Gem Profile 8: Padparadscha Sapphire
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"Sanskrit for Lotus Flower"

 Brown is beautiful but it’s still not welcome in the color makeup of any orangy-pink sapphire called a padparadscha – the world’s most coveted fancy-color corundum.  And while the no-brown rule has never been written in stone, it has been a matter of pretty persuasive opinion for at least two decades.

 According to GIA colored stone courses dating as far back as 1980, the presence of brown (often euphemistically described as orange without the brown modifier) deprives a sapphire of labeling as padparadscha.  Before then, the question of brown was moot.  Padparadscha was classified as a Ceylonese gem, famous for combining orange and pink in soft shades that conjured everything from lox bellies to tropical sunsets.

 Only when deeper-toned brownish-orange stones were discovered in Tanzania’s Umba Valley region did GIA feel it necessary to insert a color caveat into its courses to prevent these new comers from being sold as padparadschas.  Anyone around then would have understood the need for GIA to intervene in market affairs.  A hallowed gem tradition was under attack and many of GIA’s top people felt the need to defend it.

HUES AND CRIES

    To test trade adherence to the no-brown rule for padparadscha, this writer recently took a walk in cyberspace, visiting more than a dozen sites that advise about or sell gems.  Several of these sites have either not heard of the no-brown rule for padparadscha or ignore it.  At the Gem Auction Learning Center, for instance, visitors are told, “Until very recently, padparadscha was only known to be of Ceylonese origin, until the ‘African padparadscha’ hit the gem world and changed the rule.”  Things go from bad to worse at The Jewelry Experts site, where an Afro-centric definition of padparadscha as “an orange variety of sapphire” seems to suggest that its origin is strictly Tanzanian.  “This East African beauty boasts a brilliant orange color and has the high durability and luster characteristic of sapphire,” one is told.

     In light of recent finds of fancy color sapphires in Madagascar that satisfy traditional criteria for padparadscha, there are now grounds to include Africa in any gem geography for this variety.  But don’t put East Africa on this map just yet.  Trade consensus bars Tanzanian fancy-color sapphire from any definition of padparadscha.  What’s more, this consensus is now becoming as much a matter of science as sentiment.

     The science was done by AGTA’s Gemological Testing Center.  To set a color range for padparadscha sapphire, Ken Scarratt, the center’s director, measured color in hundreds of fancy-color corundums using a spectrophotometer, then constructed a three-dimensional model of padparadscha color space by plotting locations for each stone using CIE coordinates.  According to Scarratt, the study shows that traditional padparadschas occupy a clearly defined sector of color space-galaxies away from the sector for orange Umbra Valley sapphires.  Case closed.

     Not so, say Umba Valley diehards, who cite 1970 CIBJO rules for continued marketing of orange sapphires as padparadschas.  Under those rules, which give one-word color definitions for gems, padparadscha is defined as orange sapphire.  How such a dumbed-down definition of padparadscha was ever ratified both irks and mystifies American gem dealers.  “Padparadscha is prized for a subtle mixture of colors and not the strength of a single color,” says Jeff Bilgore of Oscar Heyman & Brothers, New York.  “To call it either orange or pink sapphire would be both inaccurate and unfair.”

     Whether CIBJO intended its simplistic definition of padparadscha to override fuller definitions which do more justice to the highly nuanced nature of this gem is doubtful.  CIBJO definitions were only meant to serve in situations where there is an absence of accepted color understandings for particular gems.  Luckily, there has long been a common understanding among gem dealers and educators about padparadscha’s color makeup.  The word itself, which is Germanized version of the Sanskrit word for lotus blossom, conveys a unique color blend of orange and pink.  What’s more, that color is always pastel-akin to water colors, not oil paint.  So unless East Africa, or any other sapphire source, produces gems that meet long-established parameters for padparadscha, it’s time to stop stretching clearly defined terms to accommodate undeserving stones.

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