Rebecca Zemans Jewelry Blog

Often known for it's red-brown color, the alternative birthstone of July is the beautiful carnelian. Carnelian is a zodiac birthstone for the signs of Leo and Virgo and has been said to promote inner vitality and joy. The carnelian is a commonly available microcrystalline quartz. It is considered a chalcedony, made up of silicon dioxide colored by different levels of iron impurities which makes them come in many warm colors ranging from a pale orange to a dark brown. Often, the stones have been heat treated to make their color more intense. This stone got its name from the Latin...

  One of the birthstones of June and one of our favorite gemstones to use is Moonstone. With its beautiful shimmer it has fascinated people for centuries continuing to be a very popular and elegant stone. The moonstone got its name from the historian Pliny the Elder, who believed that the stone changed its appearance depending on the phases of the moon. Although a myth, people believed this until the 16th century. Today we know that beautiful shimmer to be adularescence, which happens when the light hits the stone. Moonstone is composed of orthoclase and albite, two minerals from the...

The traditional birthstone for the month of May is the emerald, a beautiful gemstone known for its deep green color. Some of us cannot afford emeralds or might be looking for more variety in color. Chalcedony, the alternative birthstone for May, offers both. Chalcedony is a term that includes several varieties of cryptocrystalline quartz gemstones rather than one specific gemstone itself. The chalcedony is very common and can be found in all 50 United States. It also comes in a variety of colors, shapes and transparencies. The word chalcedony comes from the Latin word chalcedonius, which was first used in...

We are continuing our how to series with wax carving, which we use for many of our commitment rings. Wax carving is a very interesting and delicate process. When we carve a ring in wax, we first decide which type of wax is best suited for the design. Blue wax is the softest and therefore best for more organic shapes, the purple wax is the medium and best for intricate designs, and the green wax is the hardest and most brittle which makes it best for for more architectural and machine like designs. Once you decide on the wax you are...

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...