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RUBY - Stone of Fire and Passion

BIRTHMONTH: July

When we think love, vivacity and passion, the color red immediately comes to mind, because red is the color of love. It radiates warmth and a strong sense of vitality. The red of the ruby is incomparable: warm and fiery, it was not for no reason that the name 'ruby' was derived from the Latin word 'rubens', meaning 'red'.

Two magical elements are associated with the symbolism of this color: fire and blood which implies warmth and life. The ruby is the best gemstone to express powerful feelings because ruby-red itself is an absolutely undiluted, hot, passionate, powerful color. Instead of symbolizing calm, controlled affection, a ring set with a precious ruby bears witness to that passionate, unbridled love that people can feel for each other.


MYTHS & LEGENDS

Ruby has accumulated a host of legends over the centuries. People in India believed that rubies enabled their owners to live in peace with their enemies. In Burma (a ruby source since at least 600 AD—now called Myanmar), warriors possessed rubies to make them invincible in battle. However, it wasn’t enough to just wear the rubies. They had to insert them into their flesh and make them part of their bodies.

ABOUT THE STONE

Ruby is the red variety of the mineral corundum, one of the hardest minerals on Earth, of which the sapphire is also a variety. Pure corundum is colorless. Slight traces of elements such as chrome, iron, titanium or vanadium are responsible for the color. These gemstones have excellent hardness- second only to that of the diamond. Only red corundum is entitled to be called ruby, all other colors being classified as sapphires. The close relationship between the ruby and the sapphire has only been known since the beginning of the 19th century. Up to that time, red garnets or spinels were also thought to be rubies. (That, indeed, is why the 'Black Ruby' and the 'Timur Ruby', two of the British Crown Jewels, were so named, when they are not actually rubies

This magnificent red variety from the multi-colored corundum family consists of aluminium oxide and chrome as well as very fine traces of other elements - depending on which deposit it was from.  This gemstone occurs only very rarely in the world's mines in really fine colors and good clarity. It is actually the coloring element chrome which is responsible for this scarcity. Chrome was the element which gave the ruby its wonderful color, but at the same time it was also responsible for causing a multitude of fissures and cracks inside the crystals. So only very few ruby crystals were given the good conditions in which they could grow undisturbed to considerable sizes and crystallize to form perfect gemstones, and rubies of more than 3 carats in size are very rare. That’s why rubies with hardly any inclusions are so valuable that in good colors and larger sizes they achieve top prices at auctions, surpassing even those paid for diamonds in the same category.




Source: https://www.gemstone.org, https://www.gia.edu/

Photo by Victoria Priessnitz on Unsplash


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