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12 Carats
Many people equate the term carat with the size of a diamond, and as carat size increases, so will the carat weight. But the operative word there is weight. Carat refers to the weight of a diamond and is equal to roughly 200 milligrams...

36 Ruby and Sapphire
It's hard to imagine that a mineral with a name as mundane as corundum yields gems as exquisite as the ruby and sapphire, or even that these two stones, so different in color and mystique, are actually the same mineral family. Lucky...


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23 Marie Louis Diadem



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There were a few benefits to marrying the Emperor Napoleon, if you loved jewelry, that is! The Marie-Louise diadem, now part of the Smithsonian Collection, was a wedding gift from Napoleon I to his second wife, Empress Marie-Louise in 1810. The diadem was originally part of a set that also included a necklace, comb, belt buckle, and earrings, all made of emeralds and diamonds set in silver and gold. They were all made by French Jeweler Etienne Nitot et Fils of Paris.

In the original diadem, there were 22 large and 57 small emeralds, along with 1002 brilliant-cut and 66 rose-cut diamonds. The central emerald weighed 12 carats. After the fall of the Emperor, Marie-Louise fled to Vienna and took her personal jewelry with her, including the diadem and other pieces that were made as part of a set, including a necklace, a pair of earrings and a comb.

Empress Marie-Louise left the diadem to her Hapsburg aunt, Archduchess Elise. Archduke Karl Stefan


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29 American Topaz
The world's largest cut topaz, called the American Topaz, resides at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. A 172-faceted topaz weighing 22,892.50 carats (5785 kg), it's the largest cut yellow topaz in the world, and one of the...
Hapsburg of Sweden, a descendent of the Archduchess sold the set to Van Cleef & Arpels in 1953. Between May 1954 and June 1956, the emeralds were removed and sold individually in pieces of jewelry as emeralds "from the historic Napoleon Tiara."

Between 1956 and 1962, Van Cleef & Arpels mounted turquoise cabochons into the diadem. In 1962, the diadem was displayed in the Louvre in Paris with the necklace, earrings, and comb in an exhibit about Empress Marie-Louise. In 1971, Marjorie Merriweather Post, heiress to the Post cereal fortune, purchased the diadem for the Smithsonian Institution. There are 1,006 mine-cut diamonds weighing a total of 700 carats and 79 Persian turquoise stones weighing a total of 540 carats. In one respect, it's a shame that the original piece was dismantled to sell off the emeralds. Yet the diadem, reset with the turquoise cabochons is equally beautiful and made even more distinctive with the use of the less valuable turquoise.

 

Today's #1 Resources

10 Fluorescence
We're all familiar with the 4Cs of diamonds - cut, color, clarity and carat weight. But diamonds also possess a quality called fluorescence that's part of the evaluation and assessment of a diamond. It's actually called photo-luminescence...

13 Shapes
The cut of a diamond refers to the way the stone is shaped and polished, how the facets are arranged and how deep or shallow it's cut. There are various cuts of diamonds that refer to that, many of them patented. Both Asscher and Princess...

 

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One-hundred diamonds to the John Hay on its 100th birthday, and another for its copy of a book with handwritten notes by Galileo himself. We think we saw some annotations from him in the Rock bathroom, too. ...
TORONTO - Diamonds are in vogue again but the industry is changing as demand for the jewels in the rapidly growing Asian markets is outpacing that in Western countries, says Harry Winston Diamond Corp. (TSX:HW).
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