Heads Up

Early morning in Central Park might be one of the most wonderful places on the earth. I have a host of things to do today, the first being explaining to a young woman that the sapphire ring she recieved as an engagement ring is the most traditional stone she could have recieved. Charles gave one to Diana (sometimes things dont work out). She loves the stone and wants to do a new mounting. It got me thinking that there are so many misconceptions about gemstones. The first thing I often tell people is that the vast majority of stones come in every color. Diamond, for instance, is colorless in our imagination, however there are an enormous range of color variations based on the trace elements in the earth. One can see grey diamonds, vivid yellow ones, as well as pink. The occurance of pink is caused by the colorless carbon material that is diamond cooling in dirt or rock that has vanadium in it. The vanadium tints the colorless material, and how much vanadium will dictate the saturation. So heads up: ruby is really red sapphire, and aquamarine is blue emerald. Emerald is really a description of color saturation of green beryl, colored by cromium. Beryl is the term for all colors of the stone. Morganite is a pink beryl. I prefer stones that have unusual color and are not heat treated, because they often come from small rare deposits that are found by mistake. Rare, by the way, is the most overused and misleading word in jewelry. Blue sapphires are not rare. They are corundum colored by iron, and as we know iron is everywhere. That's why we see a million blue sapphires from Ceylon, Burma, Montana, Australia and the list goes on. Tsavorite garnets are far rarer than blue sapphires. They come from one mine in Tsavo, Tanzania. Thats it. However, there is a mine of green grossularite garnet in Mali, but the material is very yellow. The Tsavo material is colored again by cromium so it has the bright emerald color. Why is blue sapphire called precious and garnet not? Simply because there is enough of it to sell in different qualities to English royalty as well someone in a double-wide outside of Baggs, Wyoming. The ubiquity of the stone justifies the advertizing campaign. Anyway, back to my client with the ring. I will assure her that in the forty's De Beers advertized "a diamond is forever" and it worked. Your grandmother probably did not have a diamond. A diamond does have the benifit of being the hardest thing on earth, so it is perfect for taking the day to day pounding a woman dishes out. However, the tradition of diamond as engagement ring is not an old one. The most important thing one should realize is that few people actually know a lot about gems, very few. The best thing to focus on is the simple idea of weather something is pretty or not. Pretty is the end game. If a sapphire is very dark, it is not very pretty. I don't care if a cert says it's Kashmir (the most valuable sapphires come from Kashmir) if it's dark, it's still not pretty. Don't sweat the situation of thinking that a stone or piece of jewelry is attractive and not being able to explain why. That's called taste and we all use it. Fine jewelers should be at the very least able to explain why something is of value and hopefully beautiful. I prefer to bore my clients to tears with specifics about stones, and in turn ask miners an inordinate amount of questions about the stones I purchase. It's their pedigree, and it's really interesting. In conclution, ask as many questions as you can about jewelry. It will lift many of the veils of mystery in jewelry making. It might even create some more.