All About Gems & Jewelry Making — Semi-precious gemstones

Sunstone is a favorite of mine.  The soft peachy orange color with sprinkles of shimmery specks, provides a unique and fancy look.  You don't see sunstone in much jewelry, as most people have never heard of the stone.  The stone is found in various places around the world, including being mined from Oregon, so we can support our country and look fabulous while doing so. 

I love to pair the stone with moonstone and/or labradorite, since they all share a shimmer characteristic.  

Sunstone shows a distinct and lively glitter called aventurescence. Aventurescence is a sparkly, metallic-looking luster caused by flat, reflective inclusions, sometimes called “schiller” by sunstone fanciers. Whereas, labradorite has "Labradorescence." Labradorescence is not a display of colors reflected from the surface of a specimen. Instead, light enters the stone, strikes a twinning surface within the stone, and reflects from it. The color seen by the observer is the color of light reflected from that twinning surface. Different twinning surfaces within the stone reflect different colors of light. Light reflecting from different twinning surfaces in various parts of the stone can give the stone a multi-colored appearance.

It has always amazed me how much people pay for a ruby!  Rubies are simply red sapphires!  Granted, there are differences and specifically in how trubies are created. 

Experts and professors around the globe are yet to settle on a precise explanation for how rubies are formed. It’s known that a ruby is, in essence, a type of corundum, which is itself colorless when pure, and turns ruby red when chromium is introduced. Sapphires, incidentally, are also a type of corundum, created when titanium and iron are part of the mix, turning the stones beautiful shades of blue. But the conditions needed to create rubies are so rare that a definitive explanation for their creation remains elusive.

For rubies, it is their color, rather than their clarity, which makes them so valuable, and this is greatly determined by where the rubies are found. Ranging from vibrant orangey red to almost purple in hue, rubies can be many different shades.There are many red gemstone that can be confused with a ruby.  Red spinel is one of my favorites because it looks identical and is a fraction of the cost.