Rebecca Zemans Jewelry Blog — precious stones

Special occasions call for personalized design.  Jewelry is often a gift given to commemorate significant times in our lives - engagements, weddings, anniversaries, birthdays, push presents, and other milestones.     Without needing to go fully bespoke in design, the Family Jewelry Collection is a selection of our most popular jewelry designs showcasing birthstones.  Featuring elegant pendants and modern stacking rings, this collection has something to represent all the meaningful people of your life. All of these designs are able to be tailored to the amount and variety of stones to suit you needs, and forged in the recycled metal of your choice.  Click here...

Today is the first day of Autumn and even though we'll miss the sunny fun of summertime, we are looking forward to the striking palette that is bestowed upon us in the coming months.  Over the years we've worked with couples who have used colored stones in their engagement rings, embracing this colorful time all year long!  Inspired by these couples, we've created this roundup of some of our favorite alternative engagement rings! Colored gemstones are selected for their birthstone attributes, their historic and cultural meanings and their unique beauty.  Any stone can be set in an engagement ring, or...

We have been doing a lot of custom wedding bands and engagement rings lately, so we decided to do a little blog post about the different stone settings we use for those of you who are interested in a custom design that includes stones. In the end, which setting you choose to use in your design mostly depends on which one you like the most. However, there are advantages and disadvantages to each setting, that should also be taken into account.   Flush setting A flush setting is when we cut a hole into the band, just big enough to...

This blog post is dedicated to Mohs scale of hardness. We use it frequently with our stone of the month series so we wanted to take this opportunity to dedicate an entire post to explain it. It is important to know the Mohs hardness in order to better care for different gemstones. The Mohs scale is a way of measuring a stone's scratch resistance against a harder material. It was invented in 1812 by the German geologist and mineralogist Friedrich Mohs and ever since has been used to test and describe the hardness of minerals. While Mohs was the first...

Considered the “Universal Crystal” all over the world because of its transparent and colorless nature, Crystal Quartz is the perfect alternative to the diamond, the traditional birthstone of April. The word "crystal" comes from the Greek word "krustallos", meaning ice. Quartz was believed to be ice formed by the Gods. Since the Middle Ages, crystal balls made of clear quartz have been used to predict the future. The English word "quartz" comes from the German word "Quarz". Another theory, by Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, was that quartz is ice that has been permanently frozen after a great length of time....