Picture the ring you already have in your head right now. Odds are it's a blue stone in a mounting with engraved shoulders and a low profile. Then you open a search page, and every result on it is labeled antique style. At Judy's Jewelry, our shop is in Fort Myers and Bonita Springs is part of the area we cover. Your search gets shorter once you take it in the right order, beginning with what already exists and ending with what you may already own.

Estate Rings With Their Original Stones

Start with a period ring that still has its original sapphire in place, because that's the version you're picturing. Rings like that come to us through house calls and estate sales. On a complete original piece the mounting and the stone have aged together, so wear on the shank matches wear on the prongs. Aged-looking wear can be faked, though matching it across shank and prongs is much harder, which is what makes an untouched ring worth finding. Supply is finite, because nobody is making new Edwardian mountings anymore. We can tell you how a piece came to us, and that answer separates estate inventory from wholesale reproduction.

Loose Antique Sapphires Without A Mounting

A sapphire usually outlasts the mounting it started in, which is how loose old stones enter the market in the first place. Blue sapphire is strongly pleochroic, which means its color changes depending on which direction light travels through the crystal, and a cutter has to work around that. Orientation is the whole job, and a good one puts the violetish blue face up. Older stones were often cut to keep weight rather than to return light, so a deep one looks dark through the center and a shallow one shows a window. Rock the stone under a light and watch whether the color stays even across the face or drifts toward green. You can run that check yourself with the stone in your hand and a lamp overhead.

Sapphire Colors Other Than Blue

Sapphire is corundum, and corundum shows up in nearly every color except red. We call red corundum ruby, and that's the only color with a separate name. Yellow, green, and pink sapphires all appear in antique mountings, and widening your search to include them opens up more rings. Padparadscha, first found in Sri Lanka, is the trade name for the pink orange variety, and antique examples of it do appear in estate work. A colored sapphire in a period mounting still has the engraving and the low profile. Set the color question aside for a moment, and the number of period rings available to you goes up sharply.

Heat Treatment And What It Means

Heat treatment is standard practice on sapphire, and it has been for generations. At high enough temperatures the process dissolves the fine rutile needles inside the stone, and jewelers call those needles silk. A stone with its silk intact often shows a softer velvety blue, and heavy heating clears that texture away for good. Treatment like this is permanent and accepted throughout the trade, so a heated sapphire is a perfectly normal stone for you to buy. Sapphire confirmed as unheated is rarer, and rarity is what puts it in a different tier. Ask whether a stone has been heated before you commit, and make sure you get a clear answer, because any straightforward seller will have one ready.

A Stone Already In The Family

The last route starts with a sapphire already in the family, and it is worth checking before you shop at all. One stone from a brooch or a cocktail ring nobody wears can move straight into an engagement mounting. We repurpose pieces here at Judy's Jewelry, so bring the design you have in mind and we'll tell you what your stone can move into. Resizing happens in our own shop, and a piece purchased from us is resized at no charge. This route can be the shortest, since the hardest part of your search was sitting in a drawer the whole time. Only the mounting gets built new, and the stone is the one you already owned.

Schedule Time To See Them In Person

Sapphires photograph badly, and no screen shows you how one behaves when you move your hand. At Judy's Jewelry we schedule visits at (239) 481-9600, so call and come over to Fort Myers from Bonita Springs. Bring a stone in, or look at what we have, and we'll get it under a lamp so you can rock it yourself.