Join Adam Barralet, Kyle Perez , Ashley Leavy and Nicholas Pearson in Episode #27 of the Crystal Confab Podcast as they do a deep dive into Blue Sapphire meaning, including:
Blue Sapphire for commitment
Sharpening the mind with Blue Sapphire
History and folklore of Blue Sapphire
Blue Sapphire and Full Moon in Libra
Tune in now for a deeper look at Blue Sapphire meaning!
Podcast Transcript:
Crystal Confab Podcast Introduction: Are you just starting with crystals? Or maybe you have a whole collection but aren't sure how to use them? Join four crystal nerds, healers, workers, and lovers for Crystal Confab: a casual chat about all things crystals.
Nicholas Pearson: Hello, and welcome to another edition of the crystal confab. My name is Nicholas, and I'm joined by three of my crystal besties, Kyle, Ashley, and Adam, and we are gonna confab about another gemstone. So this week, we are going to talk about the sibling gem of one we just recently covered. And although we alluded to the fact this was coming, I think it's gonna be really fun to talk about sapphires. And before we really, like, dive into our our separate topics, I would love to just kinda open the floor to, we'll say, the the cornucopia of things we see labeled sapphire on the market from maybe different flavors and colors of it to things that are maybe a little disingenuous that can also be out there.
Kyle Perez: I am so excited to talk about a little bit of sapphire. Sapphire is a stone that is very important to me. I spoke about this in our last episode. I have orange sapphire in my wedding band as one of my important stones of connection, but I would really like to talk about fakes first. Fakes, synthetics, imitations because sapphire being one of the big four, emerald, diamonds, sapphire, and ruby, it is one of the most imitated and faked stones.
Right? It's one of the most and I've been doing it the longest. Right? Because these stones have been loved for so long. And I've got a couple of examples that I have and you're not going to be able to see it as well as I'd like you to, but this is a really pretty blue sapphire pendant.
It's got a lovely little clear stone on the top. But this is one of the lyres that is out there. And what I know with my little loop when I look at it sideways is it has a clear portion on the top, a tiny little sliver of dark blue, and then clear underneath. That means it's a foil scented stone, so it's an imitation. It's not even a real sapphire.
It's totally, totally imitation. And then within this little box, you can see a lovely bright blue stone in the middle. This was actually our gift. There's a couple of real ones on the outside, but it's, you know, gotta keep them together because they're all sapphires. The one in the middle is actually a synthetic manmade sapphire that was a gift to all of our gemology class when we graduated.
We were told it was. It's one full carat. It's really, really beautiful, but it is a lab grown example. And it's really interesting to know that we have lab grown. We have synthetic.
We have, like, imitation. There's all of these different layers of fakes that are out there. So it's really important that if you can, when you're looking at jewelry, fine jewelry, especially examples, a nice triplet loop as a base is an amazing place to start. These have come a long way in a really long time. They've got UV lights on them.
They've got lights on them, so you can really dive into and look at stones and see within them. And that's something that reveals a sapphire. Sapphires will often have layers of blue color, which I alluded to with Ruby last week. That dichroic nature of showing more than one color is something that is very common in our sapphires. So it's important to look for that subtle difference in color, but not necessarily clear blue in such dramatic spaces.
Ashley Leavy: Let me ask you, Kyle. In your training, did you ever come across, like, where you had to inspect different types of sapphires and see if they were fully genuine or not? Because I have read that there are sapphires that are glass filled, where it would be like a natural sapphire, and they would actually fill any little tiny microscopic holes with glass to make it a little bit more solid for use in jewelry. And they'll typically be disclosed, and they'll typically be a little bit more affordable, but maybe not always. Is that something people have to look out for when they're buying fine jewelry, or have you ever seen any examples of that?
Kyle: Honestly, in sapphire, it's not something I've seen a lot because it's quite dramatic. The refractive difference between glass and sapphire, it's quite dramatic. So it's not something that you'll see too much. If they have to, they will and it should be disclosed. Obviously, they probably won't.
But basically, there's this really big difference in diffraction that you see with the glass and the sapphire. So it looks different. It looks odd. It won't sit correctly within it, if that makes sense.
Adam Barralet: It's all I'm going oh, sorry, Ashley. Go on.
Ashley: That's okay. Thank you for that. I also know that we have to look out for, heat treated and artificially irradiated enhancements, which are obviously gonna make the color of the sapphire more blue, but I wanted to kind of tell everyone about something that I've seen for pretty much, like, my whole career out there, but I didn't know what it was until just about a year ago. So have you ever? I know we have jewelry vendors come to my shop all the time and they'll be like, oh, let me show you all these great things we have. And a lot of times you'll find some fantastic, really unique pieces.
But I kept having this one jewelry vendor come up from Chicago to my shop to bring some things to sell wholesale, and she had rubies, emeralds, and sapphires in her jewelry that I could tell were not rubies, emeralds, or sapphires. And I was like, what on earth is this? All of the stones looked very similar and they looked unusually bright, and it looked like, from my research at least, from what I could find, it turns out that it's dyed sillimanite. I don't know if I'm even saying that right. Nicholas is, like, shaking his head.
Nicholas, do you have any, like, knowledge of this? Because I see it a lot now.
Nicholas: Yeah. It's gotten really pretty common. I actually bought a large piece of this material faceted in, like, your classic kind of rectangular emerald cut, like, chunky, oversized because it looked from a picture on the Internet to be a lower grade kind of matrixy emerald. And we took a picture of it and put it in a book. And then later, I would find out that this is dyed fibrous sillimanite.
So forms in really big masses. Sometimes if it's good enough quality, it will have the kind of cat's eye effect. It will, when cotton cabochon, be really nice to look at if the fibers are really well organized. If you cut it differently so the fibers are oriented in a different way, it's also fiber optic the way selenite could be. But most of the material that we're seeing in in the gem trade that's being dyed in offensively bright colors and being sold as more precious gems, is more like a kind of felted mass of these fibers that's the result of, like, metamorphic activity kind of squishing the the rock together to produce them.
Silimanite is an indicator species that we often use to understand how strongly metamorphosed a rock that contains it can be. So it's not uncommon to find it in this kind of format, but it seems to be getting more and more widespread as the years go on to sell it off as these other gems.
Adam: Well, I can imagine as people are listening and watching this, they're kinda getting worried about how do I pick you know, I'm gonna go buy an engagement ring on the weekend. How do I know? And that type of thing. And one technique I learned from, another jewelry vendor that I knew, who used to buy a lot of his stones in parts of, like, Southeast Asia and so on, is he relied on the good old Mohs hardness scale, which is a scale of hardness from one to 10. And, of course, rubies and sapphires, are nine.
So what he would do is he'd take a little quartz point with him and which is of Mohs hardness of seven. So in reality, I guess what happens is a harder stone will always dent or scratch the softer stone. So he would go to these stores or these distributors and go, hello, I'd like to see your rubies. And they're like, oh, here we go, sir. And, it got these real rubies.
They're like, yes, sir. Real rubies. And that's why if I get this quartz point and scratch them, it's not gonna scratch them because they're harder. Is that right? They're like, sir, come out back.
We show you other rubies and that type of way. So that's a kind of real basic way of telling, you know, a ruby and a sapphire from something. Do you know what the Mohs hardness scale of selenide is, guys? Nicholas?
Nicholas: Yeah. It's a seven like quartz, but this is where we also have to remember that hardness is not the only trait that is going to influence the reading. We have to talk about tenacity and toughness, which don't get numerical scales like our hardness scale. The hardness scale is actually a comparative chart and not a scale of absolute hardness because a nine is in reality many, many, many, many times harder than an eight. And a 10, like, inconceivably harder than a nine, but, like, a two and a three, they're pretty darn close.
So it's a ranked chart, and the challenge here is because we've chosen some indicator species, we're gonna have to group things similarly that may not read the same way. So because of that, like, fibrous structure that the sillimanite has when it's when it's in that kind of big massive form,
