What are the World’s Most Expensive Gemstones?
With their undeniable beauty and brilliance, each gemstone is valuable, especially to their owners. However, of these stunning sparklers that Mother Nature gifted to the world, which are the most expensive of them all?
Here is a quick overview of some of the most valuable gemstones that the world has ever seen:
Blue Diamond
The blue diamond is the special type of diamond exhibiting all of the inherent properties of the mineral and the only difference is the extra touch of the blue color. The trace amounts of boron are responsible for this blue color. Boron contaminates the crystalline lattice’s structure.
Blue diamonds are under the diamond subcategory known as fancy color diamonds, which is the generic name for those diamonds with intense color. Blue diamonds are ranging from Flawless to Included in terms of grade as is the case with the white diamonds.
Jadeite
Jadeite is the rarest, purest, and the most vivid gemstone that belong to Jade family. This particular gemstone is a type of pyroxene mineral and is monoclinic. Its hardness in the Mohs scale is around 6.5 up to 7.0 based on the specific composition. This is a dense mineral that has a gravity of around 3.4.
Pink Diamond
The pink diamond is very rare and just 0.0001% of all diamonds that exist in the world are of pink color. This is a type of gemstone that gives harmony and beauty to the world. Pink diamonds, similar to white diamonds, range from Flawless up to Heavily Included. To date, the Pink Star is the world’s only pink diamond that is totally flawless.
Red Diamond
Red diamond is one type of diamond with similar mineral properties as those of colorless diamonds that boasts of red color. Red diamonds are often dubbed as the rarest color and most expensive diamonds in the world, even more so than blue or even pink diamonds. The source of the color of these diamonds are still the topic of debate yet the gemological community often attribute the colors to the gliding atoms in the diamond’s structure as this goes through intense pressure during the formation process.
Emerald
Emerald is one type of gemstone, a variety of mineral beryl, whose green color is due to chromium’s trace amounts and vanadium at times. The hardness of beryl on the Mohs scale is at 7.5 to 8. Many emeralds are highly included, which means that their toughness or breakage resistance is categorized as poor in general.
Taaffeite
Taaffeite is a type of mineral whose name was taken after the person who discovered it, Richard Taaffe, who was able to find the very first sample, a polished and cut gem, in October 1945 in Dublin, Ireland. This is why this is the sole gemstone first identified from faceted stone. Many pieces of the gem had been incorrectly identified as spinel before Taaffe’s discovery. This was known in just a few samples for several years after and this remains to be among the rarest gemstone minerals of the world.