THE COLOR OF GEMSTONES

How the enchanting colors are created

In addition to the decorative effect, the colors of gemstones are sometimes even said to have supernatural powers. Thus, the various gemstones with their diverse colors stand for certain healing effects on the human body. You can believe in it or not - what is certain is that the origin for the hue of the precious stones can be explained in a completely scientific way.

To do this, one should first be clear about why we can perceive colors at all. When light waves fall on an object, it reflects only certain color spectra. A blue gemstone, for example, reflects the blue light waves from its surface, but absorbs the corresponding compensating color in the yellow to red range, so that these light waves are not reflected.

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The color world of gemstones

How we perceive the colors

An object that absorbed all light waves would appear completely black. Our eye picks up these (reflected) light waves through sensory cells in the eye called "cones" and passes the stimuli on to our neural system, which converts the stimuli into color. Humans, by the way, can only perceive colors in a spectrum of about 390nm (violet) to 700nm (dark red). However, there are many animal species that can see other colors.

The decisive factor is therefore the nature of a gemstone and which light waves it absorbs, or which it reflects again. A distinction is made between intrinsically colored (idiochromatic) stones, in which the color is created by the mineral structure itself, and extrinsically colored (allochromatic) gemstones, in which the color is created by inclusions of foreign substances. A rose quartz, for example, is nothing more than simple silica (quartz) with phosphorus or titanium ions incorporated into its crystal structure, which ultimately give the rose quartz its coloration.

The color world of gemstones

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