Precious stones in jewelry

It is very common to use precious stones on jewellery in silver to create beautiful jewels with originality in the designs and color of the stone. Few stones are the same, and so these jewelry with natural stones they are almost unique. We invite you to discover the immensity of the variety of precious stones and much more.

What do we call fine stone?

THE precious stones they are all hard and colored stones used to adorn jewels and different from precious stones (diamond, sapphire, ruby, emerald) and organic stones (pearls, coral, mother of pearl, jet and mellite). In this image, a panel of precious natural stones:

In Mexico, the precious stonesThe most common are Onyx, obsidian, turquoise and malachite and fire opal, although it is difficult to close the list, due to the imports of stones which allow you to find almost all varieties of natural stones to make jewelry.

Just to give you an idea, already in the time of the Aztecs, some turquoise stones had traveled from what is now New Mexico to be finally mounted in jewelry, thus traveling more than a thousand kilometers. It is therefore difficult to define a local market for these stones which have always attracted men with their color to mount them on jewellery.

And the fake fake stones?

Here the downside of the coin hurts, there are no false stones, in the legislative sense of the term anyway. These are all coloured, natural or synthetic semiprecious stones that reproduce the latter precious stones pursuant to decree 2002-65 approved on January 16, 2002.

Legally, a Pierre, good they can be both synthetic and natural. However, the law requires the seller (of stones or jewels) to specify the mention “high”, “cultivated”, “cultured”, “true”, “precious”, “fine”, “genuine”, “natural” only in the case of non-synthetic stones.

Therefore, buy a jewel with a precious stone does not mean that this stone is natural, ask your jeweler or seller for more information on the stone in question.

Why imitate nature?

Indeed, why bother reproducing what nature does very well? After all, these fine stones are not so rare that they are worth a lot of money. No actually. However, you should know that cutting a natural stone causes a lot of losses. It is not uncommon, to mount a natural stone on a jewel, to have to throw away 50 to 80% of the original rough stone, and this has a cost. Since natural stones do not have the size we desire, the ideal shape, we therefore have to constantly adapt.

On the contrary, the Chinese (yes, again!) sell on the international market square blocks of high-quality synthetic stones that are 90% used, with minimal loss, and therefore much cheaper than traditional ones. precious natural stones.

Therefore, do not be fooled, when you buy jewelry in the supermarket with fine stones, they are probably synthetic.

How to distinguish synthetic stones from natural ones

There is an important point to clarify, it is extremely difficult to distinguish between these natural stones and their synthetic imitation, in most cases it is necessary to break the stone, sand it or heat it to find out if the stone is synthetic. In fact these imitations are very well made, and the visual rendering will fool you 100%, so you will have to test the mechanical properties of the material to discover its true nature, which is impossible for the average buyer.

By touching the stone on your teeth, you can get an idea whether it sounds like plastic or not. Another indicator is to feel if the stone is cold. If it warms up quickly in your fingers, it is safe to say that it is synthetic, but again it will not be a categorical observation.

list of precious stones

For the complete list of precious stones, I refer you to Wikipedia. You will realize that for most of these stones there is a notable variation in colors that we are not used to seeing in jewelry.

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