If you enjoy rare and precious gemstones and their related stories, here you will find a litany of gemstone ramblings, gemological observations, and useful and time-wasting trivia bought from behind-the-scenes in the rough and cut gem markets of Asia and Africa.
S OMEWHAT jokingly, we were going to name this 225 carat rough sapphire the “The Lion Of Judah” because I initially thought it was perhaps the first noteworthy golfball sized sapphire-crystal of deep-blue lusciousness to originate from the new Ethiopian Aksum sapphire-fields. My eyes nearly popped-out of my head when I first saw it. However, reality bites. And bites hard.…
An unusual 24 carat piece of gueda type sapphire came into the office a while ago. From an unknown location in Africa, the piece was heavily silky and showed a reddish light-scattering Tyndall effect as shown in the video. As the piece was performed and lost mass, the Tyndall effect loss the reddish hue and became more greenish-yellow. Peeking into…
A SUPERB & SPECTACULAR RAINBOW colored tourmaline crystal from Goma in the Eastern Congo. Showing purple, pink, orange, yellow, green and a light blue, this crystal comes so close to having every color of the rainbow, in the right order of spectrum colors, but doesn’t quite have the full red. Also attached is pics and vid of the kaleidoscope of…
How the Opal Got It’s Rainbow, According to the Ancient Australians1 In the beginning, when the world was young, when the Dreamtime legends were being made, and all the beings of Australia lived under the diurnal blazing sun and brilliant night lights of the Milky Way. In these endless lands the dingo, the emu, the snake and all other creatures…
Brilliant, green, collectible and breathtaking, demantoid garnet is what laudantium, totam rem aperiam eaque ipsa, quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt, explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem, quia voluptas sit, aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos, qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt, neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum, quia dolor…
You may be forgiven for thinking Africa’s only ‘Sperrgebiet’, a restricted access wilderness of gemstone-bearing lands, is solely Namibia’s claim to frame. It turns out however, in the remote Ethiopian Highlands, at a height of almost 8,000 feet, a large sapphire-field has been found in a remote, culturally-timeless area that is carefully administered by the authorities. This new find, made…
A fantastic, intense red and blue color piece of hard-to-classify corundum. More than just a bi-color sapphire, this vivaciously colored jewel seems to be both ruby and sapphire. Rejecting traditional corundum-identities we have self-identified this as a “rupphire” (joke lol) Weighing 1.69 Carats, this is Vietnamese, and is heated.
This sapphire fail is now a solid aggregated mass of sapphire that has bonded together unusually strongly. The crucible of sapphire was left in the oven longer than planned during the New Year celebrations, and is a casualty of the raucous alcohol-fueled celebrations that have happened here this weekend. This lot belonged to a heater who has an office a…
WHAT LIES BENEATH – A thick, black iron-oxide crust covers an 11 Gram / 55 Carat blue sapphire. Resistant to scratching with restaurant tableware, this tough and ugly lamina almost completely conceals the sapphire’s real potential and high-value derived from it’s cornflower-blue color.
and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks —Isaiah 2:3–4 A generation ago these Tigray farmers-cum-sapphire miners were the fighters who prosecuted a war against the ruling regime and won, overturning the despots who largely created the 1980’s famine. With victory won, the fighters returned to their land, swapped their weapons for ploughshares and…