Opal Ring
Discover my pieces featuring Opal,
a fascinating stone that displays an impressive play with light.
There will never be an end to what can be discovered in an opal.
They are a fascinating stone that display an impressive play with light.
When looking at a precise point, depending on the angle given to the stone, it will appear to be one colour, and then another. It is quite a mysterious phenomenon.
A powerful and well distributed coloured intensity.
Opals convey all the colours of the rainbow.
A dominant of one colour, for example a dominant red or blue-violet is quite rare.
However, some opals that have a milky aspect with a yellow or white dominant are less sought after.
What is most appreciated in opal is the presence of fire and an intense and well distributed intensity of colour.
To describe opals, I would start by saying that they are composed of fossilised silica spheres: an innumerable amount of silica beads that are set next to each other and that transmit light differently depending on their size and position.
Hardness :
5,5 – 6,5
Origin :
Australia, Ethiopia, Brazil, United States, Mali
Refractive index :
1,37 – 1,52
Ethiopian Opal
Opals can come in a wide variety of forms, and can come from a wide variety of places, the most famous country being Australia with its intensely coloured Black Opal.
My personal favourite is the Ethiopian Opal, which has a jellied effect, and whose sparks of colour seem to come from within, giving it a great impression of depth.
Unlike in traditional opals, the show doesn’t happen on the surface but well and truly at the heart of the stone.
This multitude of coloured sparkles that run around the stone give it a certain density but also a sense of freedom.
An interesting aspect of the Ethiopian Opal is the presence in certain specimens of a honeycomb structure, creating peculiar patterns speckled with colourful touches.
There is also a type called the Matrix Opal, a vein of opal in the mother rock, which sometimes gives some uncommon patterns that I find very interesting. Some fine veins of opal with an intense colour can sometimes be found inside an opaque brown material.
Opal is but used in jewellery: it can of course be worn but one has to take certain precautions, as with pearls.
They have to be taken care of; opals are tender and can be very sensitive to heat or excessive dehydration.
A very rich stone
The more interest is given to Opals, the more its riches become apparent. There are many particularities that are each rare in their own way, such as fossilised wood of opal, and many other varieties that I have not evoked here.
It is truly a stone which can become a passion, just as much as it can be rejected when unfamiliar.
Fascinating, mesmerising, it offers so many different aspects that it is impossible to tire of observing them.