Well, Agnes, I don’t really have a favorite stone. I don’t wear
jewelery, is part of it, and in the making of it I can’t even say how
many different stones I’ve set, and they all had their merits. I’ll
describe a couple of really memorable stones I’ve encountered,
though. The first I didn’t actually encounter, though. “Gems and
Gemology” of Summer, 1983, volume XIX, had an article about Kashmir
sapphire. On page 65 is a photo of a 6.7ct stone the likes of which
most of us mortals will never see in our lives. Probably robin’s-egg
blue, very silky and it looks like there’s a light bulb inside,
making it glow. I like to describe it as blue ice cream. I keep that
issue over the years just because of that picture of that stone. You
can buy it but you can’t see it for free: It is uniquely beautiful
and one of the rarest gems on Earth - probably around a million…
http://www.ganoksin.com/gnkurl/ep7zr8
When I was working for a shop, I had to work on a diamond of 10-12
carats or so. It was the only diamond that I truly wanted to keep -
I don’t mean steal, I just coveted it. The base diamond was D color,
likely flawless. The diamond itself was no better that I3, because
in between that D color material was a perfect matrix of (probably
garnet) crystals arranged in a 3D grid to a perfection that only a
diamond crystal can have. It was a perfect diamond with a perfect 3D
chess board, slightly greenish, imbedded inside the stone, top to
bottom and side to side. This was something you could easily see
with the naked eye from a couple of feet away. It was a most
extraordinary stone and it was extraordinarily beautiful, too, not
just some strange thing. I’ve never see or heard of anything like
it, before or since.
