it's the holy grail of opal
I'm Justin, and this is black opal direct. My family have been teaching and exploring opal since
1961. click the subscribe button and enjoy as we dive into the best gem in the world black opal
meet the southern cross this star pattern crystal opal was mined in andamuka over 40 years ago and
was once a fossil shell polished by yours truly this gem has a phenomena only seen in a handful
of opals ever star pattern usually has four to six points of light or colour lines that cross
in the middle of the gem what makes this even more rare is the color change between the lines
one is orange and one is green star pattern or cross pattern is usually only found in sapphires
and to find one in an opal is like the holy grail more rare than harlequin
pattern this opal is considered to be one of the most rare gem opals in existence
g'day and welcome to black opal direct my name is justin well
i've finally found one it's been pretty much my whole opal career uh looking for one of these star
opals and we're i finally found one and there's only i think a handful of opals on the planet
that i know of that have this kind of pattern and so really it makes it more rare than even
a harlequin pattern because i've seen well i've seen a lot more harlequin patterns than i've seen
star pattern opals so i do think it's very unique and very rare and it's a phenomena that i've very
rarely seen in my life i remember seeing one tiny little crystal and it was tiny and it had almost a
star pattern but it really didn't make it but one like this where it's really quite pronounced is um
it's just made my day it's made my year it was a piece of andamooca it was a fossil shell
to begin with and it's been out of the ground i think i think for about 40 years as well and
it had sand all over the back and as i went to cut this stone on the wheel i went to fully record it
and film it so that you could see it come to life and i forgot to press record so i wrecked
the whole the whole scene so all i can really do is show you and explain what happened but the the
back of the stone had sand all over it and you couldn't actually see the beautiful pattern on
the back as well so i polished the the dome i made a better dome it was it was showing the
pattern sort of and then i took a little bit more haze off the top the stone came really clear and
so i polished both sides and made it a perfect oval and that's what we have now and i think it's
a very fitting name for the stone being from the southern hemisphere with a cross pattern inside it
let's call it the southern cross well i hope you enjoyed this one it's just a short one this
week but next week i'm sure we'll get back into cutting some more nice opal thanks for watching
you