6 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Rubies

By Amy Elliott | July 06, 2021

I know it may be hard to best the JCK audience when it comes to matters of colored gemstones, but now that July is off to a running start, I thought a few tantalizing tidbits celebrating rubies (aka “the king of gems”) was in order.

The team at Gemfields, the mining company known for its Mozambican rubies, served up the list below—and also shared some recent design collaboration pieces from a handful of jewelry designers.

1. The gem’s name comes from the Latin ruber, which means “red.”

2. Early cultures believed rubies contained the power of life and represented the blood flowing through our veins. The gemstones were formed between 500 million and 800 million years ago under extreme heat and pressure, in a remarkable quirk of nature.

3. Rubies have a quality known as pleochroism, which is the appearance of different colors in the gem when it’s viewed from different angles. The job of the gemstone cutter is to marry the different colors to reveal the reddest possible gem.

4. Rubies fluoresce under UV light.

5. The 25.59 ct. Mogok Burmese Sunrise Ruby, set in a ring by Cartier, is the priciest ruby ever sold at auction, fetching $30,335,698 at Sotheby’s Geneva in 2015.

6. The world record holder in terms of price per carat is the Crimson Flame, a 15.04 ct. Mogok Burmese ruby that sold for $1,196,809 per carat at Christie’s Hong Kong in December 2015.