People like valuable gemstones for various reasons. Some store wealth in jewelry and precious metals, some wear then to show off their wealth and their self-perceived status, some believe that wearing their birthstone will bring them health, wealth and happiness and others wear them because they look nice.
Valuable gemstones have always been sought after because of their value, but in older days, they were also prized for other reasons, such as being able to bestow good health. This belief persists among some peoples, but not a lot in the Developed World any more.
In the Developed World, most people wear precious stones for their beauty and to exhibit status. In the East, people also wear precious stones to display status, but collect them because they do not traditionally have faith in banks.
And who could blame them in the light of the Developed World’s recent experience with their financial banking crisis and the meteoric rise in the cost of gold? There is probably a lesson for us all here.
Anyway, apart from precious metals, there are precious stones and the most expensive of them are: emeralds, diamonds, rubies and sapphires. The order of the stones in value relies on the quality.
Diamonds of ordinary quality are worth more than emeralds of regular quality, but high quality emeralds are worth more than high quality diamonds, because it is hard to find emeralds without lots of faults, which are also known as ‘inclusions’.
Diamonds come in all sorts of colours from clear to ‘black’. Clear diamonds are what most people want, but there are some very expensive large coloured diamonds in yellow and blue.
The difficulty with gemstones is that their supply is tightly regulated by cartels and governments, which keeps their price artificially high. Diamonds are the worst of the bunch in this regard.
De Beers controls a large proportion of the diamond market and was able to set prices for decades. The Argyle mine of Australia produces 7,000 kilos of brown diamonds, which were traditionally considered valueless for the purposes of jewelry.
However, due to a clever marketing campaign, brown diamonds are now thought to be valuable in Australia, although clear diamonds are still preferred in the rest of the world.
Emeralds are a gorgeous green gemstone, but it is very hard to purchase a good one. Many emeralds have been doctored to look more valuable than they truly are, but this is true of diamonds as well.
If you like red gems, then a ruby is for you. Ruby is a description of the colour red and rubies can vary from blood red crimson to pink, but in general, the deeper the red the better. However, not all red stones that are sold as rubies are rubies, but you could have guessed that
Sapphire is normally a beautiful deep blue, but may also be pale blue to pink. Sapphires come usually from the East, like Thailand, Russia but even North Carolina in the USA.
If you are going to buy any of these top gemstones, buy the best that you are able to afford, because you can pass them on to your children as an inheritance.
Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on a number of subjects, and is now involved with Good Diamond Quality. If you would like to know more, please visit our web site at Jewellry and Watches.