Determining the Ruby Red

While diamonds stand for their brilliance, colored gemstones are all about color.  It sounds simple but in actual it is not.  Sometimes it may get real tricky to determine quality of a gemstone just by looking at its color.  At times you may also find it difficult to point difference between two similar looking gems.  This is because when we talk about gemstone colors is not same as talking about color of a paper or a cloth.  Gemstone color is actually a combination of hue, tone and saturation.  Hue is basic color or first impression of a gem's color, tone expresses degree of darkness or lightness of color and saturation tells one about the intensity or concentration of color.  Apart from this there are also secondary factors such as body color, color center and color zoning that alter our perception of a gems color.

Ruby to most of us is red but there is a whole lot of definition to this red color that helps you determines the right color for ruby.  Red is the primary hue seen in rubies accompanied by secondary hues such as slight orange, strong orange, slight purple, and strong purple.  Red is considered to be most ideal.  After you have judged the basic color of the stone next thing you have to find out is the amount of color present or its tone.  The band of tones is divided into very dark, dark, medium, light to very light.  Medium is supreme out the four followed by dark.  Next to hue and tone comes saturation which most people refer to as color purity.  It's the concentration of hue ranging from vivid to weak where vivid is taken to be best.  Therefore the premium quality of color in ruby is vivid red in medium to medium dark tone.

While hue, tone and saturation are good theories to start with ruling color of faceted gemstones might be daunting in practice.  For instance idea of tone is pretty straightforward but not when it is unevenly distributed in gems body and appears different from various facets.  Differentiating between medium to medium dark tones might be difficult to rule out.  Therefore after judging overall tone of ruby try finding out colorless and washed out areas.  These indicate poor color or cutting.

Although saturation is a positive factor when excessively blackish it is considered undesirable.  Thus where saturation is important it should not overpower gems basic color.