by Victoria Finlay

~~~~~ very long post ahead ~~~~~

As with all non-fiction books, I took a while to finish this one, going through several others while this languished in the pile of reads-in-progress. It truly didn't deserve this treatment. You'd expect non-fiction to be dry and textbook-like, but the way Finlay introduces the stories behind different gemstones with travels to the miness and weaves in her own quest to discover the origin of her own rings reads like an anthology through time, treasure and Moh's scale of hardness.

Here are some lesser-known bits about the various gems that I thought were interesting:


Amber [Moh's 2-2.5]

The word "electricity" comes from the Greek name for amber, elektron, which means the sun. Indeed, if amber is rubbed it becomes charged with static electricity.

Amber comes from the resin of conifers that grew in great forests millions of years ago. We do not know why those trees went into overdrive; only theories like global warming, natural evolution and defence against disease exist.

The largest creatures ever found preserved in Baltic amber are lizards - and only three complete examples of these have been found. If the species in the amber is still living today, the specimen is a forgery - species last only 5 million years, so true amber fossils are at least 9 generations of evolution from the organisms we know today.


Jet [Moh's 2.5-4]

Most gems have mineral or resin origins, but jet was, once upon a time, pure wood. It comes from forests of a peculiar type of conifer that existed 170 million years ago.

Jet has been found to have been worn from Roman to medieval times, but it reached the height of fashion in the 19th century when Queen Victoria wore it in mourning, sparking a national obssession.


Pearl [Moh's 2.5-4]

According to Julius Caesar's biographer, it was not only Britain's mineral or slave resources that had persuaded him to move across the channel in the summer of 55BC. It was her pearls. Pearls were associated with Venus, the goddess of love, and were a Roman girl's best friend.

Until the 18th century, the English called pearls "margaritas" or "unions". A few theories exist for the origin of the shell Margaritifera margaritifera: the word comes from (via Greek) the Sanskrit manjari which means bud; it could be related to "marine" because pearls come from the water; or the word comes from the Persian murwari, meaning "child of the light". Our relatively new word for them comes from the Latin perna, meaning ham or "pig leg", a reference to how the shells most likely to contain pearls would appear.

Few people are aware that the making of cultured pearls (first devised by Kokichi Mikimoto) involves forcing a piece of polished shell into an oyster's reproductive organs. It takes only a few seconds but the oyster needs at least 3 months to recover from the trauma. Many die :(


Opal [Moh's 5-6.5]

Opals consist of silica and a varying amount of water. The water may form 5-10% of a stone's volume and is one of the many ingredients contributing to the opal's spectacular display of colour. This water content also means that opals can be detected by dowsing.

Cheaper opals called doublets and triplets are being sold: doublets are made of thin strips of opal glued to darkened glass or potch (colourless, fireless opal) to make them thicker and more vivid, while triplets essentially sandwich the thin strip of opal between potch at the back and glass in the front.

In the 1890s, an old miner put the dead body of his pet cat in a felt hat and buried it in his mine. The mine was left empty for 60 years or more, but when someone else took over the claim, the cat was still in there. What should have been just a skeleton had metamorphosed into scintillating rose opals. It is hard to summarise here but Len Cram, a former miner, started investigating this and other stories of how opals were being formed that were contrary to the old theory, and hit on a new theory based on ion exchange. He was then able to grow opals in his garden shed that sparkled like children's glitter.


Peridot [Moh's 6.5-7]

Peridot was known for centuries as "the evening emerald" because it holds its brilliant green hue at dusk better than true emeralds do.

Peridot is the only gemstone, apart from diamonds, that forms below the earth's crust and usually reaches the surface via volcanic eruptions. But sometimes peridot falls to earth from outer space on a meteorite called "pallasite", which is made of peridot crystals held together in a filigree of nickel and iron. In addition, peridot is the first gemstone to have been discovered on another planet (Mars).

The San Carlos Apache Reservation in Arizona has the world's most abundant (90%) peridot deposit. Unfortunately, the deposits have not made the inhabitants rich and many still live from hand to mouth.


Emerald [Moh's 7.5-8]

Emeralds are so commonly flawed that they are almost always oiled for clarity enhancement, and it is usually assumed that they have been treated unless accompanied by a laboratory report stating otherwise.

Two thousand years ago, emeralds were among the most expensive jewels of the Roman and Ptolemaic world, the equivalent of the flashiest diamonds today; they were synonymous with Egypt and Cleopatra.

While most Egyptian emeralds were pale, flawed and rather small, the deposits in Colombia had gone through a unique geological process in the Andes ranges and as such, Columbian emeralds are often larger and clearer and are the most desirable today.


Sapphire [Moh's 9]

Sapphires and rubies are essentially the same type of corundum (aluminium oxide) - from the Sanskrit kuruvindam which means ruby. Sapphires exist in all kinds of colours - blue, brown, yellow, white, purple, pink, green, orange, tricolour (yellow-green-blue) or colour-change (eg green in the daytime, violet-blue at night). But only the red ones, containing chromium, the same element that makes emeralds green, are called rubies.

Sapphire is the only precious stone ever to have been found in Britain, in the 1980s on the island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides.

A treatment developed in Thailand called beryllium bulk diffusion involves cooking low-quality pink sapphires with beryllium oxide to make them appear a delicate padparadscha (the most prized colour of all fancy sapphires) orange.

According to Greek legend, the world's first ring contained a blue sapphire and was worn by Prometheus, who stole the secret of fire from the gods. Heat treatment has been employed for thousands of years to improve or change the colour of sapphires. It is basically a chemical process that manipulates the iron and titanium impurities, transforming the ferric ions to ferrous ions and making a pale or colourless gem a vibrant blue.


Ruby [Moh's 9]

Mogok, in Myanmar, is the centre for rubies. Military roadblocks and strict government control mean that it's virtually impossible for foreigners to get in at all. The gem market takes place under pink umbrellas - the light that filters through these shades makes rubies appear brighter than they really are. Burmese rubies look at their best between 10am and 4pm, and also look better under brilliant tropical sunlight than subdued northern skies, which is one of the reasons why they have always been more prized in the East. The best rubies are actually fluorescent in natural sunlight, and Mogok's rubies tend to fluoresce more than any others.

Ancient writers and scholars in the East had varied descriptions for ruby colours, which were red like the China rose, the seeds of a pomegranate, a red lotus, the eyes of the Greek partridge or Indian crane, or the interior of the half-blown red water lily. Strangely, the two ancient English names for rubies sound incredibly ugly. In Shakespeare's time, they were called carbuncles, from the Latin root carbon because they contained the sense of being on fire. Today the metaphor has been extended to boils. The Greeks called them anthrax, which also means coal, but when we hear the term today we think of a deadly disease contained in a white powder used by terrorists.


Diamond [Moh's 10]

It is the hardest mineral found on earth, but it is certainly not indestructible. "A diamond is forever" is only a neat marketing catchphrase devised by De Beers, the Mikimoto of diamonds, to create demand for diamond engagement rings. If burned with oxygen, a diamond, which is essentially pure carbon, can be vaporised. Diamonds are hard, but they are not that tough. Take a hammer to a diamond and it would shatter; a piece of nephrite jade would scarcely be destroyed.

Diamonds are not as rare as we think. Once it was discovered that lots of them were to be found in Africa, prices plummeted and it took cartels and strategic marketing to transform them into the coveted baubles they are today.

We all know about lab-created gems, but since diamond is carbon, and carbon is found in organic material, you can actually create memorial diamonds from the ashes of loved ones. Check out LifeGem. Some find it amazing, some find it creepy.