Rare Blue Sapphire Stones
The name "royal blue" appeared between 1810 and 1820. The name "royal blue", which comes from British royalty, was given by a tailor competing to make a dress in the early nineteenth century for Queen Charlotte.
Royal blue's color has changed over the years. The royal blue of the 1950s was darker than that which the World Wide Web Consortium adopted in the 1980s. It then referred to this lighter shade, along with the RGB code, as "royal blue".
The original royal colour that appears on the United Kingdom’s flag is the closest color to the royal sapphire.
Royal Blue is used to describe the sapphire that has the most intense saturation and vivid color. It is believed that British gem traders first used the term to describe sapphire during the British Empire when Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, and Burma, now Myanmar were both part of Britain.
Royal blue symbolizes tranquility. Blue is the color of the sky, the ocean and both are known for promoting feelings of calm. The colour blue represents importance, significance and confidence. This is the origin of the blue corporate suits and uniforms worn around the globe.
The colour of the sapphire has the biggest impact on its value. Royal blue describes sapphires that have a very vivid, intense, or dark blue colour. has more information on colour grading. See here.
Clarity is a major factor in determining the value of sapphires. Royal blue sapphires are required to be flawless. Preferably, they should appear clean or transparent. The colour uniformity must be excellent or evenly distributed.
Cut is very important in the colouring of a Sapphire. To maximize total internal reflection, royal blue sapphires must have excellent or good proportions. If viewed upside down, the sapphires are not to show windowing and/or extinction.
The classification of a gemstone's colour is both an artistic and scientific endeavor. The adjective 'Royal blue' combines various facts about a Sapphire. It is not easy to classify the colour of an anisotropic transparent material such as a sapphire. For the sapphires to be considered royal blue, they must meet certain criteria.
The blue colour in sapphire comes from the presence of iron with pairs of titanium. It replaces some of the aluminium atoms in the structure, the more iron and titanium pairs, the bluer the sapphire all the way to black. The approximate iron and titanium content in most blue sapphire is between one to couples of tens of pairs of atom per million. In blue sapphire, iron and chromium play an important role. The iron tends make sapphires more green, reducing the saturation of the blue color and increasing their tone. Blue Sapphire stone is what makes the sapphires violetish.
Quantifying the chromophores present in a sapphire provides a good starting point for colour comparison without the influence of other factors such as the path of light through the stone and reflections. Combining this method with the proportions of the stones, we can analyze the most important colour factors individually and compare them to the reference collection of "Royal Blue" sapphires.
Treatment of Royal blue sapphire is acceptable only for no treatment or traditional heating. Therefore, any other treatment such as diffusion of foreign ions into the sapphire lattice, like beryllium or titanium, fracture sealing with resin, or lead, cobalt and/or silicate glass, will not be granted a gemmological report and as such not qualified for Royal blue or any other colour grading.