The Four Most Precious Gemstones
Posted by Owen Jones in Uncategorized, tags: accessories, celebrities, Fashion, gems, gemstones, history, hobbies, investing, jewelry, marriage, other, sales, Uncategorized, weddings, women's issuesPeople like valuable gemstones for various reasons. Some store wealth in jewelry and precious metals, some wear then to show off their wealth and their self-perceived status, some believe that wearing their birthstone will bring them health, wealth and happiness and others wear them because they look nice.
Valuable gemstones have always been sought after because of their worth, but in older days, they were also valued for other things, such as being able to bestow good health. This belief persists among some people, but not a lot in the West any more.
In the Developed World, most people wear precious stones for their beauty and to exhibit status. In the East, people also wear precious stones to display status, but collect them because they do not traditionally have faith in banks.
And who could blame them in the light of the Developed World’s recent experience with their financial banking crisis and the meteoric rise in the cost of gold? There is probably a lesson for us all here.
Anyway, apart from precious metals, there are precious stones and the most valuable of them are: emeralds, diamonds, rubies and sapphires. The order of the stones in value relies on the quality.
Diamonds of ordinary quality are worth more than emeralds of ordinary quality, but high quality emeralds are worth more than high quality diamonds, because it is difficult to find emeralds without many faults, which are also called ‘inclusions’.
Diamonds come in all sorts of colours from clear to ‘black’. Clear diamonds are what most people would want, but there are some very costly big coloured diamonds in yellow and blue.
The problem with gemstones is that their supply is closely controlled by cartels and governments, which keeps their price artificially high. Diamonds are the worst of the bunch in this regard.
De Beers controls a large proportion of the diamond market and was able to set prices for decades. The Argyle mine of Australia produces 7,000 kilos of brown diamonds, which were traditionally considered valueless for the purposes of jewelry.
However, due to a clever marketing campaign, brown diamonds are now considered valuable in Australia, although clear diamonds are still preferred in the rest of the world.
Emeralds are a gorgeous green gemstone, but it is very difficult to buy a decent one. Many emeralds have been doctored to look more valuable than they truly are, but this is the case of diamonds as well.
If you like red gems, then a ruby is for you. Ruby is a definition of the colour red and rubies can vary from blood red crimson to pink, but in general, the deeper the red the better. However, not all red stones that are sold as rubies are rubies, but you could have predicted that
Sapphire is normally a beautiful deep blue, but may also be pale blue to pink. Sapphires come mostly from the East, like Thailand, Russia but even North Carolina in the USA.
If you want to purchase any of these top gemstones, buy the best that you can afford, because you can pass them on to your family as heirlooms.
Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on a variety of subjects, and is now concerned with Good Diamond Quality. If you would like to know more, please visit our website at Jewellry and Watches.
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