Hello everybody. My name is Peter Nelson and welcome to my show Gemology for
Schmucks, where I'm going to tell you all the basic things you need to know to
appreciate gemstones and to buy them with education. Because realistically
gemstones have been around for so long and there are so many and so many
different qualities that it's very easy to make a mistake and spend a ridiculous
amount of money if you don't know how to look at what you're buying. It's just
like any other product out there. You need a certain amount of knowledge about
what the thing is before you can buy as an educated consumer. So that's we're
gonna get into today. This particular episode what I want to talk about is the
most important aspect that affects the price of a gemstone and that is color.
So color is made up of three essential things and this is much more than just
kindergarten alright. So the first thing in color is hue, and I'm not talking
about Mr. Hefner, okay? Over there in his mansion, so you need to stop being so
色 by the way that's a Chinese word that means color but it also means
perverted. So there you go. you've been culturally enriched. Moving on. We have
hue. The next thing we have is tone. So tone is how light or how dark a gemstone
is and the final one is saturation. Saturation is how much color is in that
color. Maybe it's a little bit confusing for you but we'll get into it with
examples in the gemstones and hopefully it'll make all sorts of sense. Jumping
right in here, what I'd like to talk about first is hue. Hue in everyday
language is what most people would call color, but color is more complicated than
that. So we're going to focus first on hue and you can see that each of these
stones in front of you has a different color, or a different hue if you will. Now
let's start in the bottom left hand corner. This right here is a sapphire and
I'll let you in on a secret. Everything in this parcel is a sapphire
except for you! This one right here is actually a ruby, but they're the same
mineral. Rubies and sapphires are the same crystal. Chemically they are
absolutely the same. The only difference is that once it gets red enough, then
we call it a ruby. Alright, so this right here is what most people know of as a
sapphire and this is just basic blue, right? But what I want you to look at is this
blue alongside this right here. Now to some people it's... it's obvious
immediately. To other people you got to look twice to find out that this one
right here is that certain bluish purple that's actually called violet. I mean who
uses that word anymore? I didn't start using it until this past
year, because I thought it was just you know purple. But turns out, this is
actually purple, and did you know that in the visible spectrum as far as science
defines it purple does not exist. Gasp! All right, so purple, according to
science, is just a mixture of red and blue. As far as the electromagnetic
spectrum goes and the wavelengths and all of these things, there is no place on
the electromagnetic spectrum for purple. It's something that our mind creates for
us. Anyhow moving on. If you look at these very faint colored sapphires you can see
that even though they are faint, they are light, some people might even call them
white sapphires, but as you look at them and you look at them closely, you can
tell that this one and this one, while they're both yellowish, it's not the same
type of yellow right? So in this way we say that the hue between these two
sapphires is different. This hopefully is a more obvious difference having a bit
more of a green to it. If you compare that with with this one over here you
can see that they have somewhat of a similar hue. The type of green is quite
similar on these two stones. But! this one is substantially lighter and that's what
we're going to talk about a little bit later with both tone and saturation.
So, moving right along. We just talked about hue and let's look at an example here. So...
if you look at the far left hand side you can see that this and this are both
some kind of reddish pink, but they're different types of reddish pink right? So
if you're used to fashion and all of these things than you're used to talking
about warm and cold colors or cool colors. What ever you prefer and so
that's what I'd encourage you to do. When you're already in the area of red or
pink, that's great, but what can we do to differentiate
this kind of red, from this kind of pink. Is it fully red? This one? No, it's not
It's got a little bit of an orange, right? So in gemology most the time we would
just say it's an orangey red, okay? or slightly orangey red. it's very very
lackluster as far as the naming process goes, but if you look down here you've
got a refreshing pink right? You can call it lilac, you can call it whatever you
want. I don't particularly care as long as in your mind you know how to separate
it. So this is, if you want to just, you know, use "man language" for a minute you
can call them both pink but this one is a orangey pink okay? This one's a little
bit of a purplish pink whatever works best for you so that's hue. Just find a
way to name it. Find a way to see it for yourself. Next thing that I would like to
talk about is saturation. So saturation is how much color is in your color. Or
you can kind of think of it as how thirsty or satisfied your color is. So
for the same given color, you might even be looking at this one and this one,
hopefully you'll start to see a little bit of a difference in how much
intensity there is in that color and even moving along to this one. Forgive
the slight differences of hue. Gemstones are one of those things that... it's made
by nature. None of it's going to be identically the same, and that's actually
a huge part of why color is so important. If you find a color that you like, there
is a chance that you may not find it again. If you look at each of these
stones, they're essentially the same hue. They're all some variety of purple, but
some of these look very thirsty because of the saturation and a tone issue. So
saturation, as we just spoke about, is how much color is in your color, but you also
have issues like, right over here, these stones that on the camera seem pretty
much black. But that's only because their color is so dark, so dark tone that they
seem black. If you're close enough to it and you've got strong light like I have
in this light box, it actually is purple. You can see the purple, but the tone is
so low that it appears black and so when we
talk about color, the last thing that we need to consider is the tone. For a given
color how low is the tone? How dark does it get? And saturation can also bring
down the tone, so if we look at these over here. These in front of us, we can
see that these are very low saturation, so the color looks very thirsty, but it's
also very light stone. its upper, it's closer to that colorless, closer to that
white, but if you've got them in your hand or if you compare them on a white
background like this you can see that they are indeed purple. They do have that
purple-violet going on. To close out here I'd like to do a review using these
rubellite tourmalines, and once again color we're breaking down into hue
saturation and tone. So what I've done here is I've got three different hues.
They're generally the same in the column. These are kind of an electric magenta or
fuchsia whatever you'd like. Here we've got something going into the more
brownish tones, and these are quite brown a little bit orangey. So the hue on
each of these I tried to match them as closely as I can, but I get as I said
before: Mother Nature has her way. She always makes things unique, alright? So if
we start here with our electric fuchsia, you can see that down here we've got the
least saturation. It's a little bit thirsty, it's still a nice pink, don't get
me wrong, but it's not as intense as when you go up the line here. So right here
in the middle I'd say is a very addictive type of electric fuchsia. This
is just a name I made up by the way. It's not a trade term, disclaimer, asterisk* and
as you go up even further ,you can see that the saturation has gotten so
intense and the tone has gotten a bit dark, so that makes this stone a little
bit sleepy looking. When it catches the light just right, it's very nice, but
otherwise it's a little bit difficult to see.
So sometimes saturation does contribute to a less desirable stone, because if
it's too saturated with a little too dark of a tone you really just can't see
the color as well, but goodness look at that. So moving along! Here we've got
something a little bit more in the the sorbet, but you can also see down
here we've got these thirsty low saturation stones, moving up into a
little bit more saturated but definitely a darker tone and this one by far is
the most saturated, but also the darkest tone. So you got to decide what you like
and more importantly than what you like, what is popular at the moment... because
popularity always drives up the cost of the commodity. So over here we've got,
these are actually quite a similar hue right you could even say that these
these are cousins right here. You could, but for this tone you can see that this
is the lowest saturation in a very very light tone, moving up to a little bit
more saturate. It's nice, quite pastel, but still not very saturated, and it's a
little bit, you know it's... it's hard to tell with the tone. You could say it's a
light tone you might be right, but it also could just be low saturation at
this point, and then finally you can see this pretty intense, I'd say maybe 40%
saturation stone but the the tones not too dark so as you move it
around it still has a fair amount of life. Okay that's all we've got for today
thank you for joining me. My name once again is Peter Nelson and thank you for
joining us for Gemology for Schmucks and I hope that in the videos to come we
will become less and less of a schmuck and have a better idea of how to buy
gemstones, understand what they are, what makes one more beautiful than the other
what makes one more expensive than the other. All of these things and we'll
figure it out as we go so see you next time