Royal Diadem Jewelers

Blue topaz is the most affordable gemstone, giving consumers the look of aquamarine for less.

But it doesn’t start out its life that beautiful blue. When it comes out of the ground, it is colorless. The color of blue topaz is an achievement of the gem treater’s art. In the 1970s, dealers discovered that they could treat white topaz by exposing it to radiation, and then heat. What was originally a colorless gem then turned the blue of aquamarine.

When blue topaz first appeared on the market, it was a pricey novelty. But as more dealers figured out how to produce the color, production exploded and prices dropped to their affordable levels today.

The blue color is permanent, making this gem ideal for affordable gemstone jewelry.
Quickly after the new color treatment was developed, blue topaz became a very popular gem with consumers.

But despite the success of blue topaz, many jewelers who sell it do so with ambivalence.
Granted, they admit, the stone has unrivalled beauty for the money. But the fact that the color is created by man makes blue topaz feel less natural than other gems. Gems like sapphire may also have their color improved by heat. But the enhancement of sapphire doesn’t always work, and it is a difficult and expensive process. In contrast, blue topaz is easily and affordably mass produced.

Trade ambivalence about topaz is evident in the marketing and merchandising of the gem. Few retailers even bother to tell consumers that blue topaz owes its color to either a nuclear reactor or a linear accelerator.

Some see such non-disclosure as a reaction to fears about irradiation. But now that many products, including food, are commercially irradiated, that is becoming less of a taboo. Interviews with treaters, dealers and government officials lead us to conclude that blue topaz poses no danger. First of all, stones treated in ways that leave residual radiation are quarantined (usually anywhere from three months to one year) until levels read ultra-conservatively low. By the time these stones get to jewelry stores, radioactivity is unmeasurable with conventional Geiger counters. What’s more, even when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which licenses reactors in the United States where most topaz is treated, ran radioactivity tests of irradiated blue topaz using ultra-expensive and sensitive measuring devices, it found no cause for concern.

So why neglect to tell the public about irradiation? The answer, we think, lies in the fact that blue topaz is a high-tech hybrid that transcends all conventional classifications. On one hand, the stone is natural, starting life as super-abundant colorless or ever-so-slightly tinted topaz from places like Brazil and Sri Lanka. On the other hand, its color is entirely manmade.

The names for topaz colors are actually dealer shorthand for the different processes used to produce them. The final resulting color depends on the process and the trace elements present in the original material. Dealers match the origin of the original material with process to achieve the desired results. The most popular process is Sky blue topaz, which is irradiated in a linear accelerator, usually a commercial irradiation facility in California. Topaz irradiated with electrons is generally light blue in color, similar to aquamarine. London blue topaz, in contrast, is produced by neutron irradiation in a nuclear reactor. This topaz may be much darker in color, more like a tourmaline blue.

If the neutron irradiation technique is used, stones fall under NRC jurisdiction. Current NRC rules require that neutron bombardment done in the United States, regardless of gem species, be performed only by NRC- licensed reactors, which must subject the stones to a battery of tests before releasing them. If stones are reactor-treated in other countries, their U.S. importers must be licensed by the NRC to import them. In Europe, release standards not quite as strict and testing is handled by individual reators before release.

However, blue topaz irradiated in a linear accelerator is not subject to regulation either in the U.S. or Europe because it doesn’t have noticeable residual radiation.

Perhaps blue topaz will someday be celebrated as union of nature and science rather than being devalued for that fact. This gem is a product of a venerable tradition of improving on nature that began long ago with the alchemists.

Until 1912, the year a Jewelers of America forerunner revised this country’s birthstone list, chalcedony boasted five, and at earlier times, six, spots on that enduring roster, making this broad branch of the quartz family the most heavily represented of any in the gem kingdom.. Today agate, carnelian, chysoprase and jasper are missing from the birthstone roll. Only bloodstone and sardonyx remain, but these chalcedonies function as alternates.

In the case of bloodstone, March’s sole gem since the list was first codified, receiving second billing in the 20th century was a real slap in the face, part of our culture’s shift away from what are now called “ornamental” gems toward crystalline gems. That’s a nice way of saying these opaque stones are second-rate because they’re not transparent and so not facetable. Ironically, of the few ornamental stones found in jewelry stores today, black onyx, a dyed chalcedony, is one of the most familiar.

As for the dozens of other ornamental stones which play big roles in jewelry history, most today are considered anachronisms, of significance mainly to hobbyists, rock hounds and practitioners of ancient jewelry arts such as carving and engraving-arts that were once mainstay gemstone fashioning processes. That’s what makes the presence, although it is largely token, of bloodstone on the modern birthstone list so important. It is a last link to a sacramental tradition which views gems more as amulets than adornments, talismans than trinkets.

Sealed in Stone

Chalcedony’s key role in the jewelry industry of antiquity is easy to understand when one realizes that the primary use of gems in early civilizations such as those of Babylonia and Assyria was as seals usually set in rings-de rigueur items for prominent men.

This admiration was contagious. According to the Bible, King Solomon wore such a seal-ring and Moses ordered only seal-stones used in the 12-gem breastplate made circa 1300 B.C. for his brother Aaron when he was installed as chief rabbi at the temple in Jerusalem. In his book “The Curious Lore of Precious Stones,” famed gemologist George F. Kunz conjectured that six of the gems in that most celebrated of vestments were likely chalcedonies: three of them jaspers, two agates, and one onyx.

Big deal, say modern cynics, these quartzes were used because they were the most available gems. Not so. Some accounts of lapidary history suggest that early carvers could just as well have used garnet, lapis lazuli and serpentine. In time, cutters expanded their repertoire of items to include beryl, malachite, turquoise and zircon, among other species. Yet the search for carvable quartzes continued too.

This is where bloodstone enters the picture. A hybrid of two chalcedonies, dark-green plasma and deep-red jasper, this gem at its best exhibits a filed of forest green that is either speckled or spotted with full blooded red. A gem with this combination of colors was bound to fire the extremely mythopoeic imaginations of the ancients.

Take the Greek name for bloodstone, heliotrope, by which the gem was known until recently Translated literally, the word means “to turn toward the sun.” Pliny the Elder (d. 79 A.D.), the Roman soldier-scholar who wrote one of the earliest and for centuries most influential treatises on gems, explains the name as a depiction of the fiery reflection seen when a piece of bloodstone is place din water and pointed at the sun.

The Christians who revered bloodstone went much further in their imaginings by associating the gem’s red with the blood of Christ. In fact, legend had it that bloodstone owed its red spots to drops of blood which fell from Christ’s body on to a jasper at the foot of the cross on which he was crucified.

Given such associations, it is hardly surprising that bloodstone was a very popular talisman throughout medieval and Renaissance Europe. In his book, “From the World of Gemstones,” Dr. Hermann Bank quotes the following from a childhood reminiscence by the Italian painter Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574): “When Luca Signorelli heard that I suffered severely from nose bleeding at that time, and even fainting, he lovingly suspended a bloodstone round my neck with his own hand.”

Love Medicine

Even today, bloodstone continues to enjoy a reputation for virtues other than beauty. Shanti Shah of Indogems Inc., New York, tells us that finely powdered bloodstone has long been and still is a very popular medicine, as well as aphrodisiac, in countries such as India and Sri Lanka. “It is said to cure many diseases,” Shah says.

Bloodstone’s double life as gemstone and healing agent may help to explain its recent and rather pronounced shortages in what dealers consider acceptable qualities. Although it is found in California., Wyoming, and also in Australia, the best specimens, nearly all of them, come from India’s rich gem and mineral mining areas of Aurangabad and Poona, southeast of Bombay. Of late, though, that region’s production has not been equal to demand.

A buyer at Lucien Stern Inc., a New York firm that specializes in ornamental gems, thinks material she sees nowadays is not up to snuff. “Maybe if I was less of a purist, I’d buy this stuff just to keep us more fully stocked, but I can’t bring myself to do it,” she says.

This hard-line position has left stock of bloodstone at an all-time low. “We have not seen the better qualities of bloodstone for the past two or three years,” says Shah.

It is custom in India for a child to wear “baby bracelets” on both its right and left hands for the first year of its life. Composed of gold and black gems, this color combination is widely believed to ward off evil.

Kuntal Shah, president of Oscargems in New York, remembered this cultural fact of life in her native country when she chanced upon an enormous surplus of black spinel rough in 2005. “I decided to start making baby necklaces of alternating 14k or 18k gold and micro-faceted black spinel beads,” she says. “The response was spectacular. I sold thousands of gold and spinel baby bracelets at $50 to $60 retail.”

As luck would have it, black gems became a global fashion fixture and Shah began showing black spinel at gem and jewelry shows in this country-where she took the opportunity to talk it up with designer clients such as Alison Osborne, Hastings, Nebraska. “The moment she showed me some faceted black spinels, I knew this was the black gem I was looking for,” Osborne says.

That’s high praise from Osborne, a black gem aficionado who uses dark gems frequently in her designs. “I have a deep fondness for black gems and I am always on the lookout for new ones,” she continues. “Among my favorites are black labradorite and black tourmaline. But I am making widest use of black spinel at the moment.”

With enthusiastic customers like Osborne, it is hardly surprising that black spinel is Shah’s number one seller this season. Whether it will continue to be her top-seeded stone remains to be seen. But the fact that Osborne plans to stay with the gem whether or not the fashion dress code remains black and white suggests this gem has enough staying power to soon earn staple status.

And fashion is only one of the factors working on its behalf.

Blazing Black
When one thinks of black gems, two choices usually come to mind: black onyx and black diamond. Of the two, black onyx is by far the most popular and affordable. Over the last decade, however, black diamond has carved a deep niche that it has never had before, especially in irradiated jet-black form.

Nevertheless, if supply is great enough (and Sri Lanka, Tasmania, and Burma are current producers), black spinel could leap-frog over both of them to assume new leadership in this color category. The main reason: It is a best of both worlds choice that guarantees it future importance to jewelers.

In smaller sizes, black spinel offers the luster of diamond for a price just slightly to the north of onyx. Shah micro-facets her beads and smaller calibrated stones to emphasize their diamond-like appearance.

In larger sizes, the similarity to diamond is not so strong. But stones still have “high facet definition and sharpness they never have with onyx,” says Osborne.

The end result is the best bargain in blackness the gem world has ever known. And, unlike onyx and diamond, black spinel is not treated. “The color is a gift from nature,” says Shah. So is its ability to shine like diamond.

One of black spinel’s biggest beauty secrets is its hardness-eight on the Mohs scale, enough to give it “superior luster when polished,” says Eric Braunwart of Columbia Gem House, Vancouver, Washington. “Because black onyx is less dense and hard, it can’t take as good a polish. Black spinel gives you an absolutely smooth black surface.”

These virtues encourage dealers like Braunwart and Shah to facet stones with everything from conventional to checkerboard arrangements. Yet most stones cost under $5 per carat, often under $2 per carat in small sizes.

True, black onyx is readily available for $2 to $5 per stone, depending on size, but Braunwart is convinced many jewelers will resist the temptation to be onyx-wise and spinel-foolish. “The large difference in quality should outweigh the small difference in price,” he says.

If Braunwart and Shah are right about black spinel’s future, this variety of spinel could do wonders for the breed as a whole.

Now that the term “semiprecious” has become politically incorrect in gem dealer circles, it is being replaced by a more subtly derogatory term, “ornamental.” While the term means “decorative,” its prevailing connotation is of something bauble-like that is both showy and valueless. No wonder the adjective is heard mostly in conjunction with chalcedony quartzes such as carnelian and, above all, black onyx.

Unless used for sculptural purposes, black onyx never costs more than a few dollars per carat. That’s why it rarely inspires rapture or scholarship. So while jewelers are aware that it was a mainstay gem of the art deco period and is widely used today in men’s jewelry, few know that black onyx was more celebrated before our century or that it boasts a millennial history with long stretches of veneration.

The earliest and possibly grandest highlight of that history dates from around 250 B.C. when a large onyx (probably banded rather than uniformly colored) was chosen as the sixth stone in the 12-stone breastplate of Aaron, unquestionably the most famous gem vestment in Judeo-Christian history.

In addition, black onyx merits attention as one of the first known and most popular treated gems, its color the result of a staining process recorded by Roman soldier-scientist Pliny the Elder in the gem section of his vast treatise, “Natural History.” Indeed, it is onyx’s status as a treated stone that poses one of the quartz world’s nagging mysteries; the exact period when “onyx” shifted meaning to refer exclusively to solid-color rather than patterned agates.

In our time, certainly, the word “onyx” conjures up gems with lacquer-like single colors, whether black, green, blue or red. But that’s not what the word originally evoked when the ancient Greeks coined onychion, from their word for “fingernail,” as “a generic term for onyx, sardonyx and agate,” explains quartz expert Sy Frazier. Shortened nearer our age to onyx, but still referring, in essence, to banded agates, the original association with fingernail makes good philological sense, but only if you think of non-treated agate. Look at a fingernail and you’ll see three alternating bands of light and dark curving across the cuticle, similar to the curved light-and-dark banding of agate.

But did the Greeks even know of dyed onyx? Or did, as many suspect, the process begin with the Romans? If so, did the Romans practice staining widely enough for it to be considered as much of a norm for this gem as it is today? Or, more likely, was the word associated equally with natural banded and treated solid-color gems?

One thing is for sure: During the Victorian era, the name began to stand almost entirely for solid-color gems. And it was then, notes period jewelry specialist Jeanenne Bell, that black onyx wrote the oddest chapter in its history by playing the role of a black-gem stand-in: similar to that of red spinel in the ruby market.

The Jet Set

In the mid-nineteeth century, when onyx was in final transition from a banded to a monochrome gem, demand for the black variety became the greatest ever known. Ironically, much of the demand was based on the popularity of a look-alike: jet, a fossil coal also known as “black amber.”

The boom in onyx was part of a larger boom in black gem and jewelry materials including jet, glass, vulcanite (an early plastic), gutta-percha (a rubber resin) and a host of other substances. This boom was due to the sustained popularity of mourning jewelry during most of the nineteenth century, especially the reign of England’s Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1901. When Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, died in 1861 and the queen vowed to wear black for the rest of her life, the already expansive market for mourning jewelry exploded, so much so, writes Diana Scarisbrick in The Jewelry Design Source Book, “its manufacture assumed the proportions of an industry.”

In America, where the Civil War further fuelled demand for mourning articles, jewelry manufacturers began to substitute onyx for jet, the age’s black gem of preference, on a massive scale because the stained agate had better color, luster, hardness, and durability. However, its most endearing advantages were greater availability and far lower price relative to jet, the result of a surging supply of treatment-friendly material from Brazil that started in 1821. Although onyx is plentiful throughout Europe (Idar-Oberstein is founded in an agate-rich region), the South American variety took to staining more readily.

Of course, few in the jewelry world knew that black onyx was artificially colored at all. The process, kept a trade secret in Germany’s Idar-Oberstein until a small booklet was published on the process in 1913, allowed this cutting center to control the black onyx market after staining was introduced there in 1819.

The stories of how the recipe got into German hands is as fascinating as the recipe itself. According to Frazier, Johan Jakob Hahn, a German cutter, learned the technique from his cellmate, an Italian, in a Paris debtor’s prison. Another legend has it that a man from regularly brought agate to Idar-Oberstein for cutting taught the method to a cutter there. In light of the fact that Pliny’s writings are the oldest ones known on the process, it is no coincidence that both stories credit an Italian as the source of the technique.

Carbon Coloring

Starting in 1813 and continuing through the mid-century, German cutters discovered a series of coloring techniques that allowed them to turn agates various colors: first red (carnelian) using heat alone, then, in 1819, black using what is called the sugar-acid process. Kurt Nassau summarizes the latter process in his indispensable book, “Gemstone Enhancement”: “Two liquids are…used for black agate, the first consisting of 375 grams sugar in 1 liter of warm water, having the consistency of thinned honey. After being soaked in this for 2-3 weeks, the agates are transferred without drying into concentrated sulfuric acid (very dangerous). After being heated for 1 hour and boiled for 15 minutes to 2 hours and then cooled, the agates are removed, washed well, and then dried very well at medium temperatures. The concentrated sulfuric acid extracts water out of the sugar, leaving behind pure black carbon.”

More recently, a quicker, supposedly less permanent dyeing technique involving immersion and heating of stones in a cobalt solution has been used. But purists stick with the sugar-acid method first described by Pliny nearly 2,000 years ago.

Ask a gem collector which variety of opal is the most prized in the world and chances are pretty good you’ll get the right answer: Australian black opal. But don’t ask which kind is the next best. The answers you’ll usually hear-Australian semi-black or boulder opal-are wrong.

Collectors can be excused for not knowing the runner up in value terms to black opal. Unless they’re connoisseurs, they may never have heard of the world’s second most valued opal. Called black crystal opal, it’s also from Australia. But unlike, say, boulder opal, which is a distinct variety of this gem, black crystal opal is more akin to a sub-species. Indeed, most opal guidebooks classify black crystal opal between well-known black and semi-black when it comes to both value and regard. So how come few people know about it when it’s so highly esteemed?

That’s a tricky question, one whose answer sounds like a Zen riddle. Collectors do know about crystal opal, only they don’t know that they know.

Unless explained by an expert, black crystal opal is very likely to be mistaken for black, semi-black or even gray opal. That’s because most people who have seen black crystal opal probably weren’t told what they were looking at.

The same goes for light crystal opal-even more so. Since crystal opal occurs in both light and dark forms, and since light (or white) opal is a jewelry store staple, the odds are great that jewelers may have sold light crystal opal without labelling it as such.

But now that black crystal beauties from Lightning Ridge, Australia’s most famous opal mining area, are more available, consumers should take note of this stunning opal.

Great Balls of Fire

The name opal is a shortened version of opalus, a Roman coinage that sums up this gem’s chief aesthetic attribute: color play. Perhaps the best description of opal ever penned is found in Pliny the Elder’s treatise from 79 AD, Natural History, which devotes a volume to gems: “For in them you shall see the living fire of ruby, the glorious purple of amethyst, the sea-green of the emerald, all glittering together in an incredible mixture of light.”

Although the world marveled at opal for centuries, the precise cause of its color play, also known as iridescence, was not known until the1960s. Then electron microscope studies revealed that the richness and brilliance of opal colors were the result of light diffraction (the breakup of light rays into spectral colors) within the stone. Here’s how opal works its color magic:

Light enters a stone, passes through lattices of silica spheres into a surrounding silica solution where it is diffracted and reflected out of the stone.

Gemologists found that both the size of these spheres and the orderliness with which they are arranged influences the number, strength and pattern of colors an opal exhibits. “For instance,” writes Andrew Cody in his photo guide, “Australian Precious Opal,” “blue colors are evident where the spheres are smaller, and at the other end of the spectrum orange and red will be evident where the spheres are larger.”

In short, sphere size correlates with specific wavelengths of light transmitted from stones. Depending on the range of sphere sizes, many or just a few colors are emitted. Moreover, spheres have to be grouped together with sufficient regularity to ensure broad, vivid colors.

Color vividness in opal is a function of body color, a term that refers to the tonal background in which opal’s spectral colors swim. Basically, there are two classifications of body color: light and dark. The former includes those backgrounds from milky white to medium gray and the latter backgrounds from strong gray to jet black. Black opal’s appeal over and above its greater rarity relative to white opal, is that its dark background acts as a color intensifier.

Whether light or dark, most opals have a colorless base, known as “potch,” that renders them opaque or slightly translucent. No matter how crisp and brilliant the color play of such opals, it will seem confined to the surface of the stone. However, when stones are highly translucent or transparent, their color is as visible inside the stone as on its surface.

There are two kinds of transparent opal. The first, and more common, is called jelly opal and features colors that are hazy, intermittent, and rarely effulgent. While sometimes magnificent, jelly opals have colors that seem to be suspended like flies in amber within the stone rather than to emanate from it. What’s more, jelly opals occur only in light opal form.