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.