Show notes
Join Adam Barralet, Kyle Perez , Ashley Leavy and Nicholas Pearson in Episode #26 of the Crystal Confab Podcast as they do a deep dive into Ruby meaning, including:
Ruby and lookalikes throughout history
Ruby for confidence
Emotional strength with Ruby
Tune in now for a deeper look at Ruby meaning!
Podcast Transcript:
Crystal Confab Podcast Introduction: Are you just starting with crystals? Or maybe you have a whole collection but aren't sure how to use them? Join four crystal nerds, healers, workers, and lovers for Crystal Confab, a casual chat about all things crystals.
Ashley Leavy: Hello, and welcome to another episode of crystal confab where I'll be confabbing with my crystal besties about one of our collected favorite stones, as we always say. This week, Adam, Nicholas, Kyle, and myself are chatting about Ruby. I am so excited about this episode. I actually just got this brand new Ruby palm stone from the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show about two months ago, and it has just been sitting on my desk, kinda letting me hold it, drawing some inspiration. So, how is everybody doing today?
Adam Barralet: Really well. And I'm really wrapped up in talking about Ruby. It is one of my favorite crystals, especially when it comes to, like, red crystals. I find it really empowering as well. And I really am enthusiastic to have this conversation because I think sometimes people forget about, like, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and diamonds because they kind of think of them as being, like, jewelry.
And so there's probably people that have a Ruby and don't realize that the Ruby because it's their engagement ring. It's not a tumbled stone in that way. But in saying that as well, you know, I'd love to know how much you paid for your palm stone. Rubies don't have to be that expensive. They are gonna be more than your amethyst or your rose quartz, but this is a piece I paid, 50 Australian dollars for this type of thing.
It's just a tumbled stone. Obviously, it's of the quality that can be turned into a ring necessarily, but I think it's a real powerful crystal to have in your collection.
Ashley: That's a great point, Adam. And so often when we're talking about, you know, crystals, we're especially in the crystal healing community, we're not necessarily thinking of fine jewelry. We're not necessarily thinking of precious gems. And those precious gems, the Ruby, sapphire, emerald, and diamond, are kind of in a class of their own, and then we have all the semi precious gems kind of that we see more commonly in the type of jewelry that, you know, we've been showing, frankly, in quite a lot of these episodes now. This Ruby palm stone, it's a good size.
It's a very nice quality. It has a good color. I think it was about 55 US dollars, so not too bad.
Adam: That's yeah. I'm very, very jealous of that. It's also interesting when we talk about those top four that we both listed, with Ruby rubies and sapphires, they're actually the same stone, aren't they? They're both corundum, but just different colors, which is quite that really interesting. And, you know, as I was learning throughout the years, I realized, oh, wow.
We always think of sapphires as being blue, but, no. You can get them in orange, yellow, green, white, black, every color. The only color that ain't come in is red. Well, they do, but we just call that a Ruby. And, Nicholas, do you know by any chance why that is?
Is that just through tradition before they realized it's all the same stone?
Nicholas Pearson: Yeah. So, you know, sapphire once used to mean more or less any blue stone, and Ruby literally comes from Latin, Ruby as red red colored gems. So, you know, they got some disambiguation over time. Like, the original sapphire, as we'll talk about another week, is not even remotely geologically related to what we think of as sapphire today. That is another semiprecious gem, Lapis Lazuli.
But, you know, rubies have been conflated with lots of other red gems over the years. If they were cut the right way, we knew them as carbuncles. If they were cut other ways, we'd call them other things. And we've kind of kept the designation over the years even though we had to attribute a name to all those other color varieties of corundum.
Adam: Yeah. Really, really interesting with that.
Ashley: Well and we started talking a little bit before the show started about not just, corundum, but we also were talking about rubies that grow in other things. Like, we have Rubyzoosite, Ruby fuchsia. We have so many things that we can see, these little bits of Ruby growing in. We even have, there are a number of things that I've seen coming out of India as well, which have been labeled Ruby, but I have, through a little experimentation, learned that they're actually spinel. So we'll see them in some, like, limestone or granite matrix.
And I think, Kyle, do you wanna chime in on that one?
Kyle Perez: I am obsessed with the Ruby Spinel confusion. And, like, from when I got my Gemology degree, I went on holiday to Europe for a month. The one class that I missed over the whole time I did my Gemo degree was Spinel. And when it came up in testing, I was like, oh, it's Ruby. It was spinels.
And I love that there are crown jewels around the world that have rubies, but are actually have been defined as spinels by modern technology. Like, I just love it. I love that little niche thing.
Nicholas: Yeah. One of those really famous cases of a misnomer is the black princess Ruby, which is actually a giant spinel and is said to bring misfortune to any male who wears the crown it's set in. And, curiously enough, before the last coronation, that was not a gem that appeared in it. So is it a little piece of superstition, or or was it just not fashionable to wear the spinel? We don't really know.
Kyle: I love it. I love it. That's so, so cool.
Adam: One other thing I wanted to clarify as well, you did notice I noticed you mentioned a couple of combinations actually that Ruby comes in. Now I've always had Fuchsia. But then recently, I believe that the guy who found its surname was actually pronounced Fook. So it is Fuchsia. She's always fine.
It's like saying urinals. So, which is, you know, it really but it is especially everywhere around the world. You do hear them, don't you?
Ashley: Yeah. So, I mean, it's definitely. I have honestly just changed my pronunciation over the years, which I know I shouldn't give in to popular whims. But, honestly, I was tired of people looking at me funny. So, yes, Fuchsite, Ruby Fuchsite.
Now one thing I've noticed, and I don't know if all of you have dealt with this as well, but people tend to get these two confused all the time because they're bits of Ruby with a green sort of matrix, right? So one way for those who are watching to sort of tell these apart, the zoocyte will actually have lots of little black dots in it. You don't really see that with the Fuchsite. So you'll see more usually like a little white ring around the Ruby or sometimes you'll even see little bits of blue kyanite in there, But if it has black dots, you're looking at Ruby zoasite. If it doesn't, then you're not.
Kyle: Yeah. Can I also throw in that, like, Fauxite will generally sparkle? Like, generally, your Ruby and Fauxite because Fauxite's a mica, generally it has a sparkle and I have managed to acquire a this is Ruby fuchsite and kyanite and it comes from India and I just think it's some of the most beautiful material that I've ever seen And I just love that sparkle that you get from the fuchsia that's so glittery. Like, it just adds something whereas I find zoisia a bit, like, denser. It's a little bit more serious.
Ashley: Actually, I have a quick question. The white that we see that usually surrounds Ruby, is that calcite in there? I'm trying to remember off the top of my head. Nicholas, you know.
Nicholas: Those are actually kyanite rich zones. So it's like really pale green kyanite. So what we're seeing are the various indicator species of regional metamorphism in these rocks. So the annulite or the Ruby in zoisite as well as the Ruby in fuchsite and the Ruby in kyanite and Ruby in cordy. Right?
They're all examples of rubies that are formed by metamorphic activity, and the stuff that they're around with tells us kinda how much it got squished and or heated by that metamorphic process.
Ashley: That is super cool. I saw somebody who had a palm stone once. It was a local guy who did lapidary work here on the Ruby Fuchsite, and he had actually carved away the little white ring of, I guess, what we now know as kyanite with because it's softer. Right? And Ruby is so hard.
So he had just, like, slowly carved that away and carved that away. So there was this little, like, moat around the Ruby, and I don't know why I thought it was so fascinating. It just looked very cool, like, a little bit kind of ruined the palm stone arguably, but it was very cool looking. So it was neat. He was trying to dig the Ruby out of it.
Nicholas: Yeah. One of the other kinds of combinations I've seen kind of mislabeled as Ruby and albite are these kinds of gneissic, probably metagranites. So there is albite in there, but they're they they have a little hexagonal cross sections of Ruby, not to be confused with those metamorphic rocks or, I'm sorry, igneous rocks that have the spinels in them. The nomenclature gets a little too fuzzy on the market sometimes.
Adam: So, Kyle, I can't ask you this question because you skipped this class. But if someone's got a stone at home, and they're like, oh, now would this be Spinel or would this be Ruby? How could someone tell?
Kyle: Well, what I realized and what I learned was that there's a density difference,
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