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Where to find a high-quality star sapphire?

Kaede

Kaede

Rough_Rock
Joined
Jan 20, 2013
Messages
39
Hey you all: I am looking for a high-quality quality, very blue, transparent to translucent, star sapphire with a very good star; at least three carats. Bigger is better, one of my uncles told me I have "hands the size of Virginia hams" he was trying to be nice. I saw several nice-looking star sapphires on NY GEMS website, I don't know how much to trust them.
Thanks for your help
 
Hopefully at @Starstruck8 will be along with better suggestions.

I have been on this hunt for maybe 15 years. I have a big opaque gray with a killer star that was dirt-cheap and picked off the (literal) bottom shelf of a vintage shop, and then a big translucent(ish) fairly bright blue with an incomplete star and some big inclusions (now sold), and then finally a small transparent vivid-blue sugarloaf with a barely-there star. The last one Inken found for me, and she described it primarily as a lovely small cab (which is what I was looking for) with an added bonus being the GIA-noted asterism.

You know that there is an inverse relationship between the prominence of the star and the "crystal" or transparency of the gem. There are some outliers -- the best would be plenty of silk at the just-below-visibility level. And sufficient silk to make a "good" star generally pulls the blue down to a less-appealing and less well saturated gray-blue.

So you have excellent taste (!) but it's super-hard to get all those things together. Three cts is pretty small for a tall-ish cab so it would make for a petite ring, imo.

If you are willing to sacrifice on transparency, and vividness of the blue, and prominence of the star, there are a million to choose from!

To me, this one is like unheated Burma ruby or maybe Kashmir sapphire -- I would only trust a third-party professional to vet for me and winnow the field. And it will be expensive -- I would think five figures for sure to check those boxes in > 3-ct range.
 
I second everything @LilAlex said. Beyond that, I can't help much.

What you have described is the Holy Grail of star sapphires, and it will be about as easy to find as the Holy Grail itself. I and many others have been seeking it for years. Must you have this, or are you prepared set your sights a bit lower?

This thread may be useful: https://www.pricescope.com/community/threads/show-your-star-sapphires-and-rubies.231433/

These are the stones PSers actually have. Many of them are beautiful and magical, but very few are of the standard you describe. Notice that there are lots of 'denim blues', very few strong saturated blues. As @LilAlex said, you can see the compromise between bright star and good translucency.

@dreamer_dachsie was recently looking for a star sapphire. Her experience may be of interest:
dreamer_dachsie said:
So now I knew I needed to try to find a replacement star sapphire if I wanted to have the setting costs covered, so I asked the local jeweler to start looking. At the same time, I started calling up vendors who were recommended in PS.

I contacted Star Ruby about a gem on their site that seemed promising and they sent the video I requested immediately. Unfortunately the gem was totally opaque and when I emailed back asking if they could recommend any other stones, I never got a reply

I reached out to multicolor as well and asked about a stone they had listed, but again it was completely opaque in the videos that they sent me. I’m this case, David Weinberg replied to my query about other options they might have an informed me that supply was very very limited these days because of changes that here happening in the trade — many suppliers in India are shifting to selling direct to the public and also buyers in Asia are increasing demand. He said a gem like I was looking for would be big money these days.

Brad at the gem trader was also very nice but didn’t have any inventory.

I toyed with ordering something from the Natural Sapphire company but the prices were so high and I wasn’t impressed with the stock… plus I’d read so many mixed things here about them.

At this point I felt a little at a loss. About six weeks had gone by since my search had begun and I had nothing to show for it. I gave my local jeweler about a month more to come up with something — I felt I owed them a chance because they had spent some time helping me finalize approval for my claim with JM. But in the end they told me their suppliers could not locate a single star sapphire that met my requirements in all of Canada or the US. And they weren’t having much luck internationally either.

I was feeling pretty depressed by the whole situation at this point.

And then I remembered that I had seen some star sapphires in Cecile Raley Designs Etsy store in the past. And I had made a small purchase from Yvonne in the past that I was happy about. So I sent her a message through her Etsy. And that is when things started to look up.
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dreamer_dachsie said:
Yvonne replied very quickly and asked my budget and desired specs. She had some concerns about finding what I wanted in my budget, and told me about the same market dynamics that David had mentioned earlier. I know we have been talking about price increases a lot on PS in the last few years, but Yvonne mentioned that they seem to be affecting star sapphires even more than some other gems. Already rare, it seems now that most are being sold into other channels and are not reaching the US and Canadian market anymore, unless you are a consumer who is comfortable buying on IG direct from source, which was not an option for me with this purchase. This helps explain why my local jeweler couldn’t locate any through her mass-market connections.

However, Yvonne thought she might be able to locate some old stock through one of her connections. An hour later she messaged to let me know that she might have something for me. The next day she sent me this image that her supplier had of a gem from his inventory. Pinkish purple, 4ct. Could be promising?
Click to expand...
Read the whole thread. She ended up with stone that was beautiful and magical, and set it into the best star sapphire ring I've ever seen. But note that the stone was far from ideal by conventional standards. For what it's worth, the jeweller I usually work with also told me that good star sapphires have become very hard to find.

I'm sorry I can't be more helpful.
 
Interesting to see this post after I just literally got back from a local gem and jewelry show in Seattle. Lots of beautiful stones and jewelry-better than last year. The most noteworthy for me was the most stunning blue star sapphire I have ever seen. You want bigger-this one is 68 carats of blue magic. Perfect star, beautiful blue color, and BIG (with the price to match). The seller let me take a photo of it which, to be honest, doesn't do it justice. I hope to post in the next couple of days. The seller had some other large star sapphires and a fairly nice star ruby. He has reports on some but not all of the stones as well. Was very pleasant to deal with. I did purchase a lovely smallish (3ct) chrysoberyl cat's eye that I am very happy with.
 
I would recommend messaging Yvonne of Cecile Raley Designs and see what she might locate for you. She has a good connection and that was where she found mine. Or consider calling other gem dealers and asking them to locate it. You won’t have much luck just trolling websites. I did that for months and nothing even close to what I wanted was available.
 
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