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Hi there, I am selling this beautiful frog figurine carved out of genuine Australian boulder opal. The color of this stone is simply amazing! This opal is from Australia and it was carved in China. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to ask me. Thanks so much for visiting my listings. Have a great day!
Name of the Opal crystal comes from the Latin word "opalus" which means "precious stone". Since the earliest civilizations, Opal stone is known as "Eye Stone" and cherished for its brilliance, color play, and flashes. This gemstone is dedicated to the eye and one of the most pleasant gemstones that inspire purity, luck, love, hope, happiness, innocence, and calmness.
Opal crystal is mostly known for its ability to bring person characteristics and positive traits to the surface. It is believed that Opal stone can pick up persons thoughts, desires, feelings and emotions and amplify them. Negative feelings and emotions that are picked up by Opal crystal, even though they are unpleasant and uncomfortable, are easier to understand, process, and fix. This stone will assist and help you get rid of negativity and those feelings that bother you.
Being one of the most colorful gemstones in the word, Opal can be found in white, yellow, pink, orange, red, green, blue, brown, gray, and black color, as a colorless stone, and can be transparent, opaque, and translucent.
The following is information about this from wikipedia:
Opal
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Opal is a mineraloid gel which is deposited at a relatively low temperature and may occur in the fissures of almost any kind of rock, being most commonly found with limonite, sandstone, rhyolite, marl and basalt. The word opal comes from the Latin opalus, by Greek ὀπάλλιος opallios.
The water content is usually between three and ten percent, but can be as high as twenty percent. Opal ranges from clear through white, gray, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, magenta, rose, pink, slate, olive, brown, and black. Of these hues, the reds against black are the most rare, whereas white and greens are the most common. These color variations are a function of growth size into the red and infrared wavelengths. Opal is Australia's national gemstone.
Contents
1 Precious opal
2 Common opal
3 Other varieties of opal
4 Sources of opal
5 Synthetic opal
6 Local atomic structure of opals
6.1 Microcrystalline opal
6.2 Non-crystalline opal
7 Historical superstitions
8 Famous opals
9 See also
10 References
11 External links
Precious opal
Opals can express every color in the visible spectrum.
Precious opal consists of spheres of silica of fairly regular size, packed into close-packed planes which are stacked together with characteristic dimensions of several hundred nm.
Precious opal shows a variable interplay of internal colors and even though it is a mineraloid, it does have an internal structure. At micro scales precious opal is composed of silica spheres some 150 to 300 nm in diameter in a hexagonal or cubic close-packed lattice. These ordered silica spheres produce the internal colors by causing the interference and diffraction of light passing through the microstructure of the opal.[4] It is the regularity of the sizes and the packing of these spheres that determines the quality of precious opal. Where the distance between the regularly packed planes of spheres is approximately half the wavelength of a component of visible light, the light of that wavelength may be subject to diffraction from the grating created by the stacked planes. The spacing between the planes and the orientation of planes with respect to the incident light determines the colors observed. The process can be described by Bragg's Law of diffraction.
Visible light of diffracted wavelengths cannot pass through large thicknesses of the opal. This is the basis of the optical band gap in a photonic crystal, of which opal is the best known natural example. In addition, microfractures may be filled with secondary silica and form thin lamellae inside the opal during solidification. The term opalescence is commonly and erroneously used to describe this unique and beautiful phenomenon, which is correctly termed play of color. Contrarily, opalescence is correctly applied to the milky, turbid appearance of common or potch opal. Potch does not show a play of color.
The veins of opal displaying the play of color are often quite thin, and this has given rise to unusual methods of preparing the stone as a gem. An opal doublet is a thin layer of opal, backed by a swart mineral such as ironstone, basalt, or obsidian. The darker backing emphasizes the play of color, and results in a more attractive display than a lighter potch.
Combined with modern techniques of polishing, doublet opal produces similar effect of black or boulder opals at a mere fraction of the price. Doublet opal also has the added benefit of having genuine opal as the top visible and touchable layer, unlike triplet opals.
The triplet-cut opal backs the colored material with a dark backing, and then has a domed cap of clear quartz or plastic on top, which takes a high polish and acts as a protective layer for the relatively fragile opal. The top layer also acts as a magnifier, to emphasize the play of color of the opal beneath, which is often of lower quality. Triplet opals therefore have a more artificial appearance, and are not classed as precious opal.
Common opal
Besides the gemstone varieties that show a play of color, there are other kinds of common opal such as the milk opal, milky bluish to greenish (which can sometimes be of gemstone quality), resin opal which is honey-yellow with a resinous luster, wood opal which is caused by the replacement of the organic material in wood with opal,[5] menilite which is brown or grey, hyalite is a colorless glass-clear opal sometimes called Muller's Glass, geyserite, also called siliceous sinter, deposited around hot springs or geysers and diatomite or diatomaceous earth, the accumulations of diatom shells or tests.
Other varieties of opal
Fire opals are transparent to translucent opals with warm body colors yellow, orange, orange-yellow or red and they do not usually show any play-of-color, although occasionally a stone will exhibit bright green flashes. The most famous source of fire opals is the state of Querétaro in Mexico and these opals are commonly called Mexican fire opals.
Peruvian opal (also called blue opal) is a semi-opaque to opaque blue-green stone found in Peru which is often cut to include the matrix in the more opaque stones. It does not display pleochroism.
Boulder opal carving of a walrus, showing flashes of color from the exposed opal. The carving is 9 cm (3.5 inches) long.
Sources of opal
Polished opal from Yowah, Queensland, Australia
Australia produces around 97% of the world's opal. 90% is called ‘light opal’ or white and crystal opal. White makes up 60% of the opal productions but cannot be found in all of the opal fields. Crystal opal or pure hydrated silica makes up 30% of the opal produced, 8% is black and only 2% is boulder opal.[citation needed]
The town of Coober Pedy in South Australia is a major source of opal. Andamooka in South Australia is also a major producer of matrix opal, crystal opal, and black opal. Another Australian town, Lightning Ridge in New South Wales, is the main source of black opal, opal containing a predominantly dark background (dark-gray to blue-black displaying the play of color). Boulder opal consists of concretions and fracture fillings in a dark siliceous ironstone matrix. It is found sporadically in western Queensland, from Kynuna in the north, to Yowah and Koroit in the south.[6]
Multi-colored rough opal specimen from Virgin Valley, Nevada, USA
The Virgin Valley opal fields of Humboldt County in northern Nevada produce a wide variety of precious black, crystal, white, fire, and lemon opal. The black fire opal is the official gemstone of Nevada. Most of the precious opal is partial wood replacement. Miocene age opalised teeth, bones, fish, and a snake head have been found. Some of the opal has high water content and may desiccate and crack when dried. The largest black opal in the Smithsonian Institution comes from the Royal Peacock opal mine in the Virgin Valley.[citation needed]
Another source of white base opal or creamy opal in the United States is Spencer, Idaho. Spencer has an open pit mine that you can visit for a fee, about 4 times a year. One business in Spencer also brings material down from the mine site to their store, so that would be opal miners can dig for their own opal, again for a nominal fee. A high percentage of the opal found there occurs in thin layers. As a result, most of the production goes into the making of doublets and triplets.
Other significant deposits of precious opal around the world can be found in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Turkey, Indonesia, Brazil (Pedro II a city in the state of Piauí), Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Ethiopia.
In late 2008, NASA announced that it had discovered opal deposits on Mars.
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