There are relatively small number of gemstone varieties with decent hardness and brilliance that occur in the color blue. Sapphire certainly is the most famous, and can be found in the full range about blues, from the palest orange to blue-black. Blue topaz, due to irradiating colorless topaz, is the best of all blue gemstones, since it is widely available at attractive prices and is situated in light and medium-dark firms. Other choices in blue include tanzanite (violet blue) together with aquamarine (light blue). Tourmaline and spinel can be found in blue, yet only rarely.

The most brilliant blue gemstone will undoubtedly be zircon, which has a larger refractive index than even sapphire, tanzanite or spinel. But zircon is definitely not well known by everyone, who are apt to help you confuse it with cubic zirconia, any synthetic diamond simulant. Zircon is mostly a natural mineral, zirconium silicate, and is found in a range of colorings, including white, blue, yellowish, orange, brown, rose as well as green.

Blue zircon, the most used color, is produced from heat treatment of brown zircon. But not all brown zircon will change blue when heated; only some zircon comes with the right physical structure to turn blue when heated. its for these reasons most blue colored zircon is produced by Cambodia or Burma.

Blue zircon has some unique properties which render it very popular with gems aficionados. Not only will do zircon have outstanding elegance, but it also has strong dispersion or fire, the tendency to split white light throughout the spectral colors. Zircon boasts very pronounced birefringence or possibly double refractivity, where the difference between the two refractive indices is normally unusually high. This are usually often be observed when using the naked eye when you look down in the table of a slashed zircon: you will observe facet doubling which makes the facet edges searched blurred.

Though blue zircon is really a reasonably hard gem, accompanied by a hardness on the Mohs scale of around 7 to 7. 5, it happens to be somewhat brittle and subsequently sensitive to knocks together with pressure. Zircon has that tendency to wear alongside facet edges. Its use in rings should therefore be limited to protective settings or temporary wear jewelry.

Blue zircon can be bought in a range of purple tones from very pale to a saturated medium blue. due to pleochroism, blue zircon can look slightly greenish when view derived from one of direction.

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