The Precious

It's been quite sometimes that I wish to blog about gemstone. There's so many things to talk about the "stone" since it become a hobby among us (hubby and I) and MIL.
The precious stone among all is still the diamond but in terms of rarity, gemstone will be much more expensive than daimond if it is in great demand.
From the view of the hardness, it ranges like the following:

1) Diamond
2) Corundum (Sapphire & Ruby)
3) Emerald

Just imagine it takes millions of years to harden deep under the ground and become one small, fine piece of precious stone. Different location consists of different type of soil and rocks and that contribute to why different stones you only can get from particular countries.

A very well-known:-
- mines for diamond - South Africa (the more the clarity the most the value)
- mines for ruby - Myanmar (pigeon blood)
- mines for sapphire - Kashmir (India, but there's none nowadays), Ceylon (Sri Lanka)both popular for its cornflower blue and royal ink
- mines for emerald - Columbia (green with tint of blue), Brazil (green with tint of yellow)

Well, sad to say there are more mines closing down nowadays as natural resources also will have the end of the day. When the demand of the gemstone get higer, apparently people start to aware of its rarity and this will always make the price goes rocket-high. There are a few points to remember if shop for colour gemstones:
1) Weight/Carat
2) Colour/hues
3) Size
4) Clarity
5) Cut/Fire
6) Origins of the stone

Different stone, different requirements and demands it will have. I like gemstone as it is so colourful and it's a wide knowledge for you to study. Besides, there are semi-precious stone which comes in variety of fantastic colours but of course they are not as valuable as the gemstone. Example of those stones are topaz, peridot, kunzite, amethys & citrine (both are crystal), tourmaline (another of my favourite), alexandrite, jade, spinel, tanzanite, and lots more.

We visited De Silva just now to have a peek on the pigeon blood rubies which cost about RM12K for less than 3 carat! Man... we are not going to buy it but we do have a nice conversation and sharing with the experts. It's a wonderful learning experience. But before you can talk about it, you must learn to appreciate gemstone and that's make the demand of gemstone rising once you learn to love it.