By Ray Lundin – Gemologist
Red Emeralds
Green emerald is the most famous member of the beryl family, which includes aquamarine (blue), morganite (red), golden beryl (yellow) and red emerald (better known as red beryl or bixbite). White or colorless beryl is known as goshenite. Red beryl was first described in 1904 based on a discovery at Maynard’s Claim in the Thomas Mountains in western Utah. It was named after Maynard Bixby (1853 – 1935), an American mineralogist (thus the name bixbite). Red beryl is so rare that most people don’t even know that it exists.
Red Beryl on Rhyolite Matrix from the Ruby Violet Mine, Wah Wah Mountains, Utah.
Concentrations of red beryl at the initial site were very small and the material was not gem quality. Gem-quality material was not discovered until 1958 in the Wah Wah mountains in southwestern Utah. The claims were worked as a hobby mine and by leases known as the “Ruby Violet Claims.” In 1998 a company called Gemstone Mining, Inc. bought the Ruby Violet Claim for $10 million. The annual yield of red beryl is about 5,000 to 7,000 carats a year. The company markets the product as “red emerald,” and says that it is one of the rarest gemstones in the world. Prices run as high as $10,000 a carat for top specimens. Most red beryl specimens are under a carat. A 2 to 3 carat stone would be considered very large. To date, the largest faceted red beryl weighs 4.5 carats.
Red Diamonds
The world’s largest red diamond is called the Moussaieff Red. It is a fancy red, flawless diamond weighing 5.11 carats. In the rough, this diamond weighed 13.9 carats. It was discovered by a farmer in Brazil in the mid-1990s. The rough diamond was bought by the William Goldberg Diamond Corporation, who cut the fine ruby red diamond and gave it the name “Red Shield.” The diamond was later bought by the Moussaieff jewelry firm for a rumored $8 million. It was then renamed the “Moussaieff Red.”
The second largest red diamond was discovered in South Africa in 1927 and weighed 5.05 carats after cutting and polishing. The shape employed was an emerald cut. The diamond has no particular name and is simply known as the “Red Diamond.” It was purchased by an anonymous diamond connoisseur for his private collection. The whereabouts of this diamond is not known.
The third largest red diamond is called the De Young Red diamond and was owned by Sidney De Young, a Boston jeweler, for quite a long time. The stone was bought by his company as part of an estate sale. The item that included the stone had been labeled as a garnet hatpin. But one day, Mr. De Young happened to examine the garnet hatpin a little more closely. He noticed the so-called garnet just didn’t look quite like a garnet. Also, he noticed that for an old stone, it was very clean and wasn’t scratched up. This observation aroused his suspicions, and he took the stone to a gem-testing lab to check its authenticity. His suspicions were confirmed, and it turned out that the so-called garnet was in fact not a garnet, but a red diamond; the third largest in the world.
Sidney De Young later donated the rare 5.03-carat red diamond to the Smithsonian Institution to be added to the National Gem and Mineral Collection. He also donated a 3-carat intense pink diamond, to the institution, that came from Tanzania. The two diamonds are exhibited side by side at the Natural History Museum.
