Ceylon Sapphire

The Ceylon sapphire is the most valuable and most favoured of coloured gemstones. Sapphire is associated with Saturn and is the birthstone for September also 45th wedding anniversary is known as the sapphire anniversary. This precious sapphire which has been treasure in our homeland for a long time, is famous for being the world's number one blue because of its unique beauty of their own, especially the Rakwana stones which have a corn flower hue similar to the color found on the tip of a peacock  feather or on the peacock’s neck.  As well as for being one of the few sapphires in the world that can be sold as a completely natural stone without any treatment.

Rough Blue Sapphire

 

The blues aside, Ceylon sapphires also come in beautiful hues including pink, yellow, orange, green, purple, lavender and of course, the inimitable padparadscha sapphire named after the lotus flower. All these highly marketable qualities of Ceylon sapphire has created brand recognition world wide a brand not created by the producers of the stone, but by the sellers and consumers.

Untreated Padparadscha Sapphire

 

Sapphires that show a star like light effect rays are called star sapphires, one of the most famous star sapphire from Sri Lanka is displayed in the Museum of Natural History in New York. The Star of India is a 563.35 carat (112g) star sapphire, one of the largest gem in the world. It is flawless and unusual in that it has stars on both sides of the stone. Star sapphires display a star like marking this effect, commonly known as asterism, occurs when light falls on the cut stone, cut in the cabochon form, and three rays appear giving a good six point star. However, stones with six rays have also been known to occur.

Star Sapphire

Lastly, there is milky corundum, a white opaque form of corundum also called geuda, which for many years was regarded as useless and discarded, often ending up lining fish tanks or backyard in some gemstone merchant’s house. This happened until dealers in Thailand learned to heat-treat geudas to change the colour of the stone from an unattractive cloudy grey-white to a bright, sparkling blue. They completed the work and ended up with a blue sapphire of much greater value than a useless pebble. The colour of heat-treated blue sapphires are stable and the chemical composition of the stone is that of a sapphire, although prices are lower than for a similar quality stone with natural colour.

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