Beautiful Opal, why these colours?

Opal amongst quartz crystals flashes fire, gold and emerald...

Opal is not crystalline in the usual sense. It is made of amorphous spheres of silica (SiO2) packed closely together. The sphere packing only mimics the extremely ordered arrangement of the much smaller single atoms and ions in the lattice of a true crystal.

Opal sphere lattices are far less ordered. The spheres are of varied size and thus they do not pack together well. Take a box of uniform sized marbles and rattle it well too and fro – the marbles will arrange into a close packed array. Add a few marbles of different size and this no longer happens, there will only be small groups, if any, regularly arranged. The out of size marbles disrupt the close packing.

Precious or gem opal, sought for its flashes of colour, has spheres 150 – 300 nm diameter. In comparison red light has a wavelength of ~600nm. Precious opal has macro sized domains where the spheres are fairly uniform in size and, locally at least, pack into a fairly orderly tetragonal, cubic or hexagonal lattice. These are the domains that can flash colour.

Read the whole scientific explanations at OPOD





Source

How cool. Opal is one of my favorite gem stones. I feel good when wearing it

S&F..

ETA:


Ethiopian Welo Opal 38ct Cab AAAA

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Opal Pictures
Precious, Black, Fire, Boulder, Jelly, Crystal, White Opal

A photographic guide for the large confusion of names that are frequently used to describe opals.

geology.com...

Des

My favorite gem. I wish my birthstone wasn't peridot.

reply to post by elevenaugust


Opal is by far one of the most beautiful gems, the mythology behind it is even more intriguing...
Opal Mythology!
Definitely a most informative link!
One of the most intriguing aspects of Opal I find is it's mysterious power metaphysically. Opal is said to manifest whatever it is that you desire, guaranteed. That being said, be careful what you wish for! Their not necessarily bad luck, but if you buy into their lore and mystery and become afraid then yes, bad things can happen. Opal metaphysically reflects your thoughts and feelings back to you increasing their power. That's why Opal is the king of all manifestation stones. It literally mirror's you until what you think/ feel/ want manifests into physicality. One must be careful for if what you desire is not of the purity of your heart/ you want bad things to come, then watch out! In one ancient opal story it was told that a king who had gotten an opal died, 3 days after getting it (most likely because he wanted to abuse his power/ do no good for his people) then everyone in his family down 3 generations passed away as well very shortly thereafter receiving it. Opal's awesome though, it's beautiful, just use it the right way!
ps. it's said to make you invisible to negative entities and beings/ people who you don't wish to be noticed by if you program it right. Google it up! There is much too learn...
heres some beautiful pictures I found and also a link to buy some nice pieces!!!!

Purchase Rough Opal Here!

Beautiful!! S+F! I love Opal, but am stuck with Garnet for a birthstone...

There are a ton of gemstones I look at in their rough setting and it always hits me, that it looks like a whole world was encapsulated inside of it. Weird, I know. Even as a kid I had the same weird thoughts that those worlds still existed inside and were just "asleep" until a better time to emerge. Fairy tales I suppose.

Thanks for bringing that old feeling back with these pics!

This looks glorious!

Starred and flagged.

I LOVE Opals!!

It's one of my favorite stones.

I use to have a really pretty oval shaped opal ring that had diamonds going around the Opal and it was set in silver. It was an old vintage ring that was given to me. I use to wear that ring every single day.....well then I trusted a so called friend to help me pack and they stole it. They denied it to no end but she always made comments on that ring and it was there when I left it in the morning (didn't wear to work) but gone when I came home.


I will never find an Opal of that color again without paying out the rear for it. Opal is a beautiful stone! I love the colors and imo it looks best in silver or white gold. The yellow gold takes away from the color of an Opal!

Interesting information on the colors. I never knew that about Opal and their coloring. Either way it's a beautiful stone!

Nice one, gonna look to procure some of this for my girl.

I will be a popular one when I do.

reply to post by youthsavior


so it seems the first opal mythology link i posted doesn't work...
here's a working one!

www.opalsinformation.com...

Opal, simply put, is fossilized water. The chemical make up is hydrated silica gel. If you dont keep it wet when storing it it will become brittle and fall apart. The colors are a result of light being broken up by amorphous crystals created when the water was trapped by the silica at high temperature preventing evaporation. It's actually a really cool gift from nature. Its also NOT a stone. Its crystal structure isnt consistent enough to be considered stone. Its more of a glass.


This piqued my interest as I used to be a gemologist not so many years ago.