Gemstones Guide

Popular and Precious Gemstones Jewelry

Alexandrite

Alexandrite is a beautiful gemstones jewelry named after a Russian czar. Alexandrite is a basic crysoberyl type, and is best noted for it's color changing properties depending on the shade of light it is exposed to. Alexandrite shifts between greenish to blue, to purple and even crimson hues. It is this very color-changing property that makes Alexandrite one of the most valuable gemstones around.

Amber Jewellery

Amber Jewellery formed from fossilized tree sap, amber jewellery is best known for it's soft yellow golden hue, which is distinctly different from other yellow-colored gemstones because it diffuses light into a much softer shade of gold than other yellow gemstones, which tend to intensify and sparkle instead. The fact that Amber Jewellery is fossilized liquid makes finding unflawed pieces with no bubbles or cracks in the Amber Jewellery much rarer and more valuable.

Amethyst Jewelry

Amethyst Jewelry is the most famous type of purple gemstone. Amethyst jewelry's color is a very light shade of purple that captures light inside the gem's facets. The color of amethyst jewelry is often semi-transparent as opposed to other purple gemstones which are darker and more opaque. It is this crystalline clarity and beauty which makes amethysts jewelry sought after by certain collectors.

Chalcedony / Agates

Chalcedony also known as agates. Chalcedony is a form of quartz crystal which is composed of several different strains of quartz fused together in parallel layers. This tends to make chalcedony / agates multi-colored, and the effect is like looking at a rainbow if the different layers of quartz are of varied colors and types. Quartz mines which hold different deposits of quartz types are ideal places to dig for this, and chalcedony / agates is the rarest form of quartz gemstones jewelry around.

Emerald Jewellery

Emerald Jewellery is the most well known type of green colored gemstone. They are beryllium-based in chemical composition, sharing this element with several equally well known gemstones like rubies and sapphires. An emerald jewellery's shade of green is unique and quite a few ancient civilizations regard this as a holy or mythic stone. More often than not, emerald jewellery gemstones are cut into simple square or circular shapes, with few variations.

Garnet Jewelry

Garnet jewelry is a stone whose basic color is red. The most famous red gemstone remains the ruby, yet the garnet jewelry's distinguishing factor is that it's shade of red actually approaches crimson. For this reason, some people refer to it as a "bloodstone". A very rare type of garnet jewelry however is the "fire garnet", whose color is a brighter orange instead of a deep crimson. This is more expensive than regular garnet jewelries.

Jadeite

Jadeite is a form of jade that is rarer than the more common form, nephrite. While both are green colored, jadeite is semi transparent, making it more closely resemble "regular" gemstones than its cousin nephrite. The purity of jadeite is higher than nephrite, and its crystal density is higher, but it tends to naturally form in smaller pieces as a result and is much harder to work with than nephrite, which can be carved like stone.

Moonstones

This gemstone's fame comes mostly from its mysticism and it's decidedly "feminine" gearing. As gemstones go, it's actual worth isn't very high, but it remains popular nonetheless. Moonstones are opaque, white-silver stones that under moonlight appear exactly the same shade as the moon in the sky. Naturally, this feature is what gave rise to its historic popularity.

Nephrite

When people refer to jade, they often mean nephrite. This material is a bright opaque green, and its physical quality compared to another form of jade, jadeite, is softer and more malleable. Large pieces of nephrite are easier to find than jadeite, and aside from jewelry this gemstone occurs naturally in pieces large enough to carve into small figurines and statues. Smaller pieces are carved into entire pieces of jewelry like bracelets and brooches.

Opal Jewellery

Opal Jewellery are completely opaque quartz crystals which, like chalcedony, display a multitude of colors at the same time. The biggest difference between the two is that chalcedony's color patterns are often set parallel to each other, and chalcedony stones themselves are semi transparent. Opal jewellery are completely opaque, and the splash of colors is random and haphazard throughout the surface of the gem.

Peridot Jewelry

Peridot jewelry gems is perhaps best known for only one thing: simplicity. Unlike other gemstones, which can come in quite a variety of colors, peridot jewelry gems are uniformly a green-gold shade. They are silicate-based gemstones, and traces of iron in the gems give it a gold hue. There are NO variations of opacity, color traces, or shade variations in peridot jewelry gems no matter what part of the world they come from.

Red Ruby Jewellery

PeAlong with the emerald and sapphire, this Red Ruby Jewellery stone is one of the oldest and most famous types of gemstone for collectors. Ruby Jewellery's shade of red is actually rather bright and the stone itself is semi transparent instead of opaque. It is a type of gemstone called corundum, and is second only to the diamond in toughness among the world's gemstones. Next to diamond, it is also perhaps the most expensive type of gemstone around.

Turquoise Jewelry

This stone can easily be likened to nephrite for two things: one, Turquoise Jewelry's considerably softer than other gemstones, making it easier to work with, and two, it is opaque. Turquoise Jewelry come in shades of sky blue with just a hint of green, and while it technically a stone the colors actually come from metals in the mineral - namely copper and iron traces. These metallic traces are the main reason for Turquoise Jewelry's opacity and malleability.

Topaz Jewelry

Topaz Jewelry is an aluminum silicate based gemstone and is primarily a rich yellow gold in color. Topaz Jewelry is semi transparent and is one of the harder and more enduring gemstones around. If the ruby "defines" red, the sapphire "defines" blue, and the emerald "defines" green for other gemstones, the topaz jewelry is the gemstone that sets the standards followed by other yellow colored gemstones.

History of Bali

Bali has been inhabited for a long time. Sembiran, a village in northern Bali, was believed to have been home to the people of the Ice Age, proven by the discovery of stone axes and adzes. Further discoveries of more sophisticated stone tools, agricultural techniques and basic pottery at Cekik in Bali's far west, point to the people of the Neolithic era. At Cekik, there is evidence of a settlement together with burial sites of around a hundred people thought to be from the Neolithic through to the Bronze Age. The massive drums of the Bronze Age, together with their stone moulds have been discovered throughout the Indonesian archipelago, including the most famous and largest drum in Southeast Asia, the Moon of Pejeng, nearly two meters wide, now housed in a temple in east Ubud. In East Java and Bali, there has also been a concentration of carved stone sarcophagi, which we can see in the Bali Museum in Denpasar and Purbakala Museum in Pejeng.
Bali was busy with trade from as early as 200 BC. The prasasti, or metal inscriptions, Bali's earliest written records from the ninth century AD, show a significant Buddhist and Hindu influence; especially in the statues, bronzes and rock-cut caves around Mount Kawi and Gajah Cave. Balinese society was pretty sophisticated by about 900 AD. Their marriage portrait of the Balinese King Udayana to East Java's Princess Mahendratta is captured in a stone carving in the Pura Korah Tegipan in the Batur area. Their son, Erlangga, born around 991 AD, later succeeded to the throne of the Javanese kingdom and brought Java and Bali together until his death in 1049.
n 1284, Bali was conquered by Kertanegara, the ruler of the Singasari; until the turn of the century, saw Bali under its own rule under the hands of King Bedaulu of Pejeng, east of Ubud. 1343 AD, is an important date in Bali's history. It was then that the whole island was conquered by East Java under the mighty Hindu Majapahit kingdom. This resulted in massive changes in Balinese society, including the introduction of the caste system.
Balinese who did not embrace the changes fled to the isolated and remote mountainous areas and hill areas. Their descendants are known today as Bali Aga or Bali Mula that means the "original Balinese". They still live separately in villages like Tenganan near Dasa Temple and Trunyan on the shores of Batur Lake, and maintain their ancient laws and traditional ways. When Majapahit in East Java fell in 1515, the many small Islamic kingdoms in the island merged into the Islamic Mataram empire, Majapahit's most dedicated Hindu priests, craftsmen, soldiers, nobles and artists fled east to Bali, and flooded the island with Javanese culture and Hindu practices. Considering the huge influence and power of Islam at the time, it is worth pondering why and how Bali still remained strongly Hindu and Buddhist.
Batu Renggong, also known as Dewa Agung, means great god, became king in 1550, and this title became hereditary through the succeeding generations of the kingdom of Gelgel, and later Klungkung, until the twentieth century. Bali reached the pinnacle of its Golden Era under the reign of the Batu Renggong, the great god ruler. Bali's decline started when Batu Renggong's grandson, Di Made Bekung, lost Blambangan, Lombok and Sumbawa. DI Made Bekung's chief minister, Gusti Agung Maruti, eventually rebelled and reigned from 1650 till 1686, when he in turn was killed by DI Made Bekung's son, Dewa Agung Jambe, who then moved the court to Klungkung, and named his new palace the Semarapura, Abode of the God of Love.

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Bali is a dynamic centre of arts, culture, religion and people. What comes out of this is a unique magical blend of mysticism, righteousness, peace, tolerance, creativity and, of course, the famous Balinese friendliness. These very attributes come together and serve as a root for the creation of what has developed and grown into a truly wonderful art and craft industry that Indonesia has become world renowned for. Hand crafted gifts and arts and crafts from Indonesia have continued to gain in popularity over the years. Bali handicrafts now adorn the homes of millions of consumers the world over. At some time or another, you may have come across a hand crafted item that has caught your eye.
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