The Soul of Gemstones

Human feeling for beauty is an age-old phenomenon that we experience only in moments of blessed illumination. Wherever beauty is apparent to us—whether in one of Nature's creations or in a masterpiece from the hand of man—it arouses a feeling of comfort, delight, and admiration. Beauty is the symbol of the ubiquitous law of creation to which man spontaneously and immediately responds, without consciously comprehending it or being able to express it in words. Beauty rejoices the eye and heart and gives wings to the spirit; indeed, so deeply does it pervade the mind that it never reveals itself to sober reasoning.

The beauty of gemstones yellow diamond rings may display itself in completely different ways: through the clear transparency, colorlessness, and fire-scattering brilliance in a brilliant-cut diamond; the luxurious splendor of color in the precious stones ruby, sapphire, and emerald; the attractive limpidity of pastel-colored beryls; the dreamy somnolence of the many-colored tourmalines; the mysterious sheen of light on cat's-eyes and star stones; the play of color in opal and spectrolite; and no less in the fantastic patterns of many ornamental stones. In all these spellbinding manifestations of beauty, light plays the chief role. In spite of all our knowledge of its physical nature, it still remains in essence an unsolved riddle which fills us with awe.

In the kingdom of the elect, the chosen one stands out epitomizing the noblest attributes of light—the ice tear, the diamond. Even in its colorless state it is king without peer design your own engagement ring; it comes even closer to the ideal of a gemstone when color, too, is inherent, for the blazing beauty of diamond springs not so much from its almost proverbial absence of color and purity, but much more from its glittering brilliance, arising from the combination of its adamantine luster, its high refraction of light, its color-scattering fire, and its vivid sparkle. In colorless stones these factors are naturally more easily visible than in colored ones. The luster is produced by reflection of light from the polished surface. The fire is the play of prismatic colors which emerge from the brilliant-cut diamond by means of the splitting, or dispersion, of white light into its rainbow colors. The light reflected back from inside the stone reinforces the glistening brilliance. The strong intensity of all these brilliance factors is due to the high refraction of light which results from the slowing of the velocity of light in diamond.