Rebecca Zemans Jewelry Blog — turquoise

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...

The alternative birthstone for the month of September is the beautiful Lapis Lazuli, often referred to as the cousin of the turquoise. Because of its beautiful blue color it has often been ground to powder form and then used to create paint and make up. Lapis Lazuli has been used in jewelry for thousands of years and got its name from the Latin word "lapis" which means stone and the Arabian word "azul" which means blue. Lapis is composed mainly out of lazurite and several other minerals, making it a rock rather than a mineral. It measures a 5 -...

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...

The traditional birthstone for December is the beautiful turquoise. Turquoise has been considered a holy stone for thousands of years, and was worn in ancient times around the neck or hands in order to protect from sudden death--and to bring good luck. The turquoise has played a big role in jewelry and people's lives since as early as 3000 BC, when it was mined and worn by the Egyptians. People would wear turquoise in their turbans surrounded by pearls as a protection against the "evil eye." Turquoise was also often used as talismans or to adorn daggers and sabres. The...