Last year, in the middle of 2023 at some point, I think perhaps it was when I was filling out an application/questionnaire - for the GIA...maybe? - the question along the lines of "if you were a gemstone, which gemstone would you be?" came up. Boom. Sapphire. Easy. No other stone came to mind. And the reasons came even faster: hard (headed maybe), tough (as needed), and comes in ALL the colors. Plus, even though I try not to play favorites, blue is my favorite color...all of the shades of denim in particular and, coincidentally, which coincide with the range of blue sapphire.
Corundum is made up of aluminum and oxygen and it can only form in an environment with low concentrations of silicon, and given that the earth's three most abundant elements happen to be the three I just mentioned, to take silicon out of the equation makes the formation of corundum kinda rare. And, we're just talking about colorless corundum here, like, in it's purest expression. Toss in trace elements like iron + titanimum - and we are talking parts-per-million here, people - then we start to see the blue hues. Add the trace element chromium to the original recipe of aluminium + oxygen and we get ruby (which is also corundum, it just has it's own name and thus there is no "red sapphire"). Take all of the trace elements in any variation, and we round out the fanciful spectrum of colors that sapphire can possibly become which happen to be called, as a group, "fancy" along with some really special ones that live up to the name "phenomenal".
How is this like me? When the conditions are right, I can be tough and hard. Add in the trace elements of life and I express myself in a range of hues. Sometimes they are vivid + super saturated and other times I fall into the less desireable hues + tones. And these are the times that may require some "treatments" to increase my clarity and (self) value. I could spend the day conjuring countless metaphors of how my blips life over the past year have correlated with different colors of sapphires, but my goal is to keep this quippy and shortish. For me, January is not a time for "newness" rather is it is a time of transition...packing up, purging, planning, and pondering. Twenty-23 was the full spectrum of sapphire for me with some juicy rubies in there, too. It is also a time of conundrums (rhymes with corundum...hehe)...what will I dig up in the new year? Even with the few crystal spheres I have to peer into (they're small...like marbles...I think there's maybe a "shooter" size one), I will just have to wait and see.
February is when I start to feel the "new" year kick in and 2024 is kicking off with my first trip to Tucson where I count on crossing paths with all facets of corundum!!
Happy NEW...ish year!!