Distinction Jewelry – The Blog

I’m excited by odd things, being a jeweler!  A cool gemstone can actually make my heart beat faster, and it just happened when I opened up my latest gem order and pulled out several varieties of rose cut gemstones to use in my Little Beauties line of stud earrings.  You see, the rose cut is a cabochon (cut with a flat back to set in a bezel) that is faceted!

Several of my customers have wished aloud that the impeccable comfort and wearability of my Little Beauties earrings could be merged with the sparkle of the faceted gems in my Little Gems line.  Well, that dream just came true on a small scale.  I have rose cuts in 6mm black spinel, lemon quartz, and a nice dark pink garnet.  I set several pairs last night when I got home from jury duty and they turned out so fabulous!  I can’t wait to photograph them and list them for sale, you all are going to love them.

The rose cut has been around for quite a while, but is relatively rare.  It’s only recently that I’ve seen a small selection of rose cut gem offerings from one of my favorite dealers at an affordable price, so these are great for jewelry collectors and those who appreciate the unusual.

If you’ve found this article, you probably love the rich, royal color of sugilite and are wondering if that strand of beads you found on ebay for under ten dollars could possibly be the same stuff you’ve seen for sale for far, far more.  The short answer is no.  Genuine sugilite with good color is quite valuable, and there is a lucrative market in dying stones to resemble sugilite as well as in calling any stone with some purple in it sugilite.

This will serve as a beginner’s guide for weeding out the fakes, but I would suggest running your potential purchase past an expert before buying if at all possible.  It’s fake sugilite if:

• It’s cheap.  You can expect to pay $35.00 (bargain price!) to over $200.00 for a strand of decent sugilite beads.  For a cabochon of ring size, you are looking at a retail price of $25-$200.00 depending on the quality of the stone.  I would be suspicious of any piece of finished jewelry containing sugilite for under a hundred dollars unless the stone is tiny, has very poor color, or just has a few sugilite beads in it.
• It’s called flower sugilite, Russian sugilite, Chinese sugilite, or sugilite jasper.
• It’s called a sugilite “crystal” and it’s anything larger than tiny.
• It’s a flat, uniform dull purple color with thick black veins running through it.
• It’s identified as “reconsituted,” “assembled,” “manmade,” or “lab grown.”

They’re two different things, right?  Or are they?  Rubies and sapphires are actually color variations of the same mineral, corundum.   Corundum occurrs in a remarkably wide color spectrum including blues, pinks, reds, yellows, greens, blacks, whites, and every shade in between.  Traditionally, the red variety has been called ruby while all of the others were termed sapphires.

The waters get muddied when one looks at ruby colors, because rubies are commonly seen as a stone with a wide range of hues from true red to wine to pink.  The most hard-line interpretation tells us to call only true red corundum ruby, and all of the others pink sapphires.  This is a little problematic however because most people outside of the jewelry field think of many shades of dark pink corundum as ruby, and would never think to ask for a “dark pink sapphire.”

Jewelry stores have been marketing light, sparkly pinks as pink sapphire, dark pink to red shades as ruby, and when you see a true red ruby for less than a small fortune, it is likely to be corundum grown in a lab, as the true red is a rare and expensive shade of corundum.

At the bottom of all of this confusion lies one reassuring fact: it’s all basically the same stone.  Your main job is to pick the shade that makes you happy, and at the end of the day it really doesn’t matter if your jeweler called it a ruby or a pink sapphire.

Oh, and the ring in my post?  I listed it for sale as a ruby…..but pink sapphire would be just as accurate, if not more so.