sharp border, though.