How We Source The Perfect Coloured Gemstone

Coloured precious gemstones like sapphires, rubies, emeralds, and alexandrite are becoming increasingly popular.

However, unlike diamonds and moissanite, individual stones vary greatly, and choosing the right one can be tricky.

Our guidelines and standards for coloured gemstones will help you decide which stone is right for you — without overpaying. There are no specific guidelines on the quality of coloured gemstones (like 4Cs), but they are characterised similarly.

Lab Grown vs Natural Gemstones: Same Same But Different

Unlike diamonds, there is a visible difference between Lab-Grown and Natural Gemstones.

Colour

The main difference is in colour

• Natural Gemstones: come in a wide range of colours and can have multiple or two-tones (called parti or bi-colour).


• Lab-Grown Gemstones: come in specific, limited hues and saturations. They are flawless in appearance and equivalent to the highest-quality single-toned Natural gemstones. 


Cut

The second difference is cut.

• Natural Gemstones: are very rarely precision cut because they use a lot of rough material and cost a lot of money. 


• Lab-Grown Gemstones: all our gemstones are precision cut to the best proportions and angles.

When working with us, we’ll determine what is important to you from all these factors and your budget and give you our view on what you should choose.

Our Gemstone Guidelines

1. Colour: Your Main Decision

When discussing the colour of gemstones (and fancy-coloured diamonds), there are two main components: Hue and Saturation.

Hue: Hue is the actual colour, as we talk about in everyday language, things like pink, blue, yellow, green, etc.

Saturation: Saturation is how intensely the hue shows up - how much ‘colour’ there is. For example, you could have two blue sapphires with the same hue, but one might be less saturated (lighter in appearance), and one might be highly saturated (darker in appearance).

We use colour as a catch-all to hue and saturation to simplify things.

Generally, the best-coloured gemstones aren’t too light (the colour doesn’t show) and not too dark, so light gets absorbed inside the stone and doesn’t ’glow’.

But colour is all about personal preference.

When working with us, we will show you the exact stone we will use in your design for you to approve so there is no confusion in colour.

2. Cut: Avoid The Major Defects

Like diamonds, a gemstone's cut is one of the most important factors in determining its beauty.

Unfortunately, coloured gemstones are cut for carat weight—gem cutters try to get the highest carat weight with the fewest off cuts to get the best price.

For natural gemstones:

We will source the best available cut for you and avoid major defects.

• Windowing — seeing straight through the stone from above

• Non-symmetrical cuts — when some sides are longer than others, making the stone look uneven

• Uneven girdle thickness — can create issues with the stone becoming loose in some settings

We can custom-cut some Australian and Sri Lankan natural sapphires depending on the exact hue and saturation.

For lab-grown gemstones:

We buy our own rough materials and ‘precision cut’ them to have ideal proportions and angles.

3. Clarity: What You Can’t See Is Most Important

Like diamonds, the clearer a gemstone is with less visible inclusions, the better.

Our default option is to try source a stone that is ‘eye-clean’ meaning no visible inclusions visible to the naked eye.

Although for natural stones, this may not be possible for some stones like Emeralds, which, unless you are spending hundreds of thousands, it is nearly impossible to find an eye-clean stone.

This is not a concern for lab-grown stones, as the material is internally flawless.

4. Carat: Size Matters

Carat is a measure of weight but is interchangeably used with size. However, different gemstones have different densities, meaning a 1ct sapphire will look different from a 1ct diamond, which will look different from a 1ct emerald.

To make things more confusing, gemstones are often cut ‘deep’ to give a stone more saturation in colour, which means two 3ct sapphires might look quite different in terms of face-up size.

To make things simple, when working with non-diamond gemstones (like moissanite, sapphires, emeralds, etc.), we will refer to a stone in terms of its face-up size in millimetres or by its Diamond Equivalent Weight (DEW)—so, for example, a 1ct DEW sapphire will have the same face-up area as a 1ct diamond in millimetres.

This allows you to compare stones and only worry about how they look from the top down.