Do you remember the Oscar winning Hollywood movie titled 'Titanic', featuring a romantic love story? Definitely, it looked tantalizing over Rose's neck while drooling Jack made a sketch of hers in the incandescence. The movie had Kate Winslet and Leonardo Di Caprio as the leading protagonists. Academy Award nominee for the movie, Kate Winslet wore a beautiful, deep-blue tanzanite necklace which she happened to hurl into the sea, at the end.
Named 'Heart of The Ocean', James Cameron featured this gemstone in the blockbuster of 1994. They say, the gem actually attracted Ms. Winslet and she kept it with her most of the time on the set.
Elaborating about the profile of the precious gemstone, as the name suggests, Tanzanite is a stone only found in Tanzania. The actual site of its incarnation is said to be in the Merelani Hills, about 30 miles southeast of Arusha, Northern Tanzania. One very fine day, a Masai tribe's man found a brilliant blue stone and handed it over to an Indian tailor named Manuel D'Souza. D'Souza, a Goan tailor was a resident of Tanzania.
Then over the long haul, the part-time gold prospector showed the alluring blue gem to various learned people and geologists across the world. It should be noted that, interestingly, the stone acquires the unique color when lightning struck the mineral particles lay scattered on the surface of the earth. Ultimately, the Gemological Institute of America followed by mineralogists at Harvard, the British Museum and Heidelberg University examined the samples and certified it as a member of the family Zoisite. This stone being rare is only found in Tanzania.
This market pulling stone, named technically zoisite, boasts of perennial demand unlike other stones of its class. Named after Baron Sigmund Zois von Edelstein who was an Italian nobleman, businessman and but of course an ardent mineralogist in the 18th century. However, the stone was formed 585 million years ago, it was found in the 20th century. The hardness scale calls for a range of 6 to 7 Mohs on the scale.
Apart from the reference and history spared above, in today's world, tanzanite is a much happening precious gemstone.
Appearing in two colors mainly, purple and violet-blue, it's the color quality that makes a tremendous difference in price. Discussing about the color, all kinds of tanzanites are heated at a temperature of 450°C with clear guidelines, particularly on color. The excessive heat initiates the development of the lighter color tone purple which is much less intense than the deep mystifying violetish-blue hue which is much more vivid. However, purple tanzanite sells less than violetish- blue tanzanite.
"Tanzanite is an amazing deep purple blue, and personally I find it more appealing than sapphire," says London jewelry designer Stephen Webster, who first worked with it in the early 1980s in Los Angeles. (However, he warns that it is more fragile than some stones: 6.5 on the hardness scale, compared with 10 for diamond and 9 for sapphire.)
The world of gems is real vast. Precious gemstones on constant demand include emerald, diamond, ruby, sapphire etc.
Emeralds are found in Columbia and in Zimbabwe; sapphires from Sri Lanka, amethyst are mined in almost every continent; diamonds in Africa, Russia and Australia. However, Tanzanite remains loyal to its origin place, the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro near Arusha.
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