Love sapphires but struggle to explain why? Here is a friendly guide to sharing your sapphire hobby, from corundum to silk, without losing your audience.

How do sapphires get their color? Iron and titanium make blue, chromium pink; combinations give purple, teal, padparadscha and color-change stones.

Discover how sapphires form deep underground, from metamorphic and magmatic origins to alluvial gem gravels, and why the conditions are so rare.

From a first blue sapphire to padparadscha and unheated stones, discover how sapphire preferences often evolve with experience and life stages.

Noon, November 16, 2010. A photo goes out to the world: Prince William’s fiancée, Kate Middleton, holding up her left hand. On it is Princess Diana’s oval blue sapphire, framed in diamonds. As the Kate Middleton sapphire ring captured worldwide attention, our website went down just ten minutes later, 20 floors above Fifth Avenue. That...

Among all the colors found in sapphire, few create as much fascination as Padparadscha. Neither simply pink nor orange, a true Padparadscha sapphire displays a delicate meeting of both colors. Its unusual appearance, limited supply, and long association with Sri Lanka have made it one of the most desirable varieties of sapphire in the world....

sapphire as it grew deep within the Earth. Under magnification, they act like a fingerprint. They help gemologists confirm that a sapphire is natural rather than synthetic, show whether it has been heated, and, together with laboratory analysis, can point toward its geographic origin, such as Sri Lanka, Kashmir, or Madagascar. Far from being simple...

The Montana sapphire rush began in the second half of the 19th century, after prospectors searching for gold found sapphires in Montana’s rivers and gravel deposits. The first were found along the Missouri River near Helena in 1865. The state’s most famous deposit, Yogo Gulch, discovered in the mid-1890s, became known for its distinctive cornflower-to-violet...

Kashmir sapphires are blue sapphires from a small, remote deposit high in the Himalayas, above the village of Sumjam in the Padar region of Kashmir, India. They were discovered around 1881, when a landslide exposed sapphire-bearing rock. The richest deposit was worked for only a few years and was largely exhausted by 1887. Fine Kashmir...

Among the world’s most remarkable sapphires, the Logan Sapphire stands out for its extraordinary size, beautiful blue color, Sri Lankan origin, and fascinating history. Weighing approximately 423 carats, this magnificent gemstone is one of the largest faceted blue sapphires in the world and today forms part of the Smithsonian’s National Gem Collection. From its origins...