Amber was one of the first and obviously the oldest adornment materials used. It was also believed to have special healing powers, and thus was employed for medical purposes.
It is not a stone but a fossil tree resin that is found in the ground and it’s very probable that it contains insects and other inclusions. it is often classified as gemstone even if it isn’t mineralized. Because it used to be soft and sticky tree resin, amber can sometimes contain insects and even small vertebrates. The amber with inclusions are also the most precious and demanded.
The color of amber is a combination of yellow-orange-brown that is associated with the color “amber”. Amber can range from a whitish color through a pale lemon yellow, to brown and almost black, but there is also red, green and blue amber, precious and extremely rare.
“Amber is like a time capsule made and placed in the earth by nature herself,” said David Federman, author of the Consumer Guide to Colored Gemstones.
Amber was widely used in the last for jewelry in many regions of the world. It was quite populat between the the Assyrians, Egyptians, Etruscans, Phoenicians and Greeks.
Amber, unlike gemstones, is warm to the touch. It is also a very soft stone, it’s hardness varying between 2 and 2 and a half.
The rare “Blue amber”
This beautiful and distinctive form of Dominican amber is very infrequently encountered. The exact physical and chemical processes that cause its formation are not fully understood. Curiously however, the vast majority of blue amber is completely devoid of insects or other organic materials; when present, they are usually severely crushed or washed out, offering possible testimony to the powerful geological forces involved in its creation. True “green amber” is rarer still.
Tags: amber, amber jewelry, blue amber, green amber, jewelry history, red amber
December 29th, 2008 at 6:42 am
that was interesting! i’ve never come across another article yet that talks about amber (although i’ve never really searched for any) and i don’t think a have an amber jewelry in my collection. basing on the photos above, i think amber would make a lovely jewelry piece with those mysterious inclusions that could be anything. i would probably do some research on this apparently “oldest adornment material” and find out how to make lovely jewelries out of them.
thanks for the post!