Myanmar (formerly Burma, a name still much used by foreigners and the local population alike…) has a long and rich history of gemstone mining. Burma was once the world’s largest producer of rubies, and although production has declined in recent years, the country is still home to some of the finest rubies and sapphires in the world.

A cultured pearl is a manmade sphere covered in a thin layer of pearl nacre. In a natural pearl, however, there is no nucleus inside the pearl – the pearl is solid through and through, consisting of countless layers of nacre developed around the original foreign particle (usually tiny!) that prompted the oyster to create a pearl. A natural pearl is made without any human help or intervention. It is a marvel made by mother nature.

It’s all about the color! The typical Kashmir blue is a highly saturated (vivid) blue with a minute tinge of purple. But it is also about the “texture”. Kashmir sapphires, more often than sapphires from other locations, exhibit microscopic silk inclusions and growth zoning patterns which, if evenly distributed throughout the stone, give the sapphire a velvety appearance, in the gem trade often referred to as a “sleepy” character. Sleepy sapphires tend to “glow” when hit by both natural or incandescent light, because the light is reflected back from the hundreds and thousands of microscopic inclusions inside the sapphire. Blue sapphires with a sleepy appearance tend to hold their color very well and appear vibrant and powerful, even in low light, which sets them apart from sapphires without these microscopic inclusions.

Even though color stability of fancy color sapphire has been discussed for decades, the issue has become more widely known only very recently, with more and more labs adopting rigorous color stability testing procedures, mostly as a result of the recently increasing popularity of padparadscha sapphire. Having received several emails from concerned clients within only a couple of days, we thought we should share some information.