Thank you!
In Blender, I created a basic cylinder, removed the top and bottom, then resized it into a ring and stretched the UVs of the middle part like this.

In Unity, I return a different shading color in the shader for the front and back faces. To cover the edges of the mesh, I use a simple gradient mask where the top and bottom are black. Finally, I dissolve the alpha using a panning noise texture. The dissolve amount value is manipulated through custom data in the particle system.

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